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I Should Be a Marketing Consultant, Part 2
Current mood: cultured
Category: Blogging

I don't think there's anyone here who would deny the fabulousness of Febreeze. Right? Does anyone wish to contradict that?

*crickets chirp*

*a kitten yawns*

*grass grows*

*Charles Dickens is still too wordy*

Right. I thought not.

Now, Febreeze has some cute commercials. I won't deny that. All I'm saying is that they could do better; there is a huge vat of untapped funniness out there for the deodorizing-spray-user. Picture this:

Scene opens on a pristine household. The Lady of the House (hereinafter referred to as "Loth") leans over a white couch and fluffs a white pillow. Then she nods to herself, satisfied that her abode is just-so.

Then the doorbell rings, and in steps her husband's grandfather (hereinafter referred to as "Smelly McGee"). Smelly McGee's first act in the house is to let one rip next to Loth's lovely, just-so white sofa. Behind him, the family dog (some cute little fluffy thing, also white in color), falls over in a faint with its legs held rigid in the air. Grandpa McGee just snorts and continues walking through the house.

*cue the Mission Impossible music*

Loth makes a beeline for the linen closet, dodging Smelly McGee's vapors, and flings it open to reveal - *a light shineth forth and angel music plays* - the bottle of Febreeze!! Loth grabs the bottle and runs back to Smelly McGee. While he's busy inspecting the sauerkraut she has made for the family dinner, Loth sprays the seat of his pants with Febreeze. Then she makes a quick getaway before Grandpa McGee can figure out what just happened behind him.

Fast-forward to a nice family dinner. The cute little fluffy white dog is seated on the carpet behind Smelly, hoping for table scraps. All of a sudden, a tremendous fart noise rips out through the pleasant scene. Forks clink on plates as they all freeze. Food falls out of a small child's slack mouth as she gapes, blue eyes wide with horror, at the end of the table where Grandpa McGee sits. Behind him on the floor, the little dog sniffs. It sniffs again. It follows the scent to Smelly's Febreeze'd buttocks. It takes a deep breath, inhaling the clean scent, and then smiles that cute puppy smile with its tongue lolling out.

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and the meal continues in peace. Grandpa McGee just looks confused.

Fin.

There, now. That's what I call "realism in advertising." Who wouldn't buy Febreeze after seeing how well it works in an actual family situation?

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.

Desi

Currently listening : Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street Deluxe - Complete Edition Release date: 2007-12-18

5:36 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

The Things I Do For Charity...
Category: Blogging

...or, in the vernacular: Yet Another Reason Why I Hate/Love Starbucks.

So. My friend Janet has this thing where she collects pop can tabs and donates them to the Burn Unit at a local hospital. Don't ask me which hospital, though; there are just too many sick people out there for me to keep track of all the places they hang out. Maybe the city should build them a roller rink to keep them from wandering the streets and making drug deals. Darn sick people.

Anyway, I get yelled at and called nasty names if I throw out a pop can without saving the tab. I suppose that's fair. How difficult is it to bend off the tab and throw it at Janet when I walk in the office door? It's even therapeutic, cuz I can throw stuff without really hurting anyone and adding to the sick-people-wandering-the-streets-spreading-sick-vibes population.

Okay - onward with the story.

I stopped at CVS on the way into the office this morning, fully intending to buy a milk since I had not eaten yet. There I am in the beverage aisle when, lo! I see a Starbucks logo shining forth from the cooler!

Um...okay, I have a confession to make. It wasn't really shining forth; more like, it was hiding in the back of the cooler with the burned-out light, shielded by a 20-oz Mountain Dew and an expired carton of half & half. But that's REALLY NOT THE POINT.

Upon further examination, I found that this gem was a large can of Starbucks Vanilla-Flavored Double-Shot cold espresso drink. Yay!!! So I bought it, because really - I can exercise self control by not passing the Starbucks store. But you just can't expect me to be within arm's reach of an espresso drink at CVS, and not buy it. That's just wrong.

