Who’s up for a little competition?
One of the blogs I follow in my Google Reader is Life in Style, the ModCloth blog. If you don’t know ModCloth, I’d recommend checking it out. They have tons of affordable darling clothes, shoes and accessories—many from independent designers—in a broad spectrum of styles. I would even say it’s the one place to shop online that has something for everyone. And I like the blog because it features interviews with interesting entrepreneurial women, outfit combinations that inspire remixing of my boring old clothes, recipes that inspire remixing of my boring old meal routine, and do-it-yourself projects. Not that I ever attempt any of these do-it-yourself tasks, but I like imagining myself competently completing any number of them while being in awe of the women who actually see them through. (Clearly, these women do not have children or the desire to collapse on the couch in front of Sister Wives while munching on a bag of cherry Twizzlers leftover from a weekend trip to San Francisco.)
All of that being said, I’ve had a very difficult week with the perpetually-updated Life in Style because this is what they call “Mews Week” (they love their puns over there at ModCloth, which is another sore spot for me, but I try to look past the grown-women-being-cutesy thing). Since Monday, Life in Style has featured all things cat, which, as many of you know, is about as fun for me as all things sewage. Looking at pictures of cats every time a new post appears in my reader, is like having to eat a crate of raisins with an endless glass of milk, followed by tapioca pudding for dessert, all while wearing culottes, a midriff bearing shirt and a bow in my hair.
That is to say: Kill. Me. Now.
But while ModCloth has been indulging in Mews Week and bombarding me ten times a day with cat photos, I’ve been doing my very best to eradicate the planet of felines.
So far, I’ve single-handedly (that pun is dedicated to the ModCloth admins *wink*) cleared my immediate neighborhood of the offending varmints. Next up: Talmadge, Kensington and Normal Heights.
A friend of mine recently suggested I make this a contest. He said I should call it the Beat Off Off.
So. Let the Beat Off Off 2011 commence. Who’s with me?
Men behaving disgustingly: About moral ambiguity and which sleazebag is sleazier
“Politicians got lipstick on the collar, the whole media startin’ to holler.
But I don’t give a fuck who they screwin’ in private. I wanna know who they screwin’ in
public. Robbin’, cheatin’, stealin,’ white collar criminal, McDonald eatin’. You deserve a
beatin.’ Send you home weepin’, with a fat bill for your Caribbean weekend.” –Michael
Franti
Oy vey. Has it been the season for awful behavior or what? Granted, it’s a numbingly
long season dating (at least) all the way back to, “It depends on what the definition
of is is,” to “I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport,” continuing right on
past “I don’t know if that picture is me. It could well be. It looks like me. I don’t know
who that baby is. I have no idea what that picture is,” and directly into “I told my
wife about this event, which occurred over a decade ago.”
Blech. It leaves a taste in the mouth more unpleasant than semen, doesn’t it?
Last week, John Edwards was indicted on several counts, none of which include
being an anal goiter, which isn’t illegal. Unfortunately for Dominique Strauss-Kahn,
sexually assaulting maids is illegal. Luckily for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, when
you’re a rich white dude, you get to live in a $50,000 a month townhouse while you
await trial. Somehow I doubt Herman Cain would enjoy such privilege under the
same circumstances.
Capping off the recent spate of ewwww, gross! by lots of powerful men, was the
tweeted photo of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s semi-erect-in-boxer-briefs wiener. Or his
purported wiener, he said, denying any recollection of whether the protruding penis
picture was his. Which made perfect sense to me, since I have absolutely no idea if
my naked pictures of me are me.
I immediately attributed the partial peen (unsee! Unsee!) to James O’Keefe or
Andrew Breitbart, purely as a coping mechanism. What public narcissist
servant would be so obtuse as to take naked self-portraits in the current climate?
Note to future egomaniacal leaders: Don’t let your fetish photos fall into the wrong
hands (how did Breitbart get all these snapshots?).
In the days leading up to his admission, Weiner said he was hiring his own
investigative team. This tack worked out well for the Catholic Church when its
own recent investigation into sexual abuse by priests finally cleared up that whole
mishegoss. It’s all in the past now, they say. And it wasn’t celibacy that made ‘em
do it, neither. It was the 60’s. All that goddamned bra burning free love had
repercussions, people.
