tangentwoman

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Narcissistic + Stinky = Sexy

Work and life have been crazy-busy during the last few weeks, and as a result I've fallen behind on my magazine-reading. I'm always behind on my New Yorkers, but somehow -- between my schedule and huge delays in getting two of the last three issues -- I feel way behind on People, as well.

So I just finished the Kenny Chesney issue this weekend, and then decided I should read this week's (the Spears-Federline family) before going back and reading last week's, the Sexiest Man Alive issue, with Matthew McConaughey taking this year's title.

Okay. I've always sort of liked Matthew McConaughey, even though that the whole naked bongo incident was a little weird, but we've all had our moments. But he has that sort of devilish charm, and even in fairly crappy movies like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, he's awfully likeable, like when he and Kate Hudson are playing Bullshit.

But in this People spread? I hated just about everything about him. He seems so in love with himself. There was a complete-the-sentence section that includes the following:

"When I look in the mirror, I see....my best friend."

I hope he means Penelope, like that they brush their teeth side-by-side in the morning or something, but I somehow I don't think that's it (besides, he points out that he always brushes his teeth in the shower, which reminds me of something Vanna White said a million years ago, that a shower is the best makeshift WaterPic. I know; I'm a weirdo).

"A man should smell like....a man. I haven't used deodorant in 20 years."

What is it about stinky celebrities? But now it all makes sense that Brad Pitt was named Sexiest Man Alive twice. But do you think that Matthew maybe thought that the interviewer posed this question in the same way that people say, "Would you like a Tic-Tac?"? Again, I'm guessing not.

And perhaps my favorite:
"Women can't say no when I..." "...really mean yes."

Is his publicist going ballistic, or is this the image that they actually want to put out there? This is not a rhetorical question.

Also in this issue of People was a series of American Express ads that are basically Playboy Playmate questionnaires filled in by celebrities. And the one that Tiger Woods did made me think no more and no less of him -- most of his answers had to do with golf (favorite movie: Caddyshack; wildest dream: winning the Masters, or whatever tournament), but they didn't make him sound conceited or weird or anything that goes against the Tiger Woods brand.

I'm not sure what the Ken Wanatabe brand is, I guess, but his questionnaire made me think that he's a little skittish about revealing the true Ken. Which is fine, and I suspect he was trying to project the "I'm so blessed, and I can't include anything that would suggest I'm an ingrate," but also the, "I don't want to alienate anyone who might question my choices." So he totally dodges practically every question: "favorite memory: too many to name..."; "favorite movie: too many to choose from." Come on!! If you're gonna do the ad, throw us a bone and pick one, for pete's sake. Or give two or three movies -- there's room. But it's like those "All about me" surveys that people forward around on email...if you're not into it, I don't want to read it. Peeps or Cadbury Cream Eggs, dammit -- I don't care which you pick, but tell me something.

It might be a good thing I'm not renewing my subscription next year, because I just get way too riled up about these things...

Monday, November 28, 2005

Thank you, thank you

A little belatedly, a list of some of the things for which I'm thankful these days:

-- A much-needed four-and-a-half-day weekend.

-- My two favorite guys, the Smelmooo and Tucker.

-- My whole family (minus one brother-in-law, sadly) sitting around watching The Year Without a Santa Claus post-Thanksgiving meal, with all of the adults singing and dancing to the Heat Meiser and Cold Meiser songs, and the kids giving us withering looks to knock it off.

-- Learning something new about the Smelmooo every time I visit my in-laws for a holiday.

-- The stranger at Macy's who gave me her $10-off coupon while I was in line behind her on Saturday morning, on the second leg of a rare shopping binge for me, during which I got last-minute accessories to wear to Mike & Nicole's wedding that afternoon, along with a bunch of home stuff for our Christmas Eve dinner.

-- Mike getting all teary and mushy as he watched Nicole walk down the aisle.

-- The DJ who actually played "Forever in Blue Jeans" two minutes after I requested it.

-- Amazing friends who love me (or at least tolerate me) even when I'm a drunken idiot scarfing Doritos, insisting on taking a million pictures with them, telling them how much I looooooooove them because they're soooooooooooooooo awesome, and just generally being a jackass.