So I purchase this cold can of yummy espresso drink and continue on my merry way. I drive back onto the highway, all the while cradling my big can of liquid bliss. Now...there's something you have to understand about pre-packaged coffee drinks that people buy in stores. That thing is: the contents separate and settle. It's like getting a carton of chocolate milk at the store, and all the chocolate has settled at the bottom. So what does a person in need of chocolate (or in this case, espresso) do to remedy this separation thing? Shake it, of course. Shake it really, really hard.

Did you know that even non-carbonated drinks in a can will explode in your face when shaken? Well they do. They spray espresso all over you, your steering wheel, your dashboard, your brand new 80GB iPod in its dock on the consol of your brand new Toyota Prius...

I imagine that you get the idea. Yes?

So there I am on the inner-belt bridge, driving along in rush hour traffic and trying to control the slow explosion of vanilla espresso. A word to the wise: espresso cannot be controlled. It doesn't even obey the laws of physics, much less you swearing and yelling at it to Stop! For the love of all that's holy in this car, stop before you ruin my upholstery!

In retrospect, I should have just set the oozing can on the passenger seat and let it wear itself out. My car is scotch-guarded, you see, with this really cool space-age stuff that makes liquid bead and roll off. My upholstery would have been just fine. Did I think of this? No, of course not. Why would I be thinking rationally during the morning commute before I've had any coffee to drink? That's why I bought the vanilla espresso in the first place - to make my brain think right.

So I clutched the exploding can to my bosom like a dying kitten, content in knowing that at least my upholstery was safe.

Luckily, I had a change of clothes in my trunk. I don't know how long these clothes have been there, but they only smell a little bit like gym sock. I would have just kept on the vanilla-espresso-soaked clothes (since they smelled better), but my office has no electric hot air dryers in the bathroom, and I don't like being wet, not even with coffee. So there I was in my car, parked at Prospect and East 14th street, huddled under a dirty picnic blanket in my own back seat, trying to change my clothes without flashing my (admittedly splendid) bare body parts at any of the bums passing by. And afterwards, I doused myself with Febreeze to get rid of the eau-de-men's-locker-room that clung to me as I stepped out of my car.

But, you know what? Even though that stupid can assaulted me in-transit, I still took the time to pop the tab off and save it for Janet. That's right; I am THAT magnanimous.

And now I have a headache from the overpowering scent of Febreeze. I think I used too much.

Darn you, Starbucks! *shakes fist at sky* It's all your fault! But we will meet again, my friend...we will meet again...

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee-scented-car.

Desi

3:38 PM - 12 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

Public Transportation: Looking after your well-being...second
Category: Blogging

I was late to work today, but it’s all good. It’s heartening to know that there are people out there having worse Mondays than me. In the end, what do I have to complain about? A deficit of coffee? Annoying coworkers? Nocturnal gnome attacks? That’s nothing.

So I was standing at the bus stop waiting for the posh coach to arrive this morning. There was a line of us and we were all kind of cranky and a little chilled there at 745am. All of a sudden, we see this plume of smoke rise off of Country Club Boulevard on the other side of the bridge. We snicker a little bit, naively figuring that some poor sap’s car overheated or ran out of oil or that his bluetooth headset blew up.

Nope. The smoking vehicle crests the ridge and drives onto the bridge, and lo! It is our bus, trundling along with smoke billowing out of the rear grill. Every few seconds, flames sputtered out too, accompanied by that signature "whump!" of gasoline igniting. Amazingly enough, the driver did not realize that his bus was aflame. Some nice third-party motorist flagged him down and pantomimed that his bus was on fire.

"Dude! You’re on fire! En fuego, ya flaming idiot!"

Meanwhile, I’m standing back by the bus hut with a gaggle of giggling commuters. We watch the bus pull over in the driveway. Then the doors open and the bus driver bursts forth, flailing his arms, and sprints away from his smoking bus like a little girl trying to escape from a spider.

Now picture this: inside the carriage, his passengers are idly sitting there sipping coffee and reading the paper, maybe listenning to music. You see a few of them look out the window, and the confusion sets in.

