Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Thursday, December 28, 2006 My Year in Movies It’s that time of year when movie critics make their best and worst of the year lists. I decided to do that myself. Shouldn’t take too long, since I see about three or four movies a year these days. Counting only movies I saw in the theater, here goes, in chronological order: Good Night and Good Luck I’ve already gone on about this film at length, so I won’t say more, except to add that it kind of shows a little insecurity on Clooney’s part to put two “Good”s in the title, just to make sure that every review of it, positive or negative, would have to do the same. He’s also in The Good German. I look forward to the culmination of his black-and-white trilogy, which will no doubt be titled Good, Good, Good Movie Good. Take the Lead Beyond crap. Take every ballroom dancing movie and every teacher-makes-a-difference-in-the-lives-of-inner-city-kids-who-in-real-life-would-have-knifed-him-in-the-first-reel movie, scan them all into Final Draft, print it out, throw the whole thing off a freeway overpass and pay homeless guys a buck each to recover as many pages as they can, cast Antonio Banderas, and there you go. I saw it in Vegas with a bunch of TWoP recappers, because if you’re paying to sit and make fun of a bad movie, you should do it with the people who are best at it. And with the worst possible movie. Probably not what the filmmakers were going for, but I consider it money well spent. Snakes on a Plane Despite all the pre-release hype, the air got let out of this faster than a 747 with two windows shot out. Kind of unfair, really. I got exactly what I expected, except even more snakes and an even bigger plane. Bonus: seeing Todd Louiso, who played Dick in High Fidelity, as the snake specialist. It’s not every day you get to say “Dick the Herpetologist.” Casino Royale Zen Viking and I have seen every Bond movie in the theater together since A View to a Kill (not in the same theater, mind you; at least two of them don’t exist any more), back when Roger Moore was still Bond, Grace Jones was still scary, and Duran Duran was a strikingly modern choice to do the theme song. That's, like, over a third of the entire series, dude. We are very old. On the other hand, most people who were old enough to get into Dr. No back in the day are now dead, so that's to our advantage. Although I thought Brosnan deserved a longer run (but don't mind me; I'm something of a Dalton apologist, for Chrissakes), I loved Casino Royale. The action was active, funny bits were actually funny, and Brutus from Rome plays M's piss-boy. My only quibbles: we’ve seen Bond sail off into the sunset so many times that when we follow him afterward for as long as we do this time, it’s clear that something’s up. Otherwise the credits would be rolling by now. And also, if you’re a bad guy, is it really a good idea to tie your captive on the road in hopes that the person speeding to rescue her will swerve avoid her just in time, but crashing his car in the process just enough to incapacitate him? Kind of iffy, when you need them both alive. Oh, and Eva Green's voice sounds like she's constantly trying to swallow a beehive. Other than that, awesome flick. And that's all the movies I saw in the theater in 2006 (so far). I do enjoy going to movies, and I wish I had time to do it more. On the plus side, however, this way I don't get so worked up about the Oscars. posted by M. Giant 9:42 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:
A View to a Kill was on Spike the other day, and it turns out Grace Jones is no longer all that scary. At least, not as scary as a youngish Christopher Walken with blond hair. Eeeek.
By Mr Craig did indeed make for the best 007 in many, many years .. I just hope he's now taking some well-deserved time out to gloat to all the haters who doubted he could pull this off
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Thank you so much for validating my aversion to Eva Green's delivery. I kept leaning over to my friend and saying, "Does she always talk like that? Is she just trying to be sultry? Does she have a condition?"
By As to the eye makeup, I blame Johnny Depp. Arrrrr!