-- Time healing all wounds, or at least the physical effects of being a drunken idiot.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Happy birfday, dear Smelmooo

Few people in this world love a birthday as much as the Smelmooo loves his; I hope it's a wonderful day!

Happy birfday, honey bunch.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Deck the halls

I should first point out that I hate, hate, hate that there has been Christmas music playing on the radio since November 1st and that there was a Santa at the mall tonight. It's November 16th! Sheesh!! I am totally channeling Will in About a Boy with the "Santa's Super Sleigh" on November Bloody Nineteenth.

Tonight, I was again looking in vain for appropriate evening attire for an Executive Director's wife. Advice from my mom, one who knows: get fancy black pants and a bunch of different tops to rotate with them.

A fine idea, except I've had a ridiculous Goldilocks kind of experience as I try to find a pair: too expensive -- more than a THOUSAND dollars at Nordstrom! Seriously -- too shiny, too blatantly tuxedo-y, too short, too casual, too trim, too many buttons, too tailored, too flowy. I realize there are worse problems in the world, but oy.

And as I'm simultaneously looking for a black-tie gown -- I only have one, really, because one is only appropriate in winter -- I realize that, try as I might to branch out, I need to stick with the same style dress. There are dresses that are so darn cute on the hanger, and on people like my friend Jenni, that I simply cannot pull off. Strapless, or tops that are cut like they SHOULD be strapless even though they've sewed on little straps for modesty's sake, I guess, do not work. Fun flappery dresses do not work -- I just look frumpy. So same old, same old, which is another reason I would like to find me some good pants.

Wow, it's taking me a really long time to get back to my Deck the Halls point here.

Despite my grumbling about it being too early for Christmas, I got caught up in the spirit and turned my attention to a relatively new -- but I hope enduring -- Tangent Family Christmas tradition: The Dollar Store Gift Exchange.

Sometime in the mid-90s, I guess, my family decided it was really enough already with buying everyone gifts for their birthdays and Christmas, so we just picked names and bought for one person (although now everyone buys for our nieces and nephews, and now that there are seven of them, I expect that will be phased out over time, as well). In addition, we instituted a $25 Grab Bag, which has very complicated rules about drawing numbers and stealing other people's gifts and sometimes gets very ugly. It's also sometimes very sweet -- like when my dad knows that my mom really wants that fleece blanket, so he steals it from my sister so my mom can steal it from him, and then he somehow ends up with a picture frame or a foot massager or something for himself, but he's fine with it because he made my mom happy.

Anyway, last year, we instituted a similar exchange in addition to the $25 grab bag, and the rule for this one is that the gift must be purchased at a dollar store (I suppose a 99-cent store is acceptable, as well). Not just cost a dollar, but actually be purchased at a dollar store. I think my sister Carolyn initiated this one -- she and her husband just fell in love with dollar stores when they were poor med students, and they still get so excited that one can buy a SWEATER in a dollar store, for pete's sake (and, in fact, their contribution to the Dollar Store Gift Exchange last year was a sweater).

The range of gifts last year was just fascinating, from the practical (like the butane lighter that Smelmooo won, or a set of clothes hangers) to the absurd (the musical reindeer antlers my brother contributed). This year, we're doing away with individual gifts for grown-ups altogether, so I expect the stakes will be even higher for the gift exchange selections.

So tonight, I took a stroll through the Dollar Store, and I was actually at a complete loss -- there are so many options! I so enjoy the crazy reindeer-antler gifts, but you really can get some very cool, useful stuff at the dollar store, so I was torn.

And then I stumbled upon the most beautiful gift: a Luxury Ornament (by Flomo). The Luxury Ornament of choice is a peacock with a nine-inch tail (altogether, he's just over a foot wide). He has green glitter on his wings, and just a dusting of glitter on his crown. His tail is remarkably similar to the tassel I lost at my college graduation, but his body appears to have been hand-painted painstakingly in China.

The best part about the Luxury Ornament, though, will be if my mom gets him. Mom has still not quite lived down her selection of living room furniture for the house we lived in until I was nine: specifically, the sofas that featured peacocks strutting across them. Seriously. Tan couches covered in peacocks. My mom always protests that the sample in the store only showed the peacock feathers, not the actual peacocks, so she was duped. And honestly, I didn't really think that the peacock couch was weird -- at nine, I sort of thought everyone did the stuff that my family did, and why not have peacocks on the couch? -- although my teenaged siblings felt differently at the time, and were understandably mortified by the peacocks.