"Hey...isn’t that our bus driver?"
"Dude - why’s he running away like a little girl?"
"Hey guys? Do you smell something burning?"
"No, but there’s a fog bank rolling in...oh. Shit!"

All at once, we see the passengers spring out of their seats with their bags and coats gathered in their arms, tripping over each other in their haste to exit the flaming bus.

Luckily, no one got hurt. Once they shut the bus engine off, the smoke stopped and the flames died down. But come on, Mister Bus Driver. You can’t even scream "FIRE!!!" as you’re leaping out the bus door in abject terror?

And there you have it. Never doubt that a government worker will save his own ass before he even considers the existence of yours. This has been another edition of: "Public Servants: Your Tax Dollars at Work."

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.
Desi

7:40 AM - 6 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

Desiree the Moot Point and her Yippee Prius
Category: Blogging

(That should be a children’s book title.)  Since I am now a moot hippie/yuppie, I have decided to call myself and my car a Yippee.

So I picked up my brand spankin’ new Toyota Prius gas/electric hybrid last night after work. Please let me preface all of this by saying that I LOVE the thing, okay? But it’s like driving around in an iPhone and you can’t figure out how to get it off speaker.

All of the dashboard controls are on a touch screen panel, which is cool...unless you’re easily distracted by, say, flashing touch screen lights and cool buttons and gismos. Like me. It’s just nifty to be able to tap at the controls and play with the radio stations, or adjust the interior climate settings, or try to figure out if you can get your email delivered to it. And the little diagram that shows you which motor (gas or electric) is powering which parts of the car at any given time? That’s REALLY nifty. So is the readout that tells you what gas mileage you’re getting, up-to-date from one second to the next. It prompts you to do things like accelerate and decelerate at varying speeds just to see if you can hit 80 mpg or run solely off the electric motor for 10 minutes straight.

A word to the wise...this may piss off other motorists. I suggest NOT doing it in Wednesday morning rush hour traffic.

I played with all of the cool buttons and knobs and stuff last night - that’s a requirement when you get a new car. Let me tell you, there are like 14 different knobs and levers and space station arms on my steering wheel alone. It took me 4 tries to turn on the windshield wipers, and then I realized that I was messing with the twisty knob for the rear windshield wipers.

Then I tried to find the horn. There was no knob or button that I could find at first. I really would not have been surprised to find it on the touch screen panel, where I would have to choose a volume level and a ring tone for my horn. I have to admit, that would be pretty cool, especially if there was a "vibrate" option. Then I could buzz the car in front of me, 2 short 1 long. (bz-bz-BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ) Anywho, against all common sense, the Prius’s horn is activated by pounding on the center of the steering wheel. It’s good to know that some things, at least, never change.

And then there is the Smart Key.

Have any of you ever played with one of these contraptions? There are faux key holes in my car doors because there is no actual KEY key. You get a fob key and the car can remote sense that the fob is in the general vicinity. When you touch the door handle, it automatically unlocks it for you.

This poses several problems for me, the least of which being that I am, in all honesty, a dumbass.

You see, I park my car close enough to my house that when I hang my fob on its hook in the kitchen, it is still in range of the Prius. It doesn’t matter if I lock the car on my way to the house - any old shmoe could come up and touch the door handle, and the car would unlock for them because it can sense the fob within a 1/3 acre radius. That’s not a "smart" key. That’s a "semi-smart" key. It’s like semi-sweet chocolate, you know? It’s still a key of some sort, but it doesn’t quite taste like a Hershey bar.

Well, this so-called "smart" key is also the mechanism by which the car starts. See, the Prius has a power button - it looks just like my laptop. (Too bad my laptop doesn’t come with a horn that I can set to vibrate.) So if the fob is anywhere in the same county as the car, any old shmoe (after gaining access to the car via the fob in my kitchen) can press the power button and then drive away in it.