By Tuesday, December 26, 2006 At family Christmas at Trash's dad's house, one of M. Small's four-year-old cousins gave him a little set of domestic items. M. Small loved it. Mostly. In response to the toy broom, he said, "A broom! Thank you!" In response to the toy mop, he said, "A mop! Thank you!" In response to the toy iron and toy ironing board, he said, "What's that?" That's great. You teach your kid some manners, and he totally sells you out. I guess we should be grateful that he recognized the broom and mop, though. posted by M. Giant 7:44 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Um, are they trying to send the kid a message? Interesting choice of toys. Of course, maybe they're trying to do you a solid by getting him used to working with household cleaning agents at a young age. I know I had a wee little rake when I was little and I couldn't wait to use it, much to my parents' glee.
By Sunday, December 24, 2006 The Longest Night The night of December 21 is already the longest night of the year. Add a toddler with croup and it becomes the longest night of your life. I thought that the first night he had it -- which was Tuesday night -- was going to be the worst, just because we didn't know what was wrong with him or how to help him. All we knew was that he had a fever and was barking like a seal. We called the nurse line early Wednesday morning, and I described his symptoms over the phone. First they wanted him to be seen that afternoon at 1:40, and then after I gave more details, they wanted to see him that morning at 9:10. Always a good sign. Fortunately, it turned out to be just your basic, classic croup. His lungs were clear, even though those barking coughs sounded like they were coming from his diaphragm. But he was still feverish, and his voice was incredibly hoarse. You don't want to know what a hoarse two-year-old sounds like when he talks. It sounds like quacking. The sucky thing about being a toddler who's sick with a cough that periodically wakes you up in the middle of the night is that you're really not emotionally equipped to lie there quietly and wait to go back to sleep. The good thing about being a toddler with a cough that periodically wakes you up in the middle of the night is that you don't have to. Trash was kind enough to take him overnight on Wednesday. She has a cold now. On Thursday, he was more or less mine. All the experts tell you that when it comes to putting a toddler to bed, routine is paramount. That's why it's the same thing every night: cuddle up in the easy chair in his bedroom with either Mommy or Daddy, who will read him a few stories and then put him in the crib when he's too tired to shriek in protest. It works great when you do this every night. It even kind of works when you do it every 45 to 90 minutes. But when it's one in the morning and this is the fourth or fifth time one has gotten out of one's bed to take care of a wailing, barking, snorting child with a 102 temperature who's only an hour or so downstream from his last Children's Tylenol dose, one begins to crave a little novelty. And standing with him in the bathroom while the hot shower runs and steams things up stops being fun after his throat opens up again and you're left holding an impatient kid who just wants to get into the tub now. Croup is kind of like a time machine. It's almost like having a newborn again, with the waking up every two to three hours to take care of things and his being too upset to speak when you get there. Only it's a thirty-pound newborn, so I guess that's one reason to be grateful that he's not an actual newborn. I've kind of been regretting that I don't remember the last time we snuggled together on the couch to sleep, mainly because I was pretty sure that the last time was the last time (he's not a big snuggler, usually). But we gave that a shot again on Thursday night, and I was rewarded with a blissful period of rest that stretched from 1:30 a.m. to 4:00, when he lifted his head from my drool- and fever-sweat-soaked t-shirt (his drool and fever-sweat, I hasten to add), and decided to climb down to play. "I want to get up," he announced. "People in Hell want ice water," I managed not to say out loud. Instead I did the bedtime routine, except it ran into a hitch when I tried to leave the room, or even sit down in the easy chair. Long story short, sleeping on a bare hardwood floor for an hour in midwinter isn't something I'd recommend, but at least now I have something to hold over his head when he gets older. The web research I did on croup told me that it normally lasts 2-3 days, which of course is a filthy lie. He's finally getting better, though. Just in time to enjoy all the stuff Santa brought him last night. More on that at a later date. posted by M. Giant 8:46 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:The snuggling is a little reward for me when my three-year-old is sick. Merry Christmas to all of you!
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Merry Christmas!
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Your son is only a month and a half younger than my daughter and I have 2 new words for you: Children's Motrin.