Mmmhmm. And Eddie Murphy was just giving the transvestite hooker a ride home.
Prior to Weiner’s pathetic confession and bare-chested-and flexing-screen shots, CNN’s Piers
Morgan launched his own investigation into Cock Shot 2011 (I wrote this before Jon Stewart used it, by the way) by consulting, via
phone with Rudy Giuliani, a leading expert on ewww, gross!
The former mayor of New York—notorious for a moral turpitude desperately out
of sync with the family values mantra of his party—should have recused himself.
That would have been classy. But Giuliani is klassy and instead offered a breathless
condemnation of Weiner; his exasperation must have left righteous spittle all over
his Blackberry.
Klassier still was Giuliani’s response to Morgan’s next line of questioning, which
focused on whether New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s use of state police
helicopters to get to his kid’s baseball games was also inappropriate. (Christie has
since written a personal check as reimbursement. A true mensch, that one.)
Giuliani had no problem with Christie using taxpayer money this way. Yet, his
opposing opinions on the two sets of circumstances revealed the size of his moral
yard stick, if you know what I’m sayin’. And I think we’ve all seen just about enough
of that.
Christie had to get to the games, he said. It’s clear Christie is a devoted family man, he
said. The helicopter was going to be up there in the air anyway, he said. Well played,
Rudy. Well played.
Unfortunately, Piers Morgan missed this opportunity to remind viewers that this
mini-Newt-Gingrich—who was fucking his communications director before he was
fucking Judith Nathan, all while married to Donna Hannover who he was fucking
while married to his second-cousin-first wife—used lots of taxpayer money to visit
his mistress (which one, I’m not exactly sure). Also not included as a credibility
asterisk, was the fact that Giuliani’s then-lover, now-third wife began getting city-
provided chauffeur services from the NYPD well before he admitted to his affair.
But, hey. Giuliani didn’t take phone pics of his penie and send them across the
Internet (that we know of). He didn’t have a love child with a maid (that we know
of). And something I bet he’d consider evidence of his upstanding character: He
didn’t sexually assault any maids (that we know of). Bonus points for him!
Obviously, there is a difference between a rapist and your everyday despicable
prick. But the news is ugly enough to make Octomom’s new bikini pictures look hot,
and that’s saying something. Have you seen them yet? She’s all chiseled, tucked,
pulled, plumped and Botoxed within an inch of where her hymen used to be,
wearing an animal print bikini, and kneel-squatting in ocean foam like she’s trying
to alleviate a months-long bout of constipation. She’s holding her hair up with one
hand, and with the other, she’s dragging behind her what I can only presume is a
brown, soggy burp cloth. It’s not sexy. It’s horrifying.
But it’s better than an imperious Rudy Giuliani pretending he has any moral
authority whatsoever. And it’s way, way better than these self-enamored,
impervious fucksticks flashing their fuck sticks all about town and thinking they
aren’t going to get caught.
Battle of wills: A beard, to me, is the anti-Kama Sutra
Everyone knows I hate cats. I don’t like Mustangs, either (the car, not the animal). I don’t like Crocs, Disney-themed clothing on adults, velour track suits declaring the physiological status of the wearer’s vagina, belching or mommy bloggers. To this list of stuff I loathe, I would like to add Stephanie Meyer’s abhorrent Twilight series and the fact that 90 of the 170 calories in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg come from fat.
And as long as I’m narrowing the scope of friends I have not yet offended, I’m going to state here that I am not a fan of facial hair on men.
Generally speaking—and there are rare exceptions—I like a clean shave, and there is no mystery that my preference is directly linked to daddy issues. My father grew a beard during the years before he left my mother, a time in which he was already gone, even if his body and his beard were physically present. He had taken up the guitar back then, and he would sit on the living-room couch, his long body curved around and clinging to the neck as if it were a rescue tube, and he would strum out “Peaceful Easy Feeling” over and over and over again. You can put The Eagles on my Gong List, too.
My husband knows my position, and, over the course of our 13-year relationship, he’s gone to great lengths to respect it. Though he also knows that if he wants to get laid, his chances—with me at least—decrease exponentially with each day the razor sits in its cartridge. The man makes his choices, and as he likes to say when soaping his face for a shave, “A happy life is a happy wife.” He really ought to write a book. Divorce rates would plummet.