For the record, I am any old shmoe. And the car automatically shuts off once I’m out of the fob’s range. Which, by the way, turns out to be the end of my driveway. Don’t ask me how I know that.

Anywho, I have to store the fob far enough away from the car that the poor Prius doesn’t get confused and start talking to strangers. I experimented, and I found that if I put my fob in my living room by the stereo, the car stays locked and in the off position. Now all I have to do is make sure I don’t forget to grab the stupid thing in the morning, lest I make it no farther than the end of my driveway. Again. One of these days, I have no doubt that I will frantically call Toyota and demand that someone come out and fix my broken car. "Um, Ms. Cunin? The fob has to be with the car if you want it to make drivey-drive."

Ooooh! Also, since the electric motor is perfectly silent, it’s hard to tell if your car is still on or not. Please let me assure you that if you leave your car without shutting it down, it WILL sense the fob leaving and power down for you. (Desiree Cunin has left the Prius, uh-uh-huh! *Elvis lip*)

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.
Desi

6:05 AM - 8 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

I have officially been rendered moot! SCORE!
Category: Blogging

In a stunning turn of events, Desiree B. Cunin, AKA The Four-Legged Fish, has finally cancelled herself out.

In the beginning, the Word was with Fish and the Fish was a tree-hugging hippie. Whosoever believeth in the Fish shall eat for a day, and get hugged. For the Fish is the Way and the Light and the Insufferable Know-It-All. And it was good.

And then the Fish got a job at a law firm, and started a 401K, and drank Starbucks every morning, and itemized her taxes to account for business expenses. And then came the final death blow - she bought a Toyota Prius...a hybrid. And thereby became a tree-hugging yuppie.

But there were still some hippie traits. She still shopped at Trader Joe's and refused to shave her legs and went bra-less. Is it not possible for a person to be both Hippie and Yuppie?

Alas, no, said her friend. If you were both Hippie and Yuppie, you would cancel yourself out. You would be rendered moot.

And the Fish smiled and said, Yay! The world is wonderful indeed, for I am finally rendered moot! That makes me a moot point.

And it was good.

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.

Desi

6:47 PM - 9 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

The subtle art of choosing your bathroom stall
Category: Blogging

You may not know it, but your choice of stall in a public restroom says quite a bit about your personality. It also has an influence on whether or not I like you as a human being. (I make meaningless assumptions about your exisistential nature based on irrelevant data every day.) (And I also spell "existential" incorrectly every day, just for practice.)

See, it's like this. There are five stalls in the average public restroom. I actually conducted a survey of public restrooms because my stall-test results would be affected by a change in the average number of restroom stalls per bathroom, after factoring in location, average per-household income, level of education and the speed that the wind blows uphill on a hot day.

"Hi, Mister Store Manager. I don't want to buy anything, I just want to count your toilets. Is that cool?"

After conducting this survey, I arrived at the completely arbitrary number of five. I was too lazy to actually tally everything and then do long division. The wind is blowing uphill more slowly than usual these days.

Now, it goes like this. If you walk into an otherwise empty restroom, then you should choose stalls 1, 3 or 5. That way, two additional people can come in and make poopy before there's a need to use adjoining stalls. If you choose stall number 2, then there is no way for the next person to salvage the situation. She can choose stall 4 or 5, and either way, the third person who walks in will have to choose a stall that adjoins either you or person number two.

Here's a picture for your educational enjoyment.

Now...if you screw over the entire restroom, I will not like you. That's a give-in. Likewise, if I am the only person in there (prefereably in stall 3 since I like to be the center of attention no matter what I'm doing), and you traipse in and choose stall 2 so that we can cuddle up in adjacent stalls, I will not like you. I do not need to admire the buckles on your shoes while I'm doing my business and you're curling your toes while you make poopy next to me. If you like to use adjoining stalls in an otherwise empty restroom, it means one of two things.

a) You are obssessive-compulsive and HAVE to use your usual stall so that a break from routine does not crush your will to live.

b) You like it when people watch, listen in, or share the smell.