By Tuesday, December 19, 2006 Backseat Driving Here’s the nine millionth change in a parent’s life that nobody tells you about: when you go shopping with just the toddler, you don’t look for a parking spot close to the door. You look for a parking spot next to where the shopping carts are. That way when you come out you can unload your stuff and the kid into the car at the same time, and then park the cart without going more than two feet away. Sometimes I even change it up and park the cart, then take the kid out and carry him the two feet back to the car with me. Just because I’m a parent doesn’t mean I’m not still open to the occasional adventure. Last week at Home Depot, M. Small got to ride in the store’s “Race Cart,” which is a huge shopping cart shaped like a race car in which the passenger sits facing forward and gets to turn a steering wheel. The steering wheel doesn’t actually steer the cart, which is good because otherwise he and I would probably be wandering the tarmac at the airport right now. Any actual steering he gets to do is purely suggestion, as in “How ‘bout let’s go over there.” These suggestions are not legally binding, which is why I’m not posting this from Home Depot’s ceiling fan section. So anyway. M. Small and I finish up, ring out, and head back out to the car. I put him in his car seat first. Thanks for being good in the store, kisses, yada yada. He’s all strapped in nice and tight. Then I load two gallons of hallway paint, a new work light, spare bulbs for it, and four gallons of primer into the shotgun seat and head out. “Off we go!” M. Small announces from behind me, as is the habit he’s picked up from his giant dork of a father. Somehow it’s cooler when he does it. He’s still singing his extremely abbreviated versions of “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Coming Town” when I get on the freeway, which is fairly backed up. Not rush hour-backed up, but worse than it should be at quarter to seven. Come to find out that right before our exit, a car had stalled in the middle of three lanes. After I’d negotiated the traffic snarl and changed freeways, I stole a glance in the child mirror. M. Small had fallen silent, and I wanted to see if he was asleep. Except I couldn’t see him at all. The car seat looked empty. Now, I knew I’d put him in the car. I knew I’d been talking to him since leaving, and that he had talked back, and we hadn't stopped since. I knew it was dark, since we were on a section of freeway that for some reason doesn’t have many lights, and that he was wearing a black coat and a black hat which, if he simply put his head down, could conspire to make him invisible. And worst-case scenario, if I had left him in the parking lot five minutes before, chances were that someone had fallen in love with him and given him a good home. But all of these reassuring thoughts were easily outrun by the cold spear of panic that impaled my entire body, and by the hand I shot behind me to grope for a T8-sized foot to wiggle. I found it, and M. Small obligingly made himself visible again by raising his head, but the terror took a little bit longer to go away entirely. Actually, I think some of it is still here. A not entirely dissimilar thing happened to Trash last week, too. She was driving him home from her dad’s house when suddenly there was a rush of air and the car was filled with noise and wind. Her first thought was that he had somehow escaped his safety restraints and stepped right out onto the freeway, but he had merely found the switch for the back window on his side of the car and done the natural thing. Trash rolled the window back up from the driver’s seat, but M. Small rolled it back down. They dueled thusly for a minute, until Trash found the switch that disables the back seat window controls. Now the sound of a humming window motor and fifty-mile-per-hour winds were replaced by a futile clicking as M. Small tried to figure out why his new toy had broken. But at least while that was going on, Trash knew he was still in the car. It’ll be so much less stressful when he can do all the driving, thus freeing us up as passengers to keep an eye on him at all times. posted by M. Giant 8:26 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Ha! Hilarious post.
By The cart chute proximal parking thing was something my mother pointed out to me while I was expecting, so I've been doing that since our little one arrived. I agree that should be standard-issue new parent advice.
