Ariel the Wonderbeagle

I realized that I haven't yet made this audience look at pictures of my dog, so I'll start you off gently -- with just one:



Get a load of that sweet face!

Despite my best efforts to put a stop to the serious over-feeding at the hands of my parents, I'm fighting a long-long battle and my girl's looking more like a tri-colored croissant every day. But croissants are good, right? Everyone loves croissants. Well, I don't, actually, but I do love Ariel. I loves her good.

Assigning Human Personalities to Food

I finally figured out blueberries. For the longest time I thought I didn't like them despite the fact that they've never been anything but nice to me: high in anti-oxidants, pretty color, crucial in one of my favorite movies scenes of all time (any guesses? It involves rolling a child to a juicing room and/or certain death). Despite all those good and kind things, I never had time for them. They didn't move me, they didn't excite me, and one time they stained my shirt, which I was really pissed about ("But I don't even LIKE them!").

I'm happy to say, though, that I figured them out. Blueberries are like that friend of a friend that's kind of your friend but is really more like an acquaintance. Like when your best friend spends enough time hanging out with her work friend that you know that friend pretty well, too, even though you don't have his or her phone number in your phone and wouldn't use it if you did. Nothing against that friend, of course, but you always need to have one or more of your mutual friends with you because hanging out alone would be awkward to the point of being unthinkable. Think for a minute; you know who I'm talking about.

Now that I've realized this, it's time to end my Blueberry Boycott. I'll totally hang out with Blueberry, but only if one of our friends is there, too.
Like Muffin or Banana. Or Banana Muffin. I'm tight with all three of those dudes.

I most recently hung out with Blueberry when I met up with Peach. She introduced me to Cream of Wheat, who is totally my new BFF. Where has it been all my life?

Watch Your Language!

Disclaimer: This post contains foul language and may not be suitable for children. Thus endeth the disclaimer.

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So, I swear. Cuss, curse, whatever you want to call it, I do it more than a pretty lady should. I would like to blame my father, a teamster, for the bad habit, but I believe there comes a time in your life when you have to stop blaming your parents for your problems.

Anyway, my problem is not that I swear; the problem is how I swear. I like to talk a lot, and I like to use a lot of adjectives so my audience is right there with me when I share my human experience. I often use "-ass" as a suffix to give an adjective a little extra oomph. If something is really gross, it's "gross-ass".

"Man, that was a sweet-ass concert!"
or
"Dude, I'm tired of these lazy-ass nurses!"

Just like every other sane person out there, I also like to liberally sprinkle my conversations with "fuck" and its many subsidiaries. My personal favorite use is "fucking" as another adjective enhancer. This requires no explanation, but - for the purposes of demonstration - I will provide examples:

"Man, that was a sweet fucking concert!"
or
"Dude, I'm tired of these lazy fucking nurses!"

By this point, I'm sure you're wondering where the problem is (unless you think my filthy language is the problem, but then you would be incorrect). The problem, kids, is when something needs extra EXTRA emphasis. The problem happens when these two swearing preference styles collide.

"Man, that was a sweet-ass fucking concert!"
or
"Dude, I'm tired of these lazy-ass fucking nurses!"

The problem doesn't occur with the written word because you can clearly see the hyphen placement. The problem occurs when I speak this kind of phrase aloud. That hyphen could go anywhere, and since "-ass" is really only a suffix in Colleen World, the phrases turn into a totally different beast:

"Man, that was a sweet ass-fucking concert!"
or
"Dude, I'm tired of these lazy, ass-fucking nurses!"

Did I really have tickets to see The Backdoor Band? Are the nurses at my job really slothful sodomites? No on both accounts! Well, probably no on the latter; you never can tell what a person is into, after all. So barring the obvious and completely useless suggestion of "Clean up your crass language. You dad is the teamster, not you!", I'm out of ideas. I'm doomed to a life where people think I get really worked up when talking about various kinds of butt sex.

A Love Story

There once was a girl named Colleen.


There was also once a girl named Caitlyn.


They were so very much in love.


It made Colleen so very happy.


But, because of a deep-seated fear of intimacy, it also made Colleen very scared.


So Colleen went to her BFF, Ariel the Wonder Beagle for advice.


Instead of advice, Ariel the Wonder Beagle decided she wanted to know what it was like to be in love, too.


No means no, Ariel. No means no.