Either way, I will not like you. In fact, there is a good chance that one of these days, I will serve you the moldy coffee that has been sitting on my office-mate's bookshelf for a month. I will, of course, scrape the mold off the surface, pour it into a fresh glass and microwave it first so that you have no idea of how old it really is.

The only time when it is acceptable to use an adjoining stall is when there is already optimal three-person occupation. Then you may use stalls 2 or 4 since 1, 3 and 5 are already in use.

And no, just in case you were wondering: If stalls 2 and 5 are in use, you can not use an adjoining stall. You should wait for the ass hat in stall 2 to vacate so that you can slap her upside the head before you enter stall 3.

When choosing your stall, you also have to take into account the secondary affect of stall placement on my opinion of you. If you choose stall five, the handicapped stall, I may assume that you need an inordinate amount of extra space when peeing because you contort yourself into odd positions when your bladder muscles flex. I may also assume that you are claustrophobic and would prefer to pee in the wide-open hallway, if only it weren't so lacking in privacy. Or, I may suspect that you are putting on your disguise and that you need the extra room to rapel down from the ceiling ducts. In any of those cases, my opinion of you will be a little strange.

Likewise, if you choose stall 1, I will think that you need to spy on the people who walk into the restroom after you. There is always an extra inch between the stall door and the wall on end stalls, perfect for peering through. I will probably check the placement of your shoes under the door as I pass, just to make sure that you aren't standing there with your eyeball pressed to the door crack, winking at me.

And if you choose stall number 2, on top of my previous low opinions of stall 2 choosers, I will suspect that you wish the stall door wasn't there so that you could admire yourself in the floor-length mirror on the opposite wall as you pee. I will no doubt imagine that you are perched on the rim of the toilet behind that stall door, leaning to the left and right in the hopes that you may catch a glimpse of some part of yourself through the crack in the door. People who like to watch themselves in the mirror as they pee are weird. Your problem will be further compounded if you make glamour poses as you exit the stall so that you can see how good you look poised in a bathroom stall with your hand on your hip and your pelvis shooting forward.

(And yes, my opinion of you is your problem, not mine.)

On that note...

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.

Desi

Currently listening : A Beautiful Lie By 30 Seconds to Mars Release date: 30 August, 2005

12:26 PM - 8 Comments - 9 Kudos - Add Comment

I should be a marketing consultant, Part One
Category: Blogging

All sorts of companies out there are failing to tap their full potential. As the Four-Legged Fish, also called the Insufferable Know-It-All, I feel that it is my civic duty to point out all of these missed opportunities.

For instance, Sharpie has a great little marketing campaign going on right now with its "Write out loud" slogan and the cute little commercials that go with it. They're slightly funny, kind of the same way that Bob Dole is slightly funny. They're also memorable, which is important since in today's commercial business, the best commercials are so funny that no one can ever remember which company or product they're for. (Like those "Life comes at you fast" commercials. I know it's for insurance, but I can't ever remember which company.)

Anywho...the point is that I think Sharpie could do better. They have a line of like 30 different color permanent markers now, and the possibilities are endless! Picture this.

Scene opens on a fancy women's public rest room. A half dozen women in little black dresses are primping and preening, carrying on with some incomprehensible bathroom mirror ritual like all women do. (And for all you male readers, don't worry - women don't even know what they hope to gain from the primping ritual. It's just something that's encoded into our genes somewhere amidst all the other genes that make us crazy and send us foraging after chocolate and People magazine like there's no tomorrow.)

As one of the women is petting her own hair like it's a cute puppy dog, she stops. You see a baffled expression on her face. The camera zooms in on her hand as she picks out one gray strand, and beyond the gray hair, you see her mouth open in horror.

All activity in the restroom grinds to a screeching halt. Some women gasp, one has an attack of the vapors and passes out. An eyebrow pencil falls to the floor with a deafening crash.

Then the woman next to her smiles, reaches into her make-up bag, and pulls out a Sharpie. She takes the Sharpie and colors the gray hair brown. (*Squeaky-squeaky-squeak*)

Everyone breathes a collective sigh of relief.