By Sunday, December 17, 2006 True Colors With the help of pretty much everyone we know, we finally got all of the upstairs painted. Want to see pictures? Now, I know I promised that I would document each stage of the construction, but the sheetrocking and taping and mudding and sanding all took so long that I kept thinking I'd already done it. And even if I hadn't, you know that expression, "Take a picture, it'll last longer?" I didn't want to be the one to prove it false. So here are some pictures after the painting, but before trim and the doors and the fixtures and the floor and the...oh, God, we're never going to get to sleep above ground again, are we? Here's a shot from the top of the stairs the day before construction started (Page 24 of my Flickr photostream, just to let you know how long ago this was):  And from approximately the same angle, today:  As in almost all of the shots, the new space is being modeled by M. Small. Here's a pre-construction view from the south end of the house:  And today:  Not a particularly helpful angle, except that you can see we stuck with similar colors. We sleep well in green rooms. This gives you a clearer picture if you can overlook the individually illuminated dust motes:  And here's a reverse angle:  The colors we used are called "Secret Garden" and "Luscious Moss." The latter led me to suspect that some hues are named after porn actresses. My aging shop-vac appears in this picture as well. Even though it's not on and not plugged in, it's probably still loud enough to have blown out your computer's speakers. Sorry about that. Here's the bathroom:  Oranges are tricky. You might shoot for "terra cotta" and not know until it's already on the wall that you've landed on "Paris Hilton." I'm pleased with how this turned out, though. This color is called "Amber Coast," which I suspect is also the name of a porn actress specializing in Paris Hilton spoofs. By the way, the lighter color on the other walls? We carefully chose something that would complement it, but not be too washed out or overpowered by it. This was too pink, that was too yellow, the other was named "Vanilla eXtasy." It was probably the single color we debated most. And then we mistakenly painted those walls with a five-dollar bucket of somebody else's mis-tinted paint that we picked up for the hell of it. We actually like it better.  M. Small in his new bedroom. He would like you to know, "THAT'S BLUE!"  Also his new bedroom. Check out the photographic effect I created by...oh, hell, I have no idea what happened.  M. Small demonstrates the optical illusion caused by the slanted ceiling being so close to the closet door frame; it makes the top of the closet door look slanted. I have suggested remedying this by painting a black-and-white grid pattern on the closet door when it goes up, but like all my best ideas, Trash has vetoed it.  M. Small enters his playroom.  M. Small ditches his dad in his playroom. Want a closer look at what's going on in the bottom left corner?  Chalkboard paint. Trash's stroke of genius. She didn't feel so smart when she was spending Thursday night and part of Friday priming and painting this cramped in a half-squat and ending up with enough paint in her hair to give it a third coat, but this makes up for it. So the end is in sight. If all goes well this week, we might just be able to sleep in our new bedroom before the first of the year. Even if we have to use an air mattress. posted by M. Giant 9:36 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:With the hammer in the playroom, it looks like M.Small is about to demonstrate what happens when plastic ponies don't pay their gambling debts.
By Clearly child labor laws mean nothing to you people. M.small isn't even wearing a weight belt. I may have to report this.
By Should we assume that the hammer is an extra-light one, so as to not tire M. Small too much?
By The terra cotta color looks great! Do you mind posting the brand? I tried to put a similar color in our bedroom, but it turned out to look more rosy than I wanted. And way more rosy than my husband wanted!
By Mandy - it's Glidden.
