Most Melodramatic Performance

The room darkens and a video screen begins to play. A woman is fretfully looking out the window at snow flurries.

Mother: Be very, very careful. I wouldn’t drive more than 30 mph on the highway. They say it’s going to be bad out.

Daughter: It’s only going to be 1 to 2 inches and most of it should melt later today. I’m sure it will be fine.

The woman collapses to her knees and begins wailing to the heavens.

Mother: BAAAAAADDD OOOOUUUTTTT!!! THEEEYY SAAAAAAAAIIIDDD!!!

There is applause then the scene shifts. A man walks into his cubicle and takes off his coat. His boss walks over.

Boss: Where were you? It’s almost 9:30.

Employee: Oh, well, uh, my development … you know, the plows …

He trails off. She sighs.

Boss: Everybody else was here at 9. I live twice as far as you do.

Employee: Give me a break, huh? I’ve had bad experiences driving in the snow. Fifteen years ago I almost drove into a ditch!

Boss: Oh! Were you hurt?

Employee (quietly): No but I still have scars … on the inside …

There is applause and the scene shifts again. A husband and wife are eating dinner.

Wife: Ugh. They’re calling for 3 to 6 inches tomorrow. Then it’s more polar vortex temperatures. I just … I can’t take it …

The husband drops his plate and covers his face with his hands.

Husband: Dear God, I just can’t deal with this. And we just had snow a few days ago. Will this winter never end? (He starts to cry bitterly.)

Wife: Are we doomed to be forever blinded by this white hell all around us?!

Husband: I just … we’re moving to Ecuador, OK? Pack your bags. I never want to experience this again. I can’t even look at photos of snow anymore. I hate the color white now.

Wife (hyperventilating): Can’t … stop … complaining …

After more applause, the house lights come up and a woman approaches the podium.

Jennifer Lawrence (opening envelope): And the Oscar for Most Melodramatic Performance in the Winter goes to … Ladies and gentlemen, we have a tie! They’re all winners!

Announcer: None of the nominees could attend due to snow related mental illnesses. The Academy accepts their awards on their behalf.

Get off the cross

Sanity prevailed in Kansas recently as the government rejected a bill that would give businesses the right to discriminate against gay customers because our sexual orientation goes against their religious beliefs. Now craziness has taken hold in Arizona because the state Senate actually passed a bill that would do just that.

Hmmm … the law is codifying the idea that businesses can refuse to serve people with certain characteristics. I vaguely remember America trying something like this before. Around mid-20^th century, maybe? Does anyone remember how that worked out?

Give me a minute. I’m sure I’ll think of it.

Bills like these codify discrimination and are unconstitutional and I hope to God a court strikes them down. Bills like these are dangerous to everyone and the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers who support them don’t seem to understand that. Laws like these could easily target anyone, not just the people you conveniently don’t like. What happens if a business owner decides that his religious beliefs exempt him from serving customers of a certain race or ethnicity or another religion? Can you imagine if a Muslim business owner used his religion to justify not Christians in Arizona? Can’t you just hear the screaming and crying that would result (these would be the same people who viciously oppose sharia law without realizing that what they want to impose on the country is a Christian version of that)?

What happens when these laws target you? Then it won’t be some grand expression of religious freedom, will it?

Well, I’m as Christian as any of these business owners and I interpret my religion as an obligation to serve all people regardless of race or sexual orientation or what have you. I see my faith as a reason not to treat people like shit just because they’re different from me. Not that the belief is just a part of any religion: It’s actually one of the tenets of good ol’ secular America. Like, we have laws against this sort of thing.

What do these people think will happen if they make a wedding cake for a gay couple? Is Jesus going to revoke their fucking halo? Are they going to end up in the circle of hell reserved for caterers of abominable relationships, toiling away for eternity, making brimstone pound cake with blood-red fondant for Satan?

We were really lucky when we got married because none of the vendors we dealt with batted an eye against a gay couple. Hey, our money is the same as everyone’s so they all took it. Gay people around the country have sued when bakers refused to make their wedding cakes. I would just take my business elsewhere. I’m glad these people sued because somebody had to establish a legal precedent against this sort of thing but I shudder to think what the reluctant bakers put in that cake.

To the people who moan that they’re being persecuted because the law won’t protect their right to discrimination, I believe a well-worn phrase applies: Get off the cross. We need the wood.

Hey, who shrunk my pants?

They fit fine last fall and now I’m squeezing into them like someone trying to put sausage back into its casing. I know one of you shrunk my pants. I know one of you did it! Just come clean.

God knows when you got access to my closet but I can hazard a few guesses. Maybe you snuck behind me as I was microwaving a bowl full of chocolate morsels for a snack and dashed down the basement to run my pants in the wash repeatedly on the hottest setting. Maybe while I was at the movies, drizzling extra “butter” on my popcorn, you performed your alchemy on my laundry, magically shrinking the waistband. Maybe you just replaced the pants with a smaller size while I was scarfing down an order of Buffalo wings with extra blue cheese and French fries while parked in front of Netflix.

