Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Hellfire Club

It seems like a lot of the people I end up spending my time with are grumpy and cuss and shout a lot. I usually just let them get it out of their system but sometimes it almost seems like they are redirecting their life's anger at me.

For this reason, I have decided to devise an incongruous scapegoat to effectively "pass the buck" in nearly any situation.

I have all but completely settled on Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin. Because logic can so easily be traced back to him:

His discovery of electricity has done many great things for mankind but think of all the bad it has done in your personal life:

Did your alarm clock inexplicably NOT go off this morning? That situation would never have occurred if not for Franklin.

Did your computer lose that file before you could Save it? Damn you, Franklin!

Do you hate vegetarians who still eat fish?
Does the whole Daylight Savings thing bug you?

Benjamin! H! Franklin!

A penny saved is a penny discontinued.

Franklin has officially been filed among all my favorite fricatives.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Non-consensual Tickling II

I found out that my blog gets A LOT of traffic from people who are searching for "nonconsensual tickling." I almost feel like I owe these people something, so I've been trying to think of a follow up post.

I told my wife about this and she can't fathom the appeal of this fetish. Mostly because she really, really, really hates to be tickled. She says, "What I want to know is: What tickling has ever been consensual? Have you ever seen anyone going around to their friends asking Would you tickle me please? Could you tickle me? People don't do that. Therefore, ALL TICKLING is NONconsensual tickling."

But I set out to find an entertaining tickling video and it turns out that they are all pretty boring. I DID find this video that suggests that living things actually DO crave being tickled:

When my wife finished watching this video she curtly said, "That man has wasted his life." And then she walked away. I think the bottom line is still that people enjoy seeing other people without their clothes on. I guess there is also a Lite-Version-of-S&M appeal to the tickling thing.

And it turns out that all of the people in the tickling videos I saw weren't very surprised that they were about to be tickled and they start smiling and laughing before they are even touched. How is that Nonconsensual?

But I'm probably missing the point because I also don't understand why people like dirty socks or wearing adult diapers for recreation. The fetishes we have in our household are pretty boring too:

Wearing ragged clothing
Eating foods from the frozen food section
Chronic fatigue
Pretending like it's all normal

These things don't get us aroused but we still seem to do them habitually.

This video is still cooler than all the tickling stuff:

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Help With Bulimia

It's estimated that between 1% and 4% of women will suffer from Bulimia during their lifetime.

In other news, I was in the shower this morning and the water was having a hard time draining from the tub.

What I'm getting at is: If there is a high number of people out there inducing themselves to vomit on a regular basis they may as well pull the big hair plug out of the bathtub drain while they're at it.

Thank you.

She'll show you a good time Then she'll show you the door

Halloween is an awesome holiday. We've got little kids and we live in a neighborhood of old fogies so we figured we'd better make an effort to set the standard on decorating.

We are usually poor and usually short on time so our decorations aren't the best but we wanted to give it our best shot. We put some leaves and a cheap wreath on the door and some pumpkins and spiderwebs on the stoop. We've also got a bunch of ghosts and pumpkin lights around but they aren't in the picture. And of course, we're still rocking the pirate flag.

I've got the hookup on paint being as my wife is from a family of painters. I painted our front door with some really expensive paint that I got for free. During the summer we were painting for a lady who was only fixing up her house for the purpose of selling it.

It seemed that her biggest priority was to have a black door. It must be dark. It's an East Coast thing. IT'S VERY EAST COAST! It was important to have an East Coast door or the house would never sell or something. I don't know. I don't understand.

My door is kind of a blackish, brownish, purplish, greenish door. It's good paint. But something tells me that nobody on the East Coast gives a crap.

Happy Halloween!

Friday, October 19, 2007

I'm not playing the role, just being who I am and if you try and dis' me I couldn't give a damn

I started my new job a couple of weeks ago and we've been working a lot. That's why I've hardly done any blogging. I'm going to avoid talking about the profession as much as I can but I'll still talk a little about work.