By Wednesday, December 13, 2006 Baking and Painting I've written before about Trash's annual Christmas Cookie Baking Extravaganza with Blaine. It's a veritable explosion of domestic industry, producing treats in greater numbers and variety than should be possible from a residential kitchen in one weekend. It's an unstoppable juggernaut, and you stand in its way at your peril. So it was a good thing that all the painting we had to do this weekend was taking place on an entirely different floor. The mudding, taping and sanding was supposed to be finished in time for us to get all the painting upstairs finished the weekend before last. We even had CorpKitten in from out of town to help us out. And I suppose we could have painted anyway, if we hadn't minded our walls looking like relief maps under the satin latex for the next however many years. So we put it off until this weekend. Which happened to be this year's baking weekend, which couldn't be put off, because hey, look at the date at the top of this entry. The whole upstairs was supposed to be prepped to paint by this past weekend, but you know how that goes. Maybe it was for the best that only our two bedrooms were completely sanded and ready to go. After I got home from my sister DeBitch the Elder's surprise birthday party on Friday night, Trash and I went upstairs to try to clean up some of the dust. And you don't know dust until you've dealt with joint compound dust. The magic of joint compound is that you can sand it until it's as smooth as glass. The downer of joint compound is that all that sanding scrapes it off in, like, individual atoms that then float around for hours until they settle on every available surface, including ceilings, until I go upstairs and kick it all back into the atmosphere from whence it then goes into my lungs and kills me. I wasn’t about to breathe weaponized drywall compound without protection, so I swallowed my doubts and “borrowed” one of the dust masks that the guy had left behind. “Hey, where’d you get that mask?” Trash asked. I answered both this question and the implied “Why didn’t you get me one, too?” by saying the guy had left it behind after apparently using it that day. She kind of lost interest in it after that. Too bad, because she still had gypsum-breath two days later. So here’s how you clean up plaster dust. First you sweep the walls and the ceiling. Then you sweep the floors. Then you sweep the piles into several dustpan-loads, 75% of which you dump into some makeshift trash receptacle while the other 25% billows back out into the room and coats the walls and floor again. Repeat until dead, either of asphyxiation or old age. We couldn’t even vacuum Friday night, because the kid was asleep downstairs and my 90s-vintage shop-vac is louder than a NASCAR race at which the PA is broadcasting the output of a megaphone that’s being held up to a jet engine that contains the Who. After ten minutes, both of our glasses looked like we’d just come in from the cold and we decided, “Screw it, we’ll start tomorrow.” So Saturday comes. Where do you put a two-year old on a day like this? Upstairs, surrounded by open cans and pans of paint and irresistibly sticky and colorful brushes and rollers? The main floor, where he just has to find out for himself why everyone seems so very interested in the oven today? Or the basement, with several thousand gross of fresh-baked cookies? Hey,. How about my parents’ house? There’s a plan. Thanks, Mom and Dad. Also, thanks for the giant tureen of tasty wild rice soup that kept everybody fed all day. Big hit, that. The whole weekend was a veritable laundry-mangle of activity, with people going in and out. In addition to Trash and Blaine in the kitchen, they had Bitter, Trash’s sister Lisa, and my almost five-year-old niece Deniece. In addition to me and Blaine’s S.O. Batman upstairs painting, we had Zen Viking, Deniece’s dad in the early afternoon, Deniece’s mom in the late afternoon, and Deniece again (she’s very energetic). We also had visits from at least three of Trash’s former coworkers (and one of their S.O.s) on Sunday, helping out with M. Small after he came home from his G-rents'. We couldn’t have done it without any of them, but at the end of the weekend we had two completely painted bedrooms upstairs and 35 different kinds of cookies all binned up. I don't even know how many containers they made. If you’re reading this, you’re probably getting cookies, is what I’m saying. The drywall dude said he would be back to finish on Monday, but he was only half right. We got home and went upstairs to find great, heaping drifts of plaster dust, with streamers of the stuff blowing off the peaks like in an Antarctica movie. Obviously no painting was going to happen that night. But then on Tuesday the guy had not only finished, but cleaned up, to an extent. All his stuff was gone (including, regrettably, the work light we’ve been using) and there were fresh broom tracks in the sediment on the floor. Any piles had been discreetly disposed of. Judging from the air quality, he’d been gone for hours. So I did some vacuuming and sweeping and commenced to slapping primer up on the walls of the new bathroom. After M. Small went to bed, Trash came up and helped me in the hallway until we ran out of primer. Tonight I put the first coat of paint on the bathroom ceiling, and then I primed more of the hallway while Trash did the nightmare of close quarters and acute angles that is M. Small's new playroom. She didn't get much paint in her hair, and it's not like we have to go to work until eight tomorrow morning. All this rush is so that we can have all the painting finished by the time the crew comes back next Monday to do the floors. They're telling us that it should be ready to move into by next Friday. Yes, the last business day before Christmas. Just in time. It's been a long, occasionally frustrating process, but it's going to be all worth it. Heck, it was almost all worth it last night when M. Small came upstairs, stood in the middle of his future bedroom (with its walls painted two shades of his favorite color, blue) and spun around on the bare, dusty particle-board floor with his arms spread wide, announcing, "This is my…BEDROOM!" "Do you love your new bedroom?" I asked. "Yeah," he declared, and dashed over to tour his new closet. Anyway, it's coming together. I'd put up pictures for you but I'm too tired right now. posted by M. Giant 10:13 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Our house is 53 years old, and the walls have lots of cracks from the inevitable settling of the foundation in the clay soil we have here. I've patched them once already but some have reappeared. What has kept me from doing it again is all of that nasty dust from the joint compound. We coughed that stuff up for days. My father bought some thingamajig that uses a vacuum to suck the dust from the sanding into a vat of water, thereby (supposedly) rendering the experience dust-free. I am hopeful, but skeptical... Glad to hear your remodeling is coming to an end finally--congratulations to M. Small on his new digs!