The evidence is elusive but I know something happened. I checked the pants and while the waist measurement is the same as it’s been for years, these are clearly not my pants. My pants were the ones that always fit fine before Christmas. The only possibility is laundry shenanigans or maybe you bought a pair in a larger size and switched the measurements before putting the pants in my closet.

Oh, you’re clever. I’ll give you that.

Now I’m walking around afraid to bend over and split my pants. I have to inhale like a Downton Abbey character putting on a corset just to slide into the suspiciously smaller size. And I bet you’re loving this, aren’t you? You’re somewhere with binoculars, watching me try to move gingerly in my snug slacks, just laughing and laughing. I bet you thought I’d never catch on but I did.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to lumber on over to a tailor who can hopefully reverse this nefarious pants shrinking process.

The Bright Side of a Leaky Roof

I am negative. I never fail to look at the downside of everything. I could spot a gaping flaw in the Hope Diamond. I hate everything.

So the fact that our roof, which was had replaced in late 2012, is leaking, could be a bit of a downer. The leaky ceiling is in my office and yesterday I was working from home while serenaded by its metronome drip for a few hours. They are coming back (again) today to fix it. But I think I’m going to look on the bright side. Here are a few positives about a leaky roof:

• At least it’s not leaking over the bed. Then we’d have to sleep on our backs while holding a bucket on our stomachs.

• The water leaking is now clear. It started out piss yellow (I don’t want to know) but now it’s clear. So that’s something.

• Maybe if they come back enough times, I’ll make some new friends at the roofing company.

• I should be grateful. There are people in California who would kill for the water dripping beside me.

• If I close my eyes, it feels like I’m having a peaceful day beside a babbling brook.  

• This now justifies spending the money on those buckets. And to think they said I was a fool when I bought them. Who’s a fool now?

• Our ceiling was looking like it needed something new. I was getting sick of the dry, pristine white.

• You know, it’s all the circle of life. The snow melts and the water evaporates and it’s just magical. Just magical as hell.

Now I’m going to skip through some fields of wildflowers.

I am not one of those people

Please please please let Action News not be at the Price’s Corner Acme tonight. I am not one of those people and I don't want the viewers to think I am. I do not panic shop before the snow.

But tonight I have to go food shopping. I always go Thursday nights but I don’t know if I want to go tomorrow because it might still be snowing and I may not feel like it. I have zero fear of driving in the snow but I won’t feel like shoveling out the car and then getting to the supermarket and it’s closed. I could easily wait a day since we won’t run out of food but it annoys me to shop on Fridays after work and I absolutely refuse to go food shopping on Saturday or Sunday unless I need something immediately because the store just too crowded. I like Thursday nights. Nobody is there and I can get in and out.

The thought of shopping tonight … ugh. Maybe I’ll wait til it starts snowing and go out because by then, maybe people will be hiding under the bed saying the rosary that the snow doesn’t get them. My nightmare is that the local news will get a shot of me doing regular shopping and I will never hear the end of it. I also dread the crowds of people who feel the best way of dealing with snow is to hit the panic button. I wonder if I’ll see the Panicked Butter Lady, who was stockpiling butter before the blizzard a few years ago. She had her arms full of as much butter as she could carry and had this crazed look in her eyes.

I am not one of those people. I just buy regular food when it snows. I don’t go crazy with snack foods or buy a dairy farm’s worth of milk. The reality is that we don’t live in the woods where downed wires would keep us indoors for days and even if we can’t drive anywhere, there are plenty of places to walk to get supplies. Even in 2010 when we had two blizzards in one week, I was only indoors for a day. There’s always enough food somewhere in our house to tide us over. My main worry if the power failed would be the cold, not a lack of food. It’s cold enough to just put the food in a cooler on the deck anyway.

I did go out last night and buy eggs because we were about out and I didn’t feel like dealing with the Dairy Section of Doom at Acme. I needed gas anyway so I went to the adjacent Walgreens and it was fine. There was a massive line at BJs for discount gas so I went to another gas station two blocks away and it was the same price with no lines.

If Action News does get a shot of me tonight, maybe I can convince them to run a chyron under my name saying, “Not one of those people. Just doing regular shopping since snow happened to fall on regular shopping day.”

I had the most irresponsible dream

I dreamed I was in Las Vegas for a business trip. I was supposed to meet one of our contributors for lunch at noon. I looked at the clock and it was 11:55. I had just woken up and still needed to get showered and dressed.

I was completely panicked and it didn’t help that a bunch of other people were using the bathroom while I was trying to get ready. I considered skipping shaving to save time but that still meant I had to shower and be at the restaurant very soon.

Time got all weird and the five minutes seemed to last longer but I got hung up on every little motion of getting ready and just couldn’t do it. I have no idea why I wasn’t already up and ready at nearly noon. It was especially appalling since I was on the West Coast and should have been up much earlier than normal due to jet lag. I basically slept til 3 p.m. EST. It was very irresponsible of me and very unlike me.

