In Which I Absolutely Refuse to Give Into Many, Many Homonym Jokes

So in my daily wanderings about the internet, scavenging for absolute metaphors that I can drop into conversation in order to give off the appearance of knowing "things", I came across what passes as an interesting nugget these days: the CEO of the Build-a-Bear Workshop is called the Chief Executive Bear. Her blog of "musings" is pretty much in line with the type of person who describes her week as "PAWSOME" (needless to say, emphasis hers); we're hardly talking some Seinfeldian universal-relating here, but if you're in the business of constructing anthropomorphic animals, it's a decent toilet read.

"I'm at risk for heart disease! Yay!"

Groan if you will, but you too would have to develop a pretty sophisticated emotional defense mechanism if your daily grind involved hundreds of gutted creatures parading past your eyes, so I think that inventing a word like "PAWSOME" shows some pretty impressive portmanteau-ing in the face of morbidity: it's now neck-and-neck with "chortle" in my rankings, just above Tribeca, and leagues above that piece of shit "vlog", which is still out there, saving dozens of internerds the milliseconds they'll need to tend to their sex life.

Now, this woman is not only the CEB--one of my other organs just punched my womb in the face as I abbreviated that--of the company, but she's also the founder, which is pretty unsurprising; I imagine the title throws a lot jobseekers off from the position. If some Harvard MBA does ascend to a position of power in the Build-a-Bear Corporation, they'd likely have to print their business cards on straight twenty dollar bills just to get a little respect at the alumni mixers. When the time does come for Ms. Clark to move on to that great beehive in the sky--I only hope the mortician appreciates the irony at the time of the embalming--I can't imagine anyone would begrudge her a little nepotism in passing the title on down the family line.

Our definition of "cuddly" is different than Eleanor's.

I actually think Ms. Clark might be a lot more cunning then people give her credit for. Imagine if you built a multimillion-dollar company based entirely on the sale of the unfinished products of another multimillion-dollar industry? Like, Ivory spends more than a century perfecting their 99.44 in order to keep that soft little naked baby fed, and then I just swoop in and start selling people sacks of lard and lye and make a mint. Or, if someone parked a wheelbarrow of sleeves outside of Gap and people came running. There's got to be some hard feelings there, right? Surely at some point, Ms. Clark thought of the consequences her business venture would have on Big Teddy Bear and feared for her safety?

For years, decades, Christ, centuries, kids have just fucking loved them some stuffed bears, and companies went crazy trying to make a dime off of them. They stole honey, we found it endearing. They stared, we bit. You'd think that the second people found themselves shelling out to watch bears simply mind their manners, the jig would be up, but we kept coming back for more, and the industry kept throwing shit against the wall. Then this broad comes along and sells us incomplete bears, and we throw money at her. I walk past the Build-a-Bear Workshop in New York City several times a week, and there's so many children holding hollow bear carcasses that I expect to see Sacajawea passing out juice boxes.

Bedtime Bear: the catchall bear for children that were neither cheery, lucky, nor capable of loving-a-lot.

On a note that is either completely related or one of the scariest non sequiturs ever, I would definitely go to a Build-a-Human Workshop.

Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave, When First We Practice to Receive

Amongst the bounty reaped from the holiday season this year--the mother's Big Catalog of Needlessly Complicated Gadgets and Oddities yielded all sorts of treasures designed to turn simple acts such as opening an umbrella or wearing gloves into an entirely unwanted conversation with curious nearby strangers-- I received a set of nice hand lotions from my somewhat terrifying boss, a gift that ranks between Five Dollar Bill and Christmas Tree Ornament in the Chronological Scale of Half-Assed Gift Giving. It's not like I'm trying to turn a profit from Christmas or anything (though if the economy were to take a Serlingesque turn and I were to wake up tomorrow in a world where scarves were the most precious element in the periodic table, I could definitely afford to start serving a better cut of man), but I get a fair number of these token gifts, and if it's all the same to the people I casually interact with/begrudge in person every so often, I'd rather just ignore the whole season of giving conceit and merrily chap along.

The gift that takes a break from giving year-round.