This Just In: I Like Bagels

More on the topic of the very rare food item I hate, I was thinking about bagels today. I thought I hated them because you eat them and they sit in your stomach like a 30-ton brick and don't move and just make you feel gross. Turns out I actually don't hate bagels; I just hate HUGE bagels. I started taking food with me to work because I'm not eating enough, and one of my go-to snacks is a mini bagel and Weight Watchers cream cheese. I've been eating this for a week before I realized that I didn't hate it because I didn't feel all nasty when I was finished. My mini bagels are the perfect size.

THEN I remembered that bagels today are actually like three times the size of what they should be; 20 years ago a bagel was the size of a hockey puck, not a pillow. My "mini" bagels are about the size of a puck, so I'm going to move to have the label changed. I would like my mini bagels to just be called "bagels", and items labeled "bagels" now should be changed to "GIANT FUCKING BAGEL THAT WILL MAKE YOUR STOMACH ALL HURTY AND BLOATY".


nom nom nom nom

Nonsense.

I was thinking about olives today. I hate olives. I don't like green olives, black olives, stuffed olives, fancy olives or canned olives. I don't like stuffed olives, and I certainly don't like empty olives. I'll even pick them off/out of things, something I rarely do. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt bad about it. I don't want to hate olives. I want to like them. They seem harmless enough. I don't feel like they're a polarizing food. What have olives ever done to me for me to hate them so? And when you consider that there are very few foods that I absolutely will not eat (I'm trying to think of another as I type this and nothing even comes to mind. I even eat food I'm allergic to), it makes me look like an even bigger jerk for picking on olives. Maybe I pride myself on not being a picky eater, and this is a pock mark on that reputation? I just feel sorry for the little guys. Sorry, dudes, I want to like you. I really do! But you're just fucking gross. If I wasn't opposed to the idea of "acquired tastes" (why would you force yourself to eat something you don't like until you fool yourself into thinking you like it when you could just avoid it all together?), I might actually consider acquiring a taste for olives. These are the things I think about while I'm driving to the eye doctor's office.


Another thing I'm super weird about: air conditioning. I cannot explain it, but I am totally opposed ot using the air conditioning in my car. And I'm not trying to be conservative with my fuel consumption, nor am I trying to be greener. . . there really just is no reason that I won't use it. I'll just drive with the windows down, not matter what. My car display varied between 95 and 101 degrees while I was doing my errands today, and still, I did not use the air conditioner. I put it one once for about five minutes, but I turned it off because. . . I don't know why. It just didn't feel right or something. And even when I got back home and had to change because my back was all sweaty (sexy, I know), I still didn't regret my decision to not use it. Freakshow, party of one.

This post has no point other than to further illustrate the utter nonsense that goes on in the space between my ears. Good day.

The Most Disgusting Thing Ever

We had a near repeat of Mothers' Day this Fathers' Day (please note that the apostrophe should come after the s as it is a day to celebrate all fathers, not just one) in that we all went for bunch and gambling at the greyhound race track. It was a very good time. My dad gave me $40, enough to bet my usual ($2 per race, the minimum), and I bet on dogs according to my 7-year-old nephew's suggestions. He was alarmingly accurate on Mothers' Day, like some sort of gambling savant. His luck wasn't quite as good this time, but not terrible. I wasn't able to give my dad his $40 back, but I did give him $23! Not too shabby for a 7-year-old, eh? Anyway, nothing disgusting happened at the dog track. Something disgusting happened immediately after when I had to pee while we were at the cheese store but the ladies' room was closed for cleaning: I had to make my poor brother stand guard at the door while I raced past the urinals to pee as quickly as humanly possible in the men's room. Men's rooms are disgusting, but that wasn't the most disgusting this ever.

We went out to dinner later at a decent enough restaurant. A bit of a blue-hair hang out, but decent food and low prices (which is why my dad likes it). Our waitress was a little odd in a matronly sort of way, but I liked her well enough (mostly because she called my brother "young lady" when she went to take his order and made no apology or correction when he looked up at her revealing his maleness). . . until the food arrived. Instead of the vegetables du jour (broccoli and carrots), my dad specifically requested corn when he ordered. However, mistakes happen as they sometimes do in restaurants, and my dad's plate arrived with broccoli and carrots; corn was nowhere in sight. He very politely pointed out the mistake and what happened next nearly made my jaw hit the floor and the contents of my stomach march right back up.

She grabbed an empty bread plate, picked my up my dads fork, and starting moving the broccoli and carrots off my dad's plate and onto the bread plate. She did this without an attitude, but also without asking or really saying anything at all - which was quite weird, but not disgusting. Then, the unthinkable happened.