One cool thing about the job is that the company hires welders to follow our crew around and we can just point at anything and say "Weld this." And they'll do it. One morning we showed up for work and the welder asked "Do you have anything you want me to weld?" and one of the bosses-of-me put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Yes. I want you to weld HIS lips to MY penis."

(That's right. The new job is just like the job with the mofos. It just pays more.)

To which I added, "You're going to need a lot of filler rod." Because welding jokes are cool.

Another thing about the new job is hardhats. Suddenly, I own hardhats in various colors. One day I was swinging around in the high pipes of a smelly yogurt factory and my hardhat almost fell off. I thought, "Wouldn't that be super-ironic to get hit on the head by a falling hardhat?"

Now I wear a hardhat all day and when I leave that job my hair is totally screwed up with hardhat-head. But I figure that it's probably a punk kind of look so I don't fix it. Hathead is less trendy than mohawks right now.

Yeah, I mostly work with rough dudes but there are a couple of girls. I heard a rumor that there is a company policy of one girl for every seven men but the reality appears to be about one girl to every fifty guys.

There is a woman on my crew named Judy. She's about the same age as my mother. I think it's strange that Judy does this work. One day we were installing a giant stainless steel cabinet but it needed to be cleaned first. It was laying outside in the dirt and Judy asked me if I could hold the doors open so they wouldn't fall down and crush her while she vacuumed the inside of the big box.

I asked her why she chose this profession. She said she thought it would make her rich. She said, "The money IS good but these men still don't treat me as equals. It bothers me. I've got more experience than a lot of them do but they send me outside to clean."

I said, "Yeah, I see that a lot. Men always seem to end up treating girls like maids and secretaries."

Judy said, "It's not right."

I said, "I know. But I'm amazed to see any girls in this profession at all. So that's one cool thing. You put your mind to it and you accomplished it. Even though the odds were against you."

It didn't seem to be very reassuring to her. And Judy and the oldest man on the crew got laid off yesterday. They found other work for the rest of us.

The only other girl in the big factory is a welder. She is intriguing. She's young and thin and blond, I think. She doesn't shower in the morning. She doesn't wear make up. She wears boys clothes. And yet you look at her and you think, "Hey, she's not bad." I think that's what is so intriguing. Her cheeks have a glow that you can only attain by welding for 60 hours a week. Tufts of hair stick out from under her bandana. But it's captivating in a Robotech-sort-of-way when she gives her head a vigorous nod to drop her welding mask in front of her face from its perch on top of her head and then fires up a torch too bright to look at. She drops the F-bomb a lot and her normal speaking voice seems to be a yell, but that's true of just about everyone in the factory.

I told my wife I had a plan to completely ignore the girl and I did for the first two weeks. My wife asked, "Why would you do that?" I said, "Because I've got nothing to offer her. I figured it would be nicest not to send mixed signals."

My wife said, "But you're a nice guy. You're friendly. You can be friendly to her."

I said, "Yeah. I had a strange feeling about vowing to completely ignore her because the last time I did that to a girl I ended up marrying her."

But one day she had all her welding crap in the way and one of the bosses-of-me told me to move it. So I asked her if and where I could move it. She said, "Don't worry about it. I'll move it for you." But there was a lot of crap to move so I started rolling up cords and hoses for her. I asked her what her name was. Shannon. I told her my name is Emmett even though it's printed across the front of my hardhat so the bosses know who to yell at.

Shannon said, "I'm not supposed to talk to anyone. Well, my crew is allowed to talk but I'M not allowed to talk to people.... because I'm a girl."

I said, "You are?"

She said, "Yes! I know. It's getting hard to tell anymore, huh? But they tell me I'm not allowed to talk or I'll get in trouble but I'm always in trouble so I do anyway."

I said, "That sucks. They're punishing you just for being who you are."

She said, "I know."