After writing a thank you email to my boss--a true tour de force of deception involving some sort of farcical situation in which I left a non-existent thank you card/outpouring of gratitude at home, written upon handmade, artisanal stationery described at length, which I then offered to bring in for posterity's sake (sometimes it's nice to lie for the majesty of it, to remind oneself that it's an art not relegated to just times of covering one's own ass)--she responded with "Thanks, and thanks for the earmuffs", which is such an odd reply that I actually considered the possibility that it was a code telling me I need to get the fuck out of here and take my files with me, before realizing it was probably just a reference to a present I most certainly did not purchase for her.

And this was just the card's envelope.

Psyched for the opportunity to see two moles of wrong actually equaling a right, I asked a couple of friends for advice before realizing that they actually considered correcting her to be an option that was on the table. On one hand, this does involve willfully taking on the persona of someone who thinks that earmuffs*--seriously, these are individual hats for your ears--make a good present, but these could be the fancy Faberge sort of earmuffs worn by society matrons, and I wouldn't want to miss out on the goodwill opportunity. What I'm really looking for is more of a backup dialogue to put into play if she does discover that someone else gave her earmuffs, and I never corrected her. It's hard to play off an out-of-context mention of earmuffs without turning it into a euphemism for an eight ball or a sex act, so I'm coming up a little dry, but Shirley Temple curls really lend a lot of cred to feigned cluelessness, so I'm gonna risk it.

*As for the stigma attached to being the kind of person imaginarily gives earmuffs as presents, it's untrodden ground.

Murder, She Wrote

The end of the year always brings some certainties with it:

a) The annual visit to the parents to renew the old goodwill meter, as I find it's good to do with all individuals who have any spare genetically-matched body parts in their possession.
b) Year-end best-of lists of media that I use as checklists by which I can measure my self-worth for the year.
c) Reception of fancy hand lotions sharply spikes, despite careful avoidance of any sort of reference to fancy hand lotions over the previous year.
e) The renewal of my Celebrity Death Pool list.

I've always had a morbid fascination with death--not sure there's any other kind, come to think of it--but the celebrity death pool is the single greatest thing to distract me from my responsibilities that does not include cheese. There's a few of them kicking around out there; I use this one, but am considering switching to this one--but the whole concept is the same: you write down famous people you think are going to die, and are summarily rewarded when they do.

A great deal of people find my joyful exuberance in a celebrity death pool to be unsettling, as if my desires played any sort of active role in the demise of marginally famous people; I take this as a complicit admission of my being some sort of deity, or at the very least, godlike, and am quite flattered. Aside from the fact that the rules very clearly stipulate that you're not allowed to actually cause the death of any of your team's registrants, or "even try to scare them or make them sick or anything", it's still gratifying to know that people think you're at least capable of it.

Learned a few lessons this year.

A year's roster is typically submitted in December, and no additions are allowed during the year. I used to start thinking about my team much earlier, but after getting bit in the ass by Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein in the same sad, mortal last week of December, I now try to put off my selection process for as long as possible. If there's one thing a celebrity death pool teaches you, it's that the human spirit is either resilient or stubborn or both; I half expected Estelle Getty to croak before I finished typing her name, but she did some serious keep away with the Grim Reaper and kicked my ass three years in a row until shuffling off her mortal coil this past fall. Similarly, Castro's added "Continuing to Exist" to his list of atrocities in my book (just below "Hogging the Good Cigars" and just above "Bay of Pigs").

Actually, we can call it even.

Although I see myself as more of an oracle of mortality than any sort of harbringer--and no one questions you when you claim to have a hand in anything relating to their extinction--it doesn't change the fact that I'm still actively rooting for certain people to die, and for that reason I can never add anyone whose existence makes me happy, decrepit as they may be. While I don't mind wishing death upon Eunice Kennedy Shriver and would even lend a hand to any prospective Andy Rooney assassination plots out there, no part of me could ever take pleasure in Julie Andrews' or Bea Arthur's demise.

When I start soliciting suggestions for my upcoming year's roster, I always get a slew of people who think they've got the dark horse picked out and try let me in on their little secret--right on with your Britney conspiracy, champ, but I'm still gonna stick with the good ole "passage of time" as my main determining factor--and then a lot of people who truly don't grasp the concept of old. A lot of folks seem to think that career longevity is enough to get on the list, but merely spanning the decades isn't enough- I need the people who cause you to register surprise when you find out they're still alive, or even better, who you're shocked to discover still alive even when you're looking at a picture of them taken that week.