So I think it'll make Millie's Christmas if she picks the Luxury Ornament, and isn't that what the holidays are all about? Winning the title of best gift-giver?

A banner day

Today, both my girlfriend Reese Witherspoon and my musical inspiration, Neil Diamond, were on the Ellen DeGeneres show, which made my day. Sadly, though, it does not appear that I was successful in my bid for tickets to see the show while Ellen is in NYC next week. Sigh.

In other news, I was delighted to discover that Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia fro-yo tastes just as yummy as the ice cream, with only 3 grams of fat per serving (and a pint is 4 servings! I was expecting a serving would be, like, half a teaspoon). Amazing.

Monday, November 14, 2005

All I have to do is dream

I took the day off last Friday, which did wonders for me. The Smelmooo also had the day off, so we lazed around in the morning watching Arrested Development, went to the gym (where we saw Matt Lauer in Croatia, right where we were on the last stop of our honeymoon cruise, and then Anderson Cooper guest hosting on Regis and Kelly -- life does not get much better!), and then took Tucker on a road trip to the Jersey Shore. Just a lovely, relaxing day, followed by an evening art exhibit where our friend sold her first photo (woohoo!) and where we ate about a million pigs-in-blankets.

Saturday, we had a super-yummy dinner at Makeda with Seth and Leslie, followed by a farewell-to-Jersey gathering for Gina and Jack, who I hope made a smooth transition to the dark side of Staten Island yesterday.

I think that all the excitement, coupled with the stress of the earlier part of the week, and probably most of all the food, gave me some crazy dreams this weekend.

I won't go into the details, but some of the recurring themes and images that pop up fairly regularly in my dreams are puzzling to me. I often have the teeth-falling-out dream, which I'm told means I fear change, and that one makes sense, but here are a few that don't turn up in the dream interpretation book that's somewhere in our library:

-- Fairly regularly, I am back in college for the start of a new semester, but it's almost never the actual apartment we lived in, although it's some mix of the people I lived with or near during senior year. I'm always totally stressed out and dreading the new semester and having to deal with everyone's nonsense and keep the peace without driving myself crazy. Okay, I guess this is fairly self-explanatory now that I actually write it out, but it's not in the dream book specifically.

-- You know those little yellow cups with long green straps that were featured on Romper Room and in my kindergarten classroom? They're pseudo-stilts, kind of, and you walk around with your feet on the yellow things and hold onto the green things? Those pop up all over my dreams, for some reason.

-- I often find myself on the edge of a lazy river -- not quite a waterslide, but a water thing where the little inflated tubes move more gently around -- that I think was at this little resort in Florida that we visited when I was a kid. But usually that's the backdrop for something else; I'm not actually in the water or on a tube; I'm having a conversation at a table or hanging out on the side with my feet in the water.

Amateur therapists, discuss. I'm just glad that the Smelmooo and I are already married, because the pre-wedding dreams where my dad showed up late, straight from 18 holes of golf, or when the DJ didn't play our first dance song until 10:30, were kind of grating, although I was always grateful that none of those dreams involved the Smelmooo not showing up.

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Someone got here by searching: huge wife

No more banana stand

So it's bad enough that they've canceled Arrested Development, but do they have to announce it in the same breath as the cancellation of godawful 7th Heaven?

Boo.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Scattered thoughts on a Tuesday

-- I am loving, loving, loving the fall weather, and the leaves crunching underfoot, and the sunshine, and the way the air smells this time of year.

-- I heart Barack Obama, and I hope he's our President one day. Although yesterday someone very cynical pointed out that he has so much charisma and charm, and he's so handsome, that it'll be impossible for him to stay on the straight and narrow with all of these people throwing themselves at him. I have more faith in him than that; don't let me down, honey!

-- I should trust the staff in Thai restaurants who tell me that "medium" is actually really, really spicy.