I said, "What kind of a world are we living in?"

She said, "A man's world. Especially this place (referring to the factory)."

I said, "Yep. Get used to it." But I don't think she needed to be told because she's already trying her hardest to look like a boy. She's just short. And stands with her legs together. And when she walks it makes a fast clomp, clomp, clomp sound instead of the shuffle sound guys make when they walk.

There is a big guy with a beard on Shannon's crew who has the girliest voice I've ever heard. It phases me every time I hear him talk. MAN, he has got a girly voice. And one day I was working and I heard a SOMEWHAT girly voice behind me and I thought, "That wasn't TOO girly. Maybe his voice isn't quite as girly as I thought." But then I turned around and it wasn't the guy with the girly voice talking. It was Shannon.

Anyway. My heart goes out to those hardworking girls who can't get an even break. You're a corker Shannon.

I'm Just an Average Joe with an Average Job

Lastnight we had a meeting at work with the mofos. Three crews of mofos shuffled into the room and quietly took their seats. They can't stay quiet for long though. One of the mofos, aptly called Bubblehead, decided to get on somebody's case just cause he could.

He yelled a derogatory comment to Morgan. But there are two black guys on our crew who are both named Morgan. So Morgan said, "Are you talking to me or to the other Morgan?"

Bubblehead said, "To you. Why would yell at the other Morgan? He's never done anything to me."

Morgan said, "What did I do to you?"

Bubblehead said, "You parked in my parking space."

Morgan said, "Since when do we have assigned parking spots? I didn't see anyone's name on it."

I chimed in, "But didn't you see the 'handicapped' sign, Morgan?"

And a strange thing happened. ALL the mofos applauded. They applauded and shouted approval.

Bubblehead admitted defeat. He turned around in his chair with his fist pointed at me. He said, "That was pretty good, man."

I gave him a fist-pound. But I didn't apologize.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

What would we do, baby, without us?

Last year my wife bought some sheets and comforters for our kids by mail order. Ever since then we receive a lot of family-oriented catalogs in the mail in which we simply are not interested.

When my wife thumbs through the catalogs she finds it highly entertaining that many of these magazines seem to support a strange and (as far as we know) non-existent family value where families like to buy matching pajamas for the entire family:

Who are these people? What really goes on in their homes?

"If you're REALLY an ANDERSON you will march your butt upstairs and get your stripy jammies on NOW, Little Lady! THEN you will come back down and have some cocoa! WE'RE GONNA HAVE FUN FOR ONCE! As a family!"

"Hey, what's everybody doing in their stripes? I thought tonight was snowmen? Oh crap! Does this mean today was THURSDAY?"

"Family Meeting! Family Meeting! The pajama thing is off tonight. Dad's top is still in the dirty clothes hamper. It's just not the same when WE'RE all dressed up and HE just throws on a white t-shirt. Sorry. Maybe tomorrow."

I don't know. People who spend their time dreaming up scenarios like matching family jammies to convince themselves it will be a fulfilling experience really worry me. It seems like overcompensating in all the wrong places; places too much importance on sleepwear.

"How can Billy be gay? Didn't we do everything right when he was a kid? Didn't we buy him all those Baby Einstein videos? Didn't we do that thing with the pajamas? I just don't see where we went wrong?"

Don't worry about the rapscallion in the red there, I'm sure she'll be sent to one of those camps for bad teens if she doesn't straighten up her act soon.

I can't tell you how to make a family work but I can tell you that matching PJ's are not the answer.

Here's a funny topic that my daughter constantly brings up to my wife:

O: "Mommy, we're all Indians in this family. This is an Indian family."
Eleanor: "Really?"
O: "But YOU'RE NOT INDIAN. But that's okay. You can still be in our family."
Eleanor: "Thanks a lot."

Yeah, she's not Indian. She slipped in under the family Affirmative Action policy. But she's okay. We'll keep her. Provided she can adhere to our family clothing themes.