Not hard to guess what her birthday wish is.

You Are What You Eat

I've long been obsessed with cannibalism, even considering myself to be a cannibalologist of sorts; I dare whoever flagged my Wikipedia page to prove otherwise, as I could probably tell them more about the mouthfeel of, well, mouths better than their owners. I've read all the literature, I've watched the right materials, I've seen just about every zombie movie ever made, and in the same way that writing about wine makes you crave a nice bordeaux and talking about Goldschlager makes you crave poor decisions , well, you get the picture. At first I thought it was the wendigo , but now I realize it's just carnivorous appreciation. I would like to eat human.

Off the hook.

Most people, when they hear this (it comes up more often than you'd think, if you does not equal me), assume that I'm referring those hypothetical situations in which one is without any food source but still has access to cooking utensils-- Jack Shephard didn't think it happened often, either--but if I were presented with the opportunity right now, at this very moment, then I'd dive right in, then make some crack about 'finger foods" to alleviate the attention that I imagine mounts when your coworker eats another human being in the break room. Of course, it would need to be OKed by said menu item, it'd have to be legally OK (or at least hard to prosecute), and it would have to be prepared in a manner in which one typically eats meat (though not marsala, I hate that shit). But I'd still eat it.

I'm on a current quest to eat an entire animal, nose-to-ass (fish and pigs excluded--I'm not an amateur), just so I can feel even smugger about my place on the food chain, and to eat an entire person would just feel so tremendously self-satisfying (obviously it would have to be someone smaller than me cough DeVito). I'd even be willing to let a fellow connoisseur eat me after I'm gone if they'd offer the same consideration, though obviously we'd have to set up some weird, double-blinded Secret Santa-type agreement with others so we wouldn't end up killing each other when we got hungry, or a Facebook group at the very least.

Well, at least the sommelier question is answered.

This also raises the question of which part to eat first, or at all, assuming that some of the rarer parts would be out of my price range. More importantly, which ethnicity do I want to cook it? The French do some nice sauces, but that might disctract from the taste; I trust Eastern Europeans with meat, but not near me with knives. I think the only ones who can handle this is the Chinese--their stoic, hardscrabble nature keep them from balking at the concept and the grittier aspects, and they're used to cooking the full range of organs and parts, and I could have an egg roll to start.

Aperture for Destruction

The holidays brought the annual trip to the grandparents' house, along with their stores of unnecessarily scented household items and skirted furniture. While I'm happy to be back in a home where the phrase "decorative garbage can" doesn't exist, I did manage to find a few photos in the basement, in an homage to the man who did it first and best.




This is the most 80s picture ever taken in the history of moment capturing-devices. It is an analog TV, playing SuperBreakout on the Atari 2600, with a VHS and Betamax VCR also hooked up. Also, that's MC Skat Cat on top of the TV.

Who dresses their child up as a harem slave girl in order to take them fishing?

I know I've said it many a time before, but there's not a lot to do in Northern NY. If it gives you a better idea, I had been staring at that spot for three days straight. You can't imagine what a relief it was when those flowers actually grew- it was a real cliffhanger.

And yes, my house was orange.

I only put this here as insurance- insurance against all future opponents who seek to thwart me through blackmail. Now that this picture is out there, for all the world to see, nothing can touch me ever again.

I find it odd that if anyone other than my parents took this--and I really do hope it was my parents who took this--asked a small girl to pose naked next to something as uneventful as a fridge, it would land them in jail for 10-14 years. And yet, somehow, not only is this OK, it's being saved for posterity.

Here I am slaving over a hot stove. While other kids were getting kites, dolls, and games, my parents didn't want me to enter into the world of indentured servitude with any happy-fluffy illusions, and only bought me toys that would prepare me for a lifetime of hardship. I only wish I had been given a plastic database and Etch-a-Excel-Spreadsheet at a younger age.

Another example of the nudity trend. In what situation would two people, cousins, find themselves where one is fully clothed, and the other is completely stark naked, and not one party involved so much as thinks twice? What is the possible explanation for why this happened, and why my cousin was so cavalier about it?

I've never really commended my mother for much, but here she managed to capture the exact millisecond in which I went from "precocious youth" to "angsty teen", using some ethereal camera that captures otherworldy transitions. You can actually see the evil Green-Day listening, world-resenting spirit enter my body. It has friggin gills, for Chrissakes. This thing's more impressive than that flag-lifting Iwo Jima shot.