-- I'm continuing to love Friendster, through which I was able to track down my best friend from childhood, who's now living on the west coast and who seems to have changed her first name because I think that she's trying to break into acting (she's now an associate producer of some sort). It's weird reading about her life and looking at her friends and trying to reconcile that with the pigtailed girl with whom I made up a secret language, took family vacations, played on the swingset and in the woods, made friendship bracelets and shared the halves of multiple "best friends" accessories (I had the ST NDS side of the necklace heart, but the BE FRIE of the earrings, so it was even and neither of us was consistently the "butt half"), . Even after we'd grown apart a little bit in junior high and high school, she totally backed me up at a ninth grade dance when this jerky older boy blew me off; it was kind of inappropriate, her screaming profanities at him, but it made me feel better, and that's what best friends do. But, sadly, I don't think we'd want to be friends with each other today, which is okay, but it's weird to me that someone who was once my soul sister now seeems sort of Nicole Richie-ish.

-- It's Election Day! Everyone please go vote. I was the eleventh person to vote in my district an hour and a half after the polls opened. And I'm horribly embarrassed to admit that I was so flummoxed by and fixated on the whole lesser-of-two-evils governor thing that I cast my ballot without answering the public questions. I just totally forgot to check the boxes. So, please, realize that there are voters out there even stupider than I am, and that it's your duty to make up for the rest of us jackasses.

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Procrastination, part deux

I know I'm, like, years behind, but yesterday (still finishing my self-appraisal for work), I wandered over to Friendster for the first time.

Yesterday, someone at my lunch table started a sentence with, "So, Bob, there's this thing called an iPod?" And my lack of connectedness with Friendster makes me feel as out of it as Bob.

Anyway, it's the best procrastination device, ever, even better than The Knot when the Smelmooo and I were planning our wedding. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm a huge fan of internet stalking, and Friendster just makes it so easy!! Amazing. I love it.

But, hey, ghosts from my past: knock it off with they stalker-blocking "This profile is only available to Joe's friends." You're taking all the fun out of this!

Friday, November 04, 2005

Disturbing image of the day

I wish I were more tech-savvy so I could actually post said image; maybe I will ask the Smelmooo to help me scan it in and post it from home.

In any case, I received a promotional piece today from a marketing firm that is alternately horrifying and amusing, but horrifying is currently winning out.

It's a bright red background, with about nine-tenths of a giant pickle, flush left so the one side is a straight edge and the other is a traditional round pickle end. That takes up about three-quarters of the space on the page, and then there's a little "You are here" pointing inside the pickle.

Which is clever, and got a little chuckle out of me, but it's just so darned phallic that my prudish sensibilities are really feeling under attack. And so close to lunchtime....

Joke of the Day

Q: Why are their two doors on a chicken coop?

A: If there were four doors, it'd be a chicken sedan!

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Procrastination

It's been such a relief actually to be in the office this week, with only a handful of meetings, so I'm actually able to sit down and get work done, which hasn't happened since August or so. So yay, productive week with limited distractions; crossing stuff off my list; all is well in the world.

Except, of course, that this is the week that our self-appraisals are due as we kick off the annual Performance Review Process at work, which is the most stressful, godawful thing in the world for me. I panic; I sweat; I have heart palpitations; I can't sleep or eat for a day before my review. And actual doing my self-evaluation? Impossible. I close my door, put on my music, open up the document, try to focus, type in my name, and...

...decide that I really, really need to get a new dress or two from Bluefly, given that Mike and Nicole's wedding is this month, and that I have all of these fancy dinners for the Smelmooo's work, particularly now that he got his big promotion and is now In Charge (yay, Smelmooo! I'm so proud of him!!). So there goes 20 minutes, clicking through 18 pages of evening dresses.

Okay, back to it.

...but wait. We're hosting Christmas Eve dinner this year, and we need to start trying out recipes NOW. Oh, hello, Epicurious.com. How'd I end up here? Ohhhh...who knew there were so many different ways to approach chicken pot pie filling, never mind the options for creating the crust?! And desserts!

Oh, crap. It's almost Thanksgiving, and I have to find out if my parents want us to bring pie or something else for dessert, and if they do, I need to order them soon (everything else I like to make myself for dessert; pies, not so much, first because I don't really like eating them, and second because I can buy through work these pies that I actually don't hate, so it all works out). Let me call my mom to see whether she wants pie this year, and hear about the play she and Dad went to yesterday (The Odd Couple -- they loved it, despite lukewarm reviews, and my brother managed to get them super-amazing seats. Yes, mom, amazing how he went from hoodlum to Wall Street bigshot in 20 short years.), and talk about how Ellen's on the cover of People magazine this week (yay!) but that if we get tickets to see her in NYC this month, mom won't go if Hillary is going to be there.