By Sunday, December 10, 2006 Ah, blogger clichés. I do try to avoid them, but every once in a while there's one you can't quite get around. I guess that's how they become clichés. Anyway, another one's come around to bite me in the ass. It's time for my book deal announcement. From Publisher's Marketplace: Television Without Pity recapper Jeff Alexander's EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW I LEARNED FROM WATCHING TELEVISION [working title], a humorous look at how TV has changed the way we view topics such as interpersonal relationships, workplace trials, small screen physics, and death, to Shannon Jamieson Vazquez at Berkley, in a nice deal, by Kate Epstein of Epstein Literary Agency (NA). So that's my excuse for any lengthy lapses in posting that may occur over the next several months. My agent sold my book proposal, and now somebody expects me to sit down and write the book. Is this a nutty business or what? Oh, and also the fact that Rome is premiering in four weeks, the four-hour premiere of 24 is a week after that, and our home renovation is at a point where we should be able to start moving back upstairs right around mid-January. I think that for my birthday I'll ask for the ability to go for weeks without sleep. posted by M. Giant 9:01 PM 12 comments 12 Comments:Hey, I saw this on Publisher's Weekly or someplace like that. Congrats - Trash must be so excited.
By Wow! Congratulations!
By Yay! Another item for my Amazon wish list!
By That's great news! Good luck.
By Congratulations on the book deal! It sounds like it's going to be fantastic.
By Congrats mate, am really pleased for you. Also looking forward to those 24 recaps...
By Have you told us how you met your agent? I would love to hear about how you went about getting a book deal and an agent.
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Well your wife is spreading the news in her neck of the woods and promising all of us mentions :) so ... start writing! Can't wait to hear you tie in adoption, tv, blogs & those wacky online friends' of M. Giant's into a snappy, humorous package! But we all promised to pre-buy it off Amazon in exchange for the mention!
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Tremendous news, my brother. Congrats again! I knew this day would come. And if you need any more house-reconstructing help, just let me know.
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Congratulatons!
By That's great news, M. Giant - I can't wait to read it.
By Woo hoo! That's really great news. I can't wait to read it!