If I were to sustain some sort of blunt head trauma that resulted in retrograde amnesia--I'd love to say that "a la Mulholland Drive" was the first thing that came to mind, but it was more like "Samantha Who?"--and I forgot my entire life and had to piece it together based on old photographs, I would surmise that I grew up in a small fridge, one of many in a city of fridges. On the night of the Fridge Prom, me and my friends from my fridge district would get together to take pictures in front of each others' fridges, then we'd go off to the Fridge, which we'd decorated with a "Under the Sea" theme. Of course, I'd have no idea what the "sea" was, partially due to the amnesia, andmostly due to the fact that I never once left the front of my fridge during the course of my entire childhood.

Amazingly, I won the "best hair" contest that day.


I'm no psych major*, but it's just fascinating to me, how the world, in all its diversity and diverging paths and varying tastes, manages to craft little girls to just be so goddamn...girlie. Most standard-issue girl things are pretty much inherently without merit, and yet millions of girls the world over covet them, yearn for them, even kill for them. Dolls? Dresses? Fluffy bunnies? I'm thankful for the one shred of damn-the-manedness I exhibited in this room. Because that's a unicorner.

I stand by the brilliance to this day.


*Actually, I am, but the intro doesn't work that way

Drive In-n-Out Part II

Kentucky Fried Chicken-When they introduced the Famous Bowl, I almost actually followed through with the heart attack Preachers keep insisting is right around the corner. Nothing new was introduced- same ingredients that compose every other product- and yet all of a sudden, everything was different. The only thing that changed was the container into which they placed everything. It really says a lot about the deliciousness of the food that KFC names its meals so sparsely that the boards reads like it's the Chinglish translation of a prison cafeteria menu- Breast & Wing Meal, Half Chicken Meal, Thigh Bucket--and yet it continues to build its fan base.

White Castle- I once stepped into a White Castle where a man was in the act of rifling through a woman's purse at the table in front of the door, and not for one second was I deterred. Something about White Castle attracts the morality and employment challenged, and if there's anyone I trust as connoisseurs of pure, baseless, hedonistic pleasure, it's criminals and hobos.


Arby's- Food's meh, works in a pinch when you're on the Mass Pike and need to stimulate an additional sense to preserve sanity. However, the fixin's bar is revelatory. The typical fast food patron is not usually one of means; for a chain to offer unlimited access to any edible solid that could possibly be abused, well, that kind of faith in fellow man should be rewarded.



Panda Express- Those who know me know that my love for Chinese food of all origins--Mexican Chinese is oddly appealing, in a Small World kind of way-- know no bounds. I can't say enough good things about Panda. First, they have the decency to treat me like a human being and trust me with an actual plate upon first meeting me- it took my mother around three years to gain that faith. Second, the way they refer to their combo meals, by the number of "items", makes me feel like I'm deeply entrenched in some Commodore 64 text-based game where I keep an inventory of shit I find along the way for possible later use, like I might later find myself in a locked room and somehow only chicken with cashews can get me out.

Chipotle- Not sure why people call this fast food- just because it's expedient? I mean, it's made, by hand, to your specifications, right in front of you. $7 literally buys you the use of another human being for several minutes, which is enough for me, and then as a bonus, you get a burrito larger than your spleen.


Arthur Treacher's- Whoever had the balls to name a fast food chain like it's a gay British schoolboy is all right by me.




In-N-Out- I once actually ate part of my thumb when I was absentmindedly making my way through a double-double with onions, and I didn't really mind.



Dunkin' Donuts- First you make a mint selling donuts. Then, you make another mint selling boxes of discarded donut parts. Whoever came up with this gambit, on his way up to heaven, there's just gonna be the creators of glue, dog food, and Slim Jims standing alongside the Pearly gates in a slow, exaggerated golf clap.

Drive In-n-Out Part I

So I like fast food. Not in theory, not out of convenience, not for price. I like it because it's delicious. I'm not a large girl; people usually look at me as if there's more to the story for why I'm such a booster for the fast food industry, a saturated fat deficiency or a life spent entirely on offramps. Nope. It's fucking tasty.