His usually clean-shaven state is maintained out of a contractual agreement of sorts, in which I do not wear bangs and which has mostly worked well for us. With the exception of a time a few years back, when our marriage was in trouble and we engaged in a subliminal war of bangs vs. beard, I’ve kept my forehead uncovered and he’s limited his facial hair to a soul patch.
However, this past winter, he stopped shaving, partly out of superstition—his football team was doing well and he didn’t want to jinx it—and partly out of laziness. At which point, I just had to get over myself.
I didn’t have the energy or the right, really, to complain. He does a lot around the house, and I figured he’d earned himself a beard. It’s his face, I decided (I’m gracious like that), and he should do what he wants with it. And anyway, we’re married-with-kid and I have to be honest here: We’re the cliché. It’s not as if we’re having sex all the time and his incentive to keep up the upkeep was—meh. Sex as a tool is pretty ineffective when you’re not having it. Go figure.
When his team eventually lost in the playoffs, he went for a shave at Barber Side on Adams Avenue and, happy that he was going to indulge himself while releasing the demon, I did an end-zone dance. But it was premature because what came of that shave—and the subsequent shaves—was a handlebar mustache. I’d almost rather pet a cat than look at a handlebar mustache.
But my husband is supportive of all my endeavors, even the cockamamie ones; the least I could do was attempt to be supportive of his. Sam was having fun with facial hair, and given that I can change my look with a sweep of Red Stiletto lipstick by Lancôme, it seemed only fair to let him do his thing.
So, I accepted the ’stache when it began to grow. I even acted enthusiastic on its behalf for a while, going so far as to express eye-rolling exasperation when he told me a regular customer had asked him, as if she didn’t get his Halloween costume, “So, who are you trying to be?”
“Whatever,” I said, in solidarity. “Obviously, she doesn’t get it.”
But soon he began to absentmindedly twist it when we were chatting. Sometimes he’d smooth it. Other times, he’d pet it. And then? He started to wax it.
It moved when he spoke, tickled my face when we kissed, and, well—I have officially confirmed that I am not at all interested in Frederic Nietzsche going down on me. I’m glad, though, to have resolved that life-long question. It was keeping me up nights.
So one morning as Sam was leaving for work, just after he’d set my daily cup of coffee on my nightstand, I didn’t say, “Thank you” or “Have a great day, sweetie” or any of the kinds of things that would be appropriate for a woman to say to the man who goes to the store in the middle of the night to bring her back a package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs.
No. I said—in what I thought was a very diplomatic and reasonable tone—“So, honey, tell me. How much longer is the ’stache gonna be with us?”
After that, it was ix-nay on the ustache-may conversation. Like a deviant teenager, I considered making a hair appointment to cut me some bangs while he memorialized the mustache when he renewed his driver’s license. This thing just had to run its course.
In time, he headed to Barber Side and took off the ends, a happy compromise fully rewarded when we had frantic make-up sex in the backseat of my car. While it was parked in the garage. He pulled a hamstring, but still. He got laid. And I got my baby-faced boy in a mustache I can live with.
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)
Dear John Mayer,
When Playboy asked you whether black women “throw themselves” at you, you said:
“I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.”
Well, jeeze. This is awkward but…dude! You said that—among many other inane things— OUT LOUD. To a reporter. And anyway, do you really think your racist dick is the reason black women don’t dig you?
The Benetton folks must be cringing.
Honey, you are an affront to frat boys everywhere and that’s a damn near impossible feat. You are not smart. You are not cute. You are not deep. You are not intellectual or witty or cool or hip or dope or fly or whatever it is you fancy yourself to be. You have a small, small, small brain and a very big mouth. You are a self-important asshat raised to the 11th power, quadrupled by dickheadery, topped with three servings of phony and one heaping scoop of overcompensation.
Do humanity a favor, John Mayer, and please stop talking. Just shut the fuck up and go far away. Make that annual Mayercraft Cruise of yours permanent. Put on your Gopher-from-The-Love-Boat costume, set your vessel on starboard tack and make a bee line for an iceberg.
Just…yeah. Don’t come back.
xoxox,
~aaryn