Bye, mom, gotta do my review.

Let's start with the easy stuff..."Areas of development." I much prefer to focus on that than to paint a picture of why I'm so darn great.

Holy crap! Look at all those birds out there. It's like Hitchcock, seriously.

My plants look so limp. You guys need a drink. Let me go fill up my water bottle for you.

Hello, co-worker with 100 Grand bars left over from Halloween! Those are my favorites. No, thanks, I don't care for Good & Plenty. Do they still make Good & Fruity? I'd love to see pictures of your kids from the Halloween parade! No; I'm good; I totally have time.

The scariest thing about all this is that it's exactly the plot of The Office this week, and I'm totally Michael.

Phew. Finally. That was the kick in the pants I needed to give myself to buckle down and do my self-appraisal.

But wait. I think my office needs cleaning first....

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

For disgruntled Netflix survivors

I'm not sure how great a deal it is to get a month's free membership for a service we discontinued because it sucked, but I feel a twinge of happiness that there's a little Class Action against Netflix. Hop on the bandwagon here.

Hypochondria

I read Teri Garr's account of the onset of her MS in People magazine, and thought, "Wow, maybe THAT'S why I wake up with those weird muscle issues."

I drink 10 glasses of Diet Coke and have to run to the bathroom in the middle of a staff meeting an hour later and think, "Maybe I'm becoming incontinent."

And then, on Monday, I woke up on Monday with the measles.

I think that it's all stress-related, and that probably some truly sick part of me, deep in my subconsciousness, reasons that, if I have the measles, I will have to be quarantined, so no need to deal with all of the gnatty little projects going on at work! Hooray!

But, really, I do have these crazy red spots all over my abdomen, and I don't know what the heck they are, and I think that these really are probably stress-related. Minnams pointed out that I often develop weird skin reactions, like the giant mass that developed on my chin last spring, right before I started my new job here. And then they disappear, as mysteriously as they arrive, and all is well, but boy is it scary and gross while they're still insisting on populating my body. At least my measles-infested abdomen is well-hidden.

I'm not, by any stretch, the worst hypochondriac I know, and I rarely actually go to the doctor (although I may call my sister who's a pediatrician, who sometimes plants additional crazy ideas in my head: "You know, there's some whooping cough going around.") or stay home sick because of my imagined ailments. But these imaginary things still nag at me, and -- even worse -- make me worry that by thinking that it wouldn't actually be such a bad thing to have the measles, I'm tempting fate in a huge way.

This all goes back to the spring of 1986, which should surprise no one who knows me: I can trace pretty much every weird neurosis to something from my childhood (count your lucky stars you were spared a proper Halloween entry this year).

I really, really hated going to confession as a kid; even though I was a relatively good, nerdy kid, I was horrified at going to tell the priest that I called my sister a name or I fibbed about eating that brownie or whatever. I just got incredibly anxious about it. So right before Easter, my Catholic school was having a Penance service (note to the uninitiated: penance/reconciliation/confession are interchangeable terms for this practice) during the schoolday, and it was mandatory. And the night before, I went to bed thinking, "Wow, I wish I would get sick so I didn't have to go to confession tomorrow."

My eighth grade teacher Sister Beverly liked to say gleefully, "God got you!" (which: what?!); and boy, did God get me on this one. I woke up the next day sick, sick, sick. Stomach flu like I'd never had; couldn't keep anything down for literally a week; literally CRAWLING to the bathroom because I was too weak to walk. My sister's boyfriend brought me this pink bunny rabbit with an Easter egg on its tummy that squeaked, and I immediately threw up all over it. It was a bad, bad thing.

So I know that the stomach virus wasn't a case of hypochondria, and that in reality I probably wasn't cursed by God -- although a tiny part of me doesn't quite believe it -- but it haunts me, and it fills me with fear and dread every time I wish or imagine sickness upon myself as a way of getting out of something I don't want to do.

And that, one day, I really will wake up with the measles.