Sharpie...color anything.

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.
*Squeaky-Squeak*
Desi

3:15 AM - 12 Comments - 16 Kudos - Add Comment

The Answers to Yesterday’s Imaginary Vacation Quiz!!!
Category: Blogging

So, here it is - the answers you've all been waiting for. You can now figure out a) how good I am at lying, and b) how good you are at catching me.

1) I have some relatives in France. Cunin's over there are like Smith's over here. True! There are all sorts of Cunin's over there - I googled them. (All hail the Great Googley Moogley) And via the law of averages, I must be at least distantly related to at least two of them.

2) I have this cousin twice removed on my dad's dad side, Adriene. False. Adriene Cunin is a real person living in France, but he's no relation of mine.

3) Adriene is a hacker. He gets himself in trouble sometimes. True. As such, it is a pitty I'm not related to him. He would make a great addition to the Cult - we're still looking for an Evil Genius Number 26 who will be responsible for infiltrating Microsoft and drawing a goatee on Bill Gates with a purple Sharpie.

4) His great aunt is Marie Cunin, like Marie Curie but not spelled the same. False. There is a Marie Cunin, but of no relation to Adriene.

5) Marie is a biochemist. True. She is indeed a biochemist in France.

6) She chain smokes and looks like an 80-year-old crack adict. Jury still out. I have not yet managed to obtain a picture of her.

7) She's been published in the French science journals. She's, like, some big shit over there. True! But I can't read any of it because one of those stuck-up Americans who thinks that if it's worth reading, then somebody else should translate it into English.

8) She has a chateau in the countryside. She might. But I'm pretty sure that if I followed her around for a week to find out, it would be considered stalking.

9) It's near the ruins of some old Roman era fort in what was once Illyria or Iberia or something Latin-sounding. Well, there are archaeological dig sites in the south of France, but as to whether or not it's near the hypothetical chateau, I couldn't say for sure.

10) I would have stalked Johnny Depp instead of poking around crumbly old piles of rocks, but he was not at his little French house last week. True! I would, indeed, have stalked Johnny Depp if there had been any way to do so. My new goal in life is to waltz with him while singing the pie song from Sweeney Todd.

Mmmm. Pie.

11) I bought some nice French-sounding wine. True! Except that I bought it at Wal-Mart instead of Chateau-Marteau.

12) I got detained at customs on my way back. They suspected me of trying to smuggle antiquities into the US. False, but only because I didn't really go to France. If I had, they would have detained me. I know it.

13) They weren't just any antiquities - they were black market loot from the Bagdad museum. Again, only false because of a technicality. I was not really in France.

14) For some reason, most of what was looted from the Bagdad museum ended up on the French black market instead of someplace closer like Israel or Egypt. I am not at liberty to answer this one. It would imply that I am hip to the black market antiquities trade. Which I am not. Honest.

No, that's not a cylinder seal in my pocket, and those 30-foot tall winged lions flanking my back door are made from paper machette.

15) I actually got to touch a piece of tablet 12 of the Gilgamesh saga, which came from the actual library of Asherbanipal II in Nineveh! True! I actually did get to touch a piece of tablet 12 of the Gilgamesh saga. My history teacher at college brought it in for show and tell.

16) Touching the tablet was great...like having a religious experience. True! (What else do you expect from a girl who toys with time travel just so that she can go back in time to jump Julius Caesar behind the forum? I'd like to see his chariot.)

17) I ate a taco. True. It's a Cult requirement.

18) I got drunk with Adriene on some cheap booze. Well, I did get drunk on cheap booze, but I don't know if Adriene got drunk in France at the same time.

19) While drunk, I role-played various scenes from my fourth book, which is only half finished. True! And double true! I played three different parts, built a battlement wall, launched Lego men at the enemy, and then got poisoned by a jealous, semi-crazy colleague who didn't like my political policies.

(Oooo - and to answer Elaine's Q left in the previous blog comments, book 4 is still in the pre-publish stage. Number 2 will be out in April, number 3 in the fall, and then four (hopefully) some time next year.)

