Sit a Spell

What's In - What's Out

Every year, the Oxford English Dictionary adds a few words. This year, the verbs google and xerox are in.
To make room for these new words, I'd like to suggest dropping a few. They are over-used, misused, or pompous and they, like, they piss me off.

1. Pre-owned Adj. Used. Refers to used items for which the seller hopes to get more than they're worth. Pre-owned BMWs.
2. Like Paranthetical 1. Said at times when you are straining to think of the word that should be used. He was, like, creepy, and I was, like, creeped out. 2. Said. Usually preceded by the word was. I was, like, 'hi,' and he was, like, 'hi.'
3. Awesome Adj. Nice. Have an awesome day. That's an awesome dress.
4. Amazing Adj. Good. That was an amazing movie. You have an amazing voice.
5. Survivor Adj. Retain meaning ONLY for people who live through war, potentially fatal disease, or severe physical abuse or sexual abuse. Not to be used for TV shows or whiners who pull through life's predictable challenges. She's a three time divorce survivor.
6. Enabler Noun 1. Person with no backbone (e.g., Mr. Lubner) or self esteem. 2. Unable to verbalize necessity for another person to stop doing something that's pissing you off. I was a (fill in objectionable behavior) enabler.
7. Period Noun 1. Punctuation (see below) at the end of a sentence. Even if you're a computer geek, it's a damned period. Dots are on fashion, and are preceded with the word polka.
8. Closure Noun Usage limited to referring to the mechanism that keeps a bra from flying open. Any psychological reference is tedious, and probably a lie. Thank you to wonderful writer Paul Decker for recommending dropping this hideous word.
9. Moist Adj. Scrabble champion/attorney/piano playin' Miss Ann pointed out that anyone who's seen "The Imposters" (Stanley Tucci and Philip Seymour Hoffman) will never use this word again. Think showers after "Psycho" and night beach swimming after "Jaws." Touche, Ann.

There are more. Lots more. But, now, some forbidden punctuation.

Apostrophe '
1. You can use it for Irish persons' last names, e.g., O'Keefe, O'Keeffe, O'Brien, O'Leary.
2. If you have a never got your GED, or did, but slept through all your English classes, you may not use apostrophes at all. That means no contractions. If you don't know what a contraction is, just don't say things like don't. Say donut.

Quotation marks "
1. You must use it before and after you are writing something in exactly the same words another person said but you may never use it while talking, by making little air wavys with two fingers.
2. You may never put them around a description of a feature of what you are selling. "Home Cooking" and "Fresh" make people nervous, and will, therefore, be counterproductive.
3. You may never use them to be a smartass. Jessica Simpson is "smart" is mean. The correct way to express that is Jessica Simpson is a moron.

Period .
1. Place at the end of the written sentence. If you say the word period, you'd better be referring to the menstrual cycle. Blurting out puntuation when you're speaking makes you look like an asshole.

If you know anyone at the OED, please pass this along.

Your assignment today is to read The Professor and the Madman. Today, I played the part of the Madman, but I'd prefer that you, like, call me Madam. Period.

Fothermucker Two (Rt)

Out of Habit

My mother, Sister Mom, who dresses in a white habit and has a chapel (complete with tabernacle, altar, pews, stations of the cross and an organ in the back) for a living room, shares at least one thing with the Virgin Mary - difficulty in explaining children. For that reason, and others, I prefer to refer to my fathers as the fothermuckers.
My first fothermucker was a Los Angeles Police Officer who worked in the Rampart district. I have little independent memory of him - a late night visit when I was in the hospital, crying at the door while he was leaving. He knocked up a dispatcher when I was a toddler. I never knew my parents were divorced. He was just gone all the time.
One morning, my whole family was sitting in the living room in their pajamas, and it was suspiciously quiet. Something was definitely up.
Daddy was dead.
Dead?
Dead.
Fothermucker number two's number came up. He is an engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My mother, a pretty woman with a beautiful singing voice, was his boss's secretary. She had taken courses in typing and shorthand after fothermucker number one had moved out, and had quickly risen from the typing pool to a high level engineer's very own.
Soon after the demise of number one, he was in. Like his predecessor, he was rarely around and very loud when he was.
At first, he was fun. He took us to the beach, where I got burned to a crisp at Scotchman's Cove, playing with the Wolfman, Big Dave, and fothermucker two, the belly-bumping King of Scotchman's Cove.
After he took his place as the King of our family, he was less fun. After the birth of his first child, Charlie-John-Jack, I, with my sister and brother, was relegated to the position of servant, politely serving hors d'oeuvres at the huge parties he threw for his fellow engineers.
He and my mother had loud, late, raucous fights. Eight years after he moved in, with Charlie-John-Jack and I the only remaining children in residence, he packed up and moved in with his pregnant cocktail waitress from the Red Fox.
It was quite a while until the third fothermucker came along. My mother was already living in the Holy House with Sister Taresa Candacelottra - as a novitiate, of sorts. A man named Manual Luna (whom I called manual labor) did some cabinetry at Sister's house. Both my evil Aunt Eleanor (soon to become Sister Martha) and my mother were smitten. Mom won.
Off to Las Vegas for a third round of marital bliss with fothermucker number three. He failed to add her name on the deed to his house, however, so the bliss was short lived and he was relegated to a fothermucker footnote (and went blind, undoubtedly a Vodou curse) .
The effect, at least in part, of these fothermuckers was an equally ridiculous parade in my own life (current excluded). Time will tell whether I'll don a habit and marry God, but the odds are against it.
I have very fair skin. White washes me out.