I had this huge hotel room that was bigger than my first apartment. It was so long that it was a hike to get from one end of it to the other if someone knocked on the door. There was also a separate room that had all these couches and a dining room set and served as a sort of lounge. I had seen this room before in another dream. I had a similar huge room like that one the last time I was in Vegas for work. It had a sectional and dining room table and all. It was kind of a waste since I was by myself but was still nice to have.

That was in contrast to the one room I stayed in in New York a few years ago. It was almost like one of those micro hotels. The room was just about as wide as the bed itself. I didn’t care so much because it was just overnight and I was alone but it was really funny to me. I guess it’s just a room for people who don’t really care too much and are going to be out and about all day.

Not sure what any of the preceding meant.

I have no position on Lena Dunham

I’ve never seen Girls, partially due to the fact that we only recently got HBO and only because Comcast offered it in a truce after a fight we had. I don’t have much of a desire to see it because the characters just seem so self-involved and with so little self-awareness, just from what I’ve read. Not that I can’t enjoy shows about people who are self-involved with little self-awareness but I just think I’ll pass, thanks. I can’t help but run across articles about Lena Dunham that run on the websites I like and will read those articles when I don’t feel like working but they don’t spur my interest in this woman. I have no position on Lena Dunham. I don’t care about her acting, writing or directing. I’m sure she’s a lovely and talented person but I don’t know if she will ever mean anything to me. Even reading what other people think about her is exhausting because it almost pressures me into thinking I should have some kind of stance on her or her work or her public persona or What Her Work Says About Women and I just don’t feel like taking a position, partially due to the fact that I am not that familiar with her work and also due to the fact that there are plenty of other books and TV shows and movies to sink my teeth into and I’m sorry, but I just haven’t gotten to her yet. I don't care how naked Dunham gets on Girls or how she looks or what grand statement her nudity might make or how many times she might crap herself while eating a burrito naked during an OB-GYN exam and then do a bunch or coke and cry and have sex six times with the gynecologist. I don’t care to debate how Girls deals with race. I truly don’t care to read another exhaustive (and exhausting) think piece on what the show signifies about how white 20-somethings live in Brooklyn today or whatever bullshit fills the tubes of the Internet. If that floats your boat, go ahead and float but I just truly do not care even a whit. Most of all, I have a breathtaking disinterest in how Dunham looked in non-retouched Vogue photos (and thought that whole thing was more embarrassing for Jezebel than it was for Dunham or Vogue) and cannot spur my brain to process a debate on the politics of how a magazine might digitally alter the neckline of a dress or the curve of an arm. Write your dissertation on it. I’ll look it up on the campus library someday, I’m sure. And I know 400 words is a lot to spend ranting about something I claim not to care about but, well, that’s what I do here.  

Amanda Knoxxxzzzzzzzzzzzz

Do I really need to be following the saga of Amanda Knox or can I just ignore it and go back to sleep?

This is one of those stories that I’ll catch for a few seconds on one of the morning shows but not really pay attention to. Every couple of months Knox will get some kind of breathless update because she got a new trial or got condemned to death or whatever and the Good Morning America anchors will be falling all over themselves to give us the details. (There are a lot of stories on those morning shows that seem to be important but not really, like when a plane has a rough landing somewhere. The anchors will announce it as “scary moments for some passengers” and do insipid interviews with people about the turbulence. My God, who cares when something almost happens? Wake me when the plane actually crashes. Just because it was a memorable story for the passengers does not mean it should be broadcast to everyone. But anyway.)

From what I gather (not even interested enough to Google her), Knox was convicted of killing someone in a murder in Italy that involved sex. The only reason I can think of that we would care about a trial in a foreign country is because the defendant is attractive and sex is part of the story.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. The Philadelphia Daily News bleated for months about this couple that was involved in identity theft or something that the reporters nicknamed “Bonnie and Clyde.” The story wasn’t that interesting but the paper just kept going on about Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie and Clyde because they were both attractive. People wrote into the paper to complain that they were only running this because they had attractive head shots to run and the paper just kept doing it. I vaguely remember the paper gave the same treatment to some white collar criminals who did gay porn.

Titillation is fun sometimes and I can get a laugh out of a salacious story but I’m not shallow enough to care about some vaguely hot woman in Italy who kills someone. I don’t even feel like making the effort to turn my head during the morning news to get an update on whether she’s being extradited or executed by firing squad or whatever. I know I wrote a lot about something I don’t care about but it’s not like I am seeking out news on Knox. It’s just kind of on the periphery and I don’t care for it.

There are awful, awful crimes (I covered some for years as a reporter) that get zero public awareness because the defendants don’t have cute head shots. I guess CNN needs something to report on in between its in-depth investigation on the next cruise ship covered in poop.

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(The preceding was an attempt to increase the SEO for my blog.)