(All non-fast food eaters will be heretofore known as “Preachers”, because ain’t no one that holds some categorical gripe against such delectable victuals that doesn’t let off some sort of organic rant to let others know how nice the view is from their high horse, which you are most likely eating didjaknow.)

Taco Bell- People often hate Taco Bell; I often hate people. Look, is it a little gross that all components of your meal come from a caulking gun? Maybe. But just don’t think about it. I don’t necessarily like the vivid mental images of horse asshole that accompany my fortnightly drunken Slim Jim binge, but I get over it. To any Preacher for whom the Crunchwrap Supreme means are the real problem, and not the ends, that’s just plain stupidity. You don’t look in the mirror and picture your parents fucking, do you?

Also: they made a taco out of chocolate, people. That’s some Wonka-level shit right there.

Dairy Queen- Growing up in small-town Northern NY, Dairy Queen was the answer to everything. Birthdays, engagements, sustenance. Despite having one of the most cut-rate mascots I’ve ever seen—it’s hard to see Dennis as a true menace when the kid with the locker next to yours is banging a 6th grader—their revolutionary ice cream technology negated that little blond annoyance. To this day, I consider a Dilly Bar to be a greater architectural wonder than Stonehenge, and I made it through two of Feynman’s “Six Not-so-Easy Pieces” before switching back to celebrity documentation.

___________________________

Pizza Hut- Three words- Stuffed Crust Pizza. How is it in the history of pizza making, it took until the late 90s to figure out there was a way to up the cheese/bread ratio? I’ll remain a Hut loyalist if only because I assume their scientists are working on a two-sided pie as we speak.

Little Caesar’s- Not much good to say about the taste, and I’m not a picky one. However, you got two pizzas at a time, and for me, quantity always rules over quality.

Papa John’s- Any establishment that provides me with spare butter for a meal that doesn’t even originally include butter has a special place in my partially clogged heart.

Domino’s- The pizza quality is all over the spectrum, but as a girl who likes my variety, I applaud them for their consistent efforts to invent more sides, even if kickers taste like cud.

That legendary pizza place in your college town run by the two old Italian men who remember your name- Yeah, it’s the best. Totally. Go away.

____________________________

Wendy’s- If ever one was to try and convert a Preacher, this would be the one to do it. While some Preachers can be tempted into eating something that wasn’t prepared solely for them by the touchy-feely chain stores like Baja Fresh and California Pizza Kitchen, there is no denying the deliciousness of Wendy’s chili, which in turn can be a gateway to other Value Menu items. If ever one were to want to try such a thing—and want is the operative word here, cause I for one can’t be bothered—you gotta walk before you can run, so start with the chili when Preacher Friend is drunk/entering into anemic shock, and then maybe a few years down the road, you can baconate them. Not bloody likely, though.

Subway- Anything you can buy by the foot can’t taste bad, carpet included. Mark it as doctrine.

McDonald’s- An oldie but goodie, and my number one pick for any first date so as get the stomach padding out of the way as quickly as possible before getting down to the getting drunk part. Given the building blocks of bread, potatoes, flattened pre-proportioned meat, about three condiments, and one tool (“hot thing”), they’ve done pretty well on the innovation front. Secret sauce? The Big n’ Tasty? I mean, one day someone at HQ was just fucking around with the piles of meat I assume they keep on their desks as stress busters, and boom! The McRib. National obesity epidemic aside—watch what you eat on your own dime, fatty, and let me have mine—I don’t think anyone has ever come up with a more soniferous sounding slogan than “Supersize it”, and that’s coming from the girl who just came up with the phrase “soniferous sounding slogan than Supersize it” without even trying.

Also, as a child, I would have happily stabbed any single one of my acquaintances for more Happy Meal toys, so nice marketing to boot.

Burger King- Not as good as McDonald’s; still, offers Onion Rings and this new Cheesy Tots thing, for which they should be commended. As a kid, my parents preferred Burger King to McDonald’s because they “baked not fried” (this was pre-gastric bypass), while I preferred everything I consumed to have undergone the Midas Touch*; luckily, the two were across the street and neither required the leaving of one’s car or the breaking of one’s ten dollar bill, so harmony was achieved. Also, a superior fish sandwich, for Catholics still observing Lent but not willing to pay more than $2.50 to do it.

*Oil, not King.