Kate's Fate

Barbie, with Brains

August 10 is my oldest, dearest friend Katy's birthday. This is the day when she has to stop saying I'm a year older than she is, and catch up. Nah nah nah nah NAH nah.
Katy is Barbie, only smarter and more talented. She and I were inseparable as teen-agers. We wore fringe jackets, boots and very tight jeans, and spent most of our summers hanging out with musicians, DJs from KPPC, and inhabitants of the head shops on Fair Oaks in Pasadena.
I stayed at her house a lot. She lived at 2851 Shakespeare Avenue in fabulously wealthy San Marino with her mom, former Kansas Corn Queen Ruth, dad Dr. Roy, the tall, dark and handsome OB/GYN who gave us birth control pills whether we asked for them or not, and her sister Sally, who was much less attractive in every respect than her younger sister. Dr. Shoaf was aware, through Katy, that my mother was quite literally coming apart, and encouraged Kate to invite me over all the time.
We would watch in giggly delight when he'd dress in a hideous outfit of clashing reds (he was color blind), don a ridiculous hat, pull out his trumpet and play along with the band on Melody Ranch. Why don't you girls wear pretty dresses like them?, he'd ask, alluding to the hopelessly corny gingham checked, poofy sleeved, tight waisted, petticoated singers. That was our cue to roll our eyes and go listen to The Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills and Nash, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
To complete her humiliation, Dr. Shoaf gave the Christian Motherhood talks at Alverno Heights Academy for Girls. At 5' 10", it was hard to hide behind 5' 7 1/2" me, but she slouched her best and prayed for the miracle of the Ascension.
We continued our friendship into adulthood. Katy and I worked and went to school when, and long after most people go to college. We went our own ways, took forever getting through school, had scads of jobs, preposterous boyfriends, fiances and husbands. Kate ended up being Assistant Vice President at a huge insurance company, where she did advertising design. I was a Vice President at a less large bank, where I did something boring.
On week-ends, sometimes I'd watch Katie do what she really loved - act. She did live theater-Shakespeare, Williams-and she was good. She never took the tall, blonde, big tits, tiny waisted, long legged parts. She took character rolls, and was inventive and touching.
We went to movies and bars and restaurants and stores together, but we always did the same thing. We'd laugh and talk and laugh and talk and laugh. Then talk. We loved Monty Python and Frank Zappa. Why couldn't we find guys like them?
Katy died in 1999. She was walking across her living room and she had an aneurism. Boom. Dead.
I miss you, Kate. You're frozen in time as the tall, smart, blonde, witty, big titted, giggly, sweet 47 year old you were, and I'll never forget you.
Have a shot of peach schnaps and flirt with a cute guy today.