By Tuesday, December 05, 2006 Concertgoing…Going…Gone. On Sunday, the Minnesota Orchestra had a free family concert. Tickets were first come, first served, but I called in weeks ago, the minute they became available. They offered me what they thought were the best seats available, twelfth row center. They only thought those were the best seats because they haven't met M. Small, and didn't realize that trying to get him to behave while trapped in the middle of one of those long, long rows (Orchestra Hall's main floor has no center aisle) is a recipe for a lawsuit. So I asked for aisle seats, and ended up in the sixth row. Score! Historically, M. Small is better behaved in such settings when he's close enough to observe the proceedings from right up front. Otherwise he gets bored in a hurry, and everyone in the room hears about it, right up until we get him outside. And then a bit longer after that, until we get him a block or two away. We had a choice between a 2:00 performance and a 4:00 performance. I picked the former, because I figured that he could take his nap early, whereas if his usual dinnertime came and went while we were still at the concert, his protests would easily drown out a 70-plus-piece orchestra. So anyway. We were looking forward to the concert. And we knew M. Small would love it too. Recently, he's been having a great time at home sitting on the living room floor with us while we all bang away on his toy drums and sing his current favorites, "Santa Claus Coming Town" and "Frosty Snowman" and "Jingle Jingle All WAY!" Live Christmas music on this scale would blow him away. And if not, it was a family concert, so we wouldn't have the only noisy toddler there. Right? We had the logistics all planned out. I had his folding stroller in the back of my car, which I would park at my workplace ramp, which happens to be just two blocks from Orchestra Hall (a little longer by Skyway, which we'd be taking because it was cold). Trash collected a bag of snacks and a sippy-cup of water for him to take along. We equipped him with a couple of his smallest, quietest toys to keep him entertained. We got him all dressed up in his sweater and cords, and on the way there he heard all about the proper way to behave at a concert, how you don’t yell and cry and squirm and run up to the percussion section hollering, "I drum too! Mine! MINE!" Actually it was more like halfway there, because that was the point where he fell asleep. He'd passed up his nap earlier, instead electing to spend a half-hour of "quiet time" in his crib enacting his particularly anarchic version of "clean-up time" instead. I wanted to keep going and hope that the stroller ride from the car to the concert hall once we got downtown would be enough to revive him, but Trash correctly pointed out that sticking him in a crowded concert hall after interrupting his nap ten minutes in would be tantamount to bringing in a bomb. Maybe we could bring him back at intermission, we thought. So we turned around and went home. We were disappointed, but at least M. Small got a nice long nap that was barely interrupted by the transfer from car to crib at home, which hardly ever happens any more. At about 2:30, I told Trash, "Let's bring him if he wakes up in the next…thirty seconds." He didn't. When he woke up a half hour after the second performance started, I was tempted to ask him, "What did you think of the concert?" But I refrained, because one of my earliest Christmas memories is of wanting to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on TV when I was three or four, and being told that I'd slept through it. And some of you may be too young to realize this, but if you miss a Christmas special in 1973, you're shit out of luck until 1974. And then it's all Watergate hearings anyway. Never mind that watching Rudolph these days reveals that the North Pole is populated almost completely by conformity-pushing assholes; if he was anywhere near as disappointed as I was by missing a holiday event, I didn't want to mock his pain. Okay, actually I did want to, a little, but I refrained. And now we have the 2007 Holiday Concert to look forward to. After all the talking up we'd done, I hope he dreamt of strings and woodwinds. And pounding the everloving shit out of a timpani. posted by M. Giant 8:52 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:I found you on the Adopitve Family Forums. I love your stories about adoption and m. small. Thank you for sharing and letting us see into your adoption world. It gives me hope.