SHE TOOK THE VEGETABLES BACK TO THE KITCHEN.

Seriously. I nearly threw up. Of course you could assume that she threw them out, but if she was going to throw them out, why take them back in the first place? I think it's very reasonable to assume that she took them back and then later served them to someone else. I second guessed every bite I took of my meal. How many tables had this been served to and sent away from before it finally reached me? I questioned everything. The arrangement of the morsels on the plate definitely looked like second-hand work! This is definitely not warm enough for this to have been its first stop! That vegetable looks like it was cut post-kitchen, don't you think?

No one was as disturbed by this as I was, and I still can't figure out why not. Dad said he didn't care if someone else had his broccoli now as long as no one else had his corn first. EXACTLY, DAD.

/hurl

Anyway, happy Fathers' Day to my dad! A great guy, I love him. And a happy Fathers' Day to your dad, to you if you are a dad, and to every father or father-figure that has touched your life and helped make you who you are today!

Edge-of-Your-Seat Excitement

At the risk of seeming redundant to my Twitter disciples followers, I had a dream last night that I was making out with Harrison Ford. And I don't mean gross, old, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Harrison Ford. I don't even mean hot Raiders of the Lost Ark Harrison Ford. I mean hot Star Wars Episode IV, Han Solo-hot Harrison Ford.



If this was 1977, I totally would have let the Wookie win, ifyaknowwhatimean. Anyway.

Thanks to a list I made, I've had a pretty productive day (except for the part where I halted productivity to eat a hot pocket and update my blog). It's also somehow been a leisurely day. Answer honestly: when was the last time you got to take a shower that was both as hot and as long as you wanted it to be? Case closed.

The leisure's not stopping there, on no. I'm leaving soon to get a mani/pedi with Vicki. It will also be the professional debut of my designated color for the rest of the summer: Green-wich Village. You're on the edge of your seat with excitement, I know. You've opened another tab so you can Google the color I've deemed worthy; it's fine. I understand. I know you're used to a certain level of non-stop excitement from my life, but I didn't mean to spring this new, epic level on you. My bad. Try to get on with the rest of your day.

When you have to pee, you jump up and down!

I decided to do something new for you guys (other than start cross-posting some things to Blogspot so that I may share my wealth with a wider audience -- Welcome, blogspot people!). It's pretty well-documented that I'm . . . well, there's just no nice way to put it, is there? I'm a weirdo. Big time. But you've all stuck with me so far, so you can't have minded too terribly much, right? So a couple days ago I decided that I would bring you into my strange world a bit more often and a bit more regularly. There's going to be a new feature 'round these parts. I haven't landed on a snazzy-enough-sounding name, so for now I'm calling it The Weekly Weird. It could be the Daily Weird because, really, all I'd have to do is tell you what I did at work, but I'm going to shoot for just once a week for two reasons: 1. I'd like to keep some of my friends from running/backing away disgusted. 2. I'm a sucker for alliteration. So without futher ado . . .

Preface: anyone who has been pregnant will likely not find this terribly weird. Gotta ease you in, I guess. Anyway.

The other day I was woken up by the alarm clock that is my bladder. The usual HEY JERK I'M FULL! message didn't seem to cut it that day; instead it woke me up with the universally understood message of pain. Oh man, it hurt. No, not a bladder infection. That's not weird enough. It was just so full that it actually hurt. I can't be the only person this has happened to, can I? Ladies? So instead of jumping out of my very warm, very comfortable bed to empty the bladder and alleviate the pain, I decide I need to check this shiz out. I actually said out loud to no one, "I need to check this shiz out!" Except I was still half asleep, so it probably sounded more like, "Ineedgarblemumblebanana". So I pulled my pajama pants down just a couple inches to expose the area, and I palpated my abdomen. And guess what?

I COULD FEEL MY BULGING BLADDER.

And guess what else?

IT WAS AWESOME.

I didn't press too hard for too long because I didn't want a mess on my hands, of course, but I spent a few minutes palpating and learning about my body in spite of the growing discomfort. It was round and semi-hard and -- from what I could tell -- not much bigger than my fist.

My challenge to you this week, spend some time palpating your abdomen this week! Stated another way, we might like to call this Get to Know Your Organs week. Whichever way you like it, happy Monday.

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In news related to other weirdos: The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien premiers tonight. Give my Conzy your support, won't you?