Babs in Toyland

Project Football

I have two smart, pretty, erudite friends who've both recently alluded to watching Project Runway.
I've never seen the show, but from what I can gleen from the commercials, Heidi Klum, a mini-skirted, impossibly wispy blonde with stunningly chiseled features, tortures burgeoning fashion designers until one of them screws up sufficiently to be bounced from the show by her panel of experts.
In a parallel universe, football season started last Sunday, and when I was listening to Al Michaels go on-and-on-and-on about how happy he was for the interminably blathering John Madden to have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, I thought about those two friends.
What on earth did we have in common?
I am in a slight funk from Super Bowl to the pre-season opening game. When football season starts, I ascend from my dour mood, and look forward to seeing if Peyton and Eli are going to choke at the end of the season, whether my favorite coach (Tony Dungee) will win more games than my least favorite coach (the evil Bill Parcells), and whether T.O. is going to pull himself together and play like the egotistical diamond-studded running back he is. Joy!
Is there any common ground between the NFL and Project Runway?
I doubt if either of these two aforementioned friends would get pissed off if you talked during their show. Most of the men, I'm assuming, whom they are watching are gay. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) The rules are slippery...who says what's good fashion? Who's the Commissioner?
My love of football started in earnest when I lived in Auburn, California, where I moved as a particularly bad love story was slamming its door.
I made friends with the Chief Loan Officer at the bank where I worked, and little by little, endeared myself to him, mostly because I caught him making out with one of the girls in Accounting, and he was nervous I'd tell on him and ruin his illustrious career at Placer Savings.
So, I was included in the Winnebago, packed full of guys and beer and bad food, and we went to see the Raiders.
The Raiders were monsters. They always won. It was like watching the marauders in Braveheart. Challengers were reguarly carried off the field with career ending injuries. I fell in love with Kenny "the Snake" Stabler and Lyle Alzado.
Kenny, however, loved Carol Doda, and I, being less well-endowed, had to love him from afar.
I became a rabid football fan, as only a Raider-lover can.
The Raiders played in the pre-season opener, and they sucked. They're a far cry from the monsters they were when John Madden was their coach, and their ridiculous Elvis-sunglass-wearing owner Al Davis was less a caricature of himself. But it's early in the season. Anything can happen.
Maybe that' s what Project Runway and the NFL have in common.
Hope springs eternal in bitchy fashion and gladiator sport.

Buy This Now

http://home.earthlink.net/~pdeck/houseforsale/

Gran Bwa

Fierce Protector

52 52

Last year was a rough one. I was 52, and was born in 1952. It was my version of the triple sixes, the sign of the anti-Christ.
This year, the pain of last year is fading, and the scars are less prominent. But, more and more, I'm not the girl I used to be. And the girl I was, is cheering new me on.
I think old me was more likable. More helpful. More generous.
New me likes herself better than old me did, and has less need to earn acceptance. New me sets serious boundaries, and if you cross them, you can just keep going. Good-byes used to break old me's heart. No more.
New me doesn't give a shit if you've dug yourself into a hole with your crappy choices and is bored to death with your rationalizations. New me won't even look in the hole you dug when you're screaming for attention. (Old me couldn't throw you a rope fast enough.)
I have less friends than I did last year. Better friends, but less of them. And, I am not looking for new friends until one of my old friends dies.
My old friends are very healthy.
New me gets scared sometimes and tries to find old me.
Old me wants none of it. Old me is tired of dragging those gigantic steamer trunks of life shit around everywhere I go, and tells new me to move along.
New me is trying to be more like my brother, St. Billy of Milan.
I call him St. Billy the Adopted, because I can't believe he's as sane and smart and giving as he is, with the same toxic gene pool. I continue to believe my mother, who dresses in a white habit and has a chapel in her living room, will tell him he's adopted on her death bed, right before she joins the Muslim martyrs looking for their 70 virgins, tells them that they are the anti-Christ, last year was their year, and all they get is her very non-virginal daughter telling them to go fuck themselves.

Snowflake

Cuttin Loose

Walking down the street in a picturesque little town on the Oregon Coast yesterday, I saw a little boy lean over a flower box and sniff a flower. When his grandmother asked him what the flower smelled like, he answered, "Butterflies."
When I was a kid, I took piano lessons from Mrs. Kieffer. The lesson went like this. Mrs. Kieffer put three buttons at the end of the piano. I played my lesson. Every time I played perfectly, she removed a button. Every time I made a mistake, she put one back. When the buttons were gone, she played my assignment for the next week so I'd know how it should sound.
Not practicing enough meant humiliatingly long lessons. Practicing at least an hour a day usually resulted in a three-plays-and-you're-out lesson.
When I was a teenager, and had three buttoned my way through all the John W. Schaum piano books, I took lessons from Merv Kennedy, a late sixties beat whose furniture consisted of a Hammond B3, Steinway, vibes, drum set and a Rhodes piano. He was Steve Allen's piano teacher. He was a studio cat. He was very, very cool.
When I auditioned for him (no button removed!), he asked me if I had been potty trained at gunpoint. What?
R-e-l-a-x, he said, as he took my hands in his, and banged (!) them on the piano. Let's try this...and he'd just doodle around until he found something remarkable, then made a song with it.
Nothing written, no charts, just theory. First lesson, r-e-l-a-x.
Merv stuck with me for longer than Mrs. Kieffer, and took me to hear the best musicians I ever heard. Some were professional musicians, some were janitors with extraordinary talent. Sometimes the janitors were better.
He helped me develop an ear for good music. He introduced me to people I would never had met, all with one thing in common - they were very talented musicians.
But, he never rid me of the deeply seeded button lessons. No amount of cajoling or laughing or ignoring would convice me that I hadn't made a "mistake." It was in too deep.
I could never think flowers smelled like butterflies.