By Saturday, December 02, 2006 0 for 10 Trash sent this to me the other day. I'm really glad that before I opened my e-mail, she called me and told me that it would be a good topic for an entry. If I'd thought she was being serious with this, it probably would have freaked me out a great deal. So here they are: the Ten Commandments for Wives. I guess the original ten only applied to dudes, so someone saw a need that had to be filled. Think it was a wife? 1. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and you shall love your husband as yourself. You shall not make your husband into an idol, but you shall love, honor, respect and submit to him as unto the Lord. Wives, stop being so selfish. Just realize that you're an extension of your husband, and you'll both be happier. Okay, maybe he'll be happier than you are, but it's not all about you. Treat him as you would yourself. And also as you do God. Actually, come to think of it, this seems to be directed women who already think of themselves as God, and maybe those particular individuals could stand to be taken down a peg. 2. You shall not take your husband's name in vain through gossip, slander, criticism, complaint or mockery; but you shall bless him both privately and publicly. Don't complain about your husband to other people when he's not around. Or when he is around. Or when it's just you and him. Or when it's just you. Or in your head. Honestly, is this really too much to ask? 3. You shall work heartily as directed by the Lord and your husband, not by your own ideas of what should be done. You shall not be so busy working that you neglect to get alone with God every day. During this quiet time, you shall pray diligently for your husband. See? We're not so unreasonable. In between raising the kids, taking care of the house, cooking the meals, and rubbing our feet, we want you make sure you can have your own private, quiet time to yourself so you can pray for us. Set your alarm earlier, maybe. 4. You shall honor your mother and father, but you shall not elevate their position or opinions above your husband's. No, your mother-in-law can't move in with us. 5. You shall not resent or revile or hate your husband, but you shall grant him grace, forgiveness and mercy and love. Trust us, there'll be a lot less smacking that way. 6. You shall not commit adultery, nor shall you think lustfully toward another man; but you shall thank God for your husband and be pleased with him. That's not to say that we'd object if, in your daily prayers for us, you'd put in a word for us to stop losing our hair. 7. You shall not steal from your husband. You shall not steal his marriage by threatening divorce. Nor steal his wife by leaving him alone all the time. Nor steal his time by placing unnecessary demands on him. Nor steal his joy by complaining. Nor steal his peace by endless nagging. Nor steal glances from other men by wearing provocative clothes and causing them to stumble. This defrauds your husband of an honorable wife, the other man of pure thoughts, and the other man's wife of her husband's faithfulness. Yes, anything that bothers your husband is stealing. Don't steal his time by making him keep explaining this to you. 8. You shall not lie to your husband, but you shall speak the truth in love. You shall practice a quiet and gentle spirit. Yes, no lying about anything, except about how trapped, stifled, and unfulfilled you feel as a result of Commandments 1-7 (and probably 9-10). And lie quietly and gently about that while you're at it. We're trying to read the paper. 9. You shall not covet another woman's husband, or compare yours to him. Nor shall you covet her children and friends. Where are you finding time for all this coveting, anyway? You're supposed to be praying for me, dammit. 10. You shall not covet another woman's home, appearance, fashions, possessions, talents and gifts, or any other thing that is hers; but you shall be content with all God has given to you. Also, don't covet her accomplishments, career, strength, intelligence, or wit, because let's face it, if she has those things she's no kind of woman anyway. Trash spent a good deal of that day laughing with her female friends about which of them was in the most violation of these commandments. I gratefully told her that I'm proud to call her the worst wife in the world. I only hope that when someone comes up with an equally backward set of Ten Commandments for Husbands, that I can do half as badly as she did. posted by M. Giant 9:29 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:What's really terrifying is that there are people, women even, who actually believe in this sort of thing... It blows my mind.
By
I'm betting it was written by this woman:
By What a helpful list! I'm going to put it on my refrigerator, and hopefully it'll help me remember to do my housework more cheerfully and stop committing adultery so much.
By My aunt married a Baptist and #1 was in her wedding vows (note: there was no reciprocation about submitting to the wife or loving her as his god during his vows). When the minister said it, I watched my dad flinch and look at me as if ready to restrain me if I jumped up and caused a scene. I must say, I was surprised because I had never given my dad that much credit for good sense before.
By I'm sorry to hear that Trash is unwilling to live up to the good wife standards set within this list. Wouldn't you say that her attitude qualifies as stealing from your joy?
By I heard #1 in a Southern Baptist wedding, too. This was after a very VERY long sermon, mostly focusing on the reason that marriages fail: because the newlyweds forget to invite Jesus home with them. I whispered to my date, "Don't you think they'd want to be alone for a while?"
By Good to know I'm responsible for defrauding another man of his "pure thoughts" if I happen to attract his attention. Shame on me! Don't I know men have no control over themselves?
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