20) The dog ate some poo out of the grass and got worms. True. Icky. I have not yet forgiven her. She thinks she's getting a treat, though, because I have to mix the worm-killing powder in cottage cheese before feeding it to her. Lucky bum.

And that, my dear friends, is how well I lie. :P

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.

Desi

3:37 PM - 2 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

My Never-Ending Quest to Freak Out and Deceive My Neighbors
Category: Blogging

I have had a blast these last 4 years doing things to help my neighbors develop a screwy opinion of me. Why, just last month I finally acvhieved my thirteenth short-term goal: convincing the neighbors that there are actually two of me.

No really - I'm not kidding. I was outside mowing my lawn at the end of November (yes, November - it's called global warming), when my neighbor the shitzu breeder-slash-town council elder walked up to me. Now, keep in mind that this lady has talked to me before and has talked to my parents on a couple of occasions, and I even went to look at her shitzu pups once. She only lives three houses down from me. Any normal person in such a situation would know me well enough by now to at least realize that I live in that house.

So she walks up and she looks all concerned, and I shut off the mower so that she can talk to me. She says, "You know, we were all [meaning "all the nosy neighbors"] just wondering if Desiree's alright. Nobody's seen her in a few months."

Okay, let me explain something here. I am outside all of the time. I walk the dog a few times a week, I wave to people as I pass their houses. Every night, the dog and I romp in the yard and completely destroy one of those cheap little Wal-Mart stuffed dog toys... They see me all the farking time. But apparently, I'm not me.

So I gave this shitzu-lady a strange look, and then a little voice popped into my head. The little voice said, "Eh, fark it." So I smiled at the lady and I replied, "Oh, she's fine. She's just a shut-in. It's sad at her age. I'm Gwen, by the way. Her dad hired me to look after the place and keep an eye on her."

The shitzu lady looked shocked and rabid at the same time. You  know how much these sorts of people relish juicy gossip...relish it like sweet salty minced pickles in a Vlassic jar. "Oh my goodness! How did she become a shut in?"

Now by this point, I'm finding it difficult to keep a straight face. Luckily, the shitzu lady is a little blind, so she didn't notice my expression. "Well, she's a writer, you know. She used to use this pen name, and some fan found out who she really was... Actually, I'm not supposed to talk about it. There was an incident... I had to sign a confidentiality agreement to get this job, you know."

The shitzu lady pretty much died of delight and shock right there in my yard. "Really? Oh my god!"

"Yeah! Hey, but she's writing again under her own name. In fact, she just released her latest book. You should look it up." Then I restarted my mower and trundled away.

Gasoline for lawn mower: $4 at gas station
Wool hat to wear while mowing: $2 at thrift store
Getting the neighbors to think you're someone else: priceless

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.
Desi

6:02 AM - 9 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

The Art of Imaginary Vacation Taking
Category: Blogging

I work with nosy people. I'm sure that you do too. When they learned last week that I was about to go on vacation, they all flocked to me like flies to a greasy politician. Where are you going? What are you gonna do? Do you have plans? Are you visiting relatives? Will you use this week to finalize your plans to take over the world? I'm not doing anything, you hoard of ding-willy blab-doodles! I'm relaxing!! At home!! Where it's quiet and I don't have to put up with any of you!!

At one point, I got totally fed up with them all. When the next person asked how I planned to spend my week off, I put on my smart-ass hat and replied, "I'm vacationing in the south of France." And I walked away.

Well...being that a law firm is only one degree removed from a 17th century pirate ship, the scuttlebutt got around that I was in France. So I come back to work this week and an attorney calls me up and asks if I was really in France. "Maybe," I said. "No, really - were you?" "Um...no, dumbass. Where do you think I would get that kind of money?" He called this rumor one of my "devious" plots to keep my coworkers off guard.

This incident got me thinking, though, and pretty soon, trumpets were heralding the end times.

Well, not really. But there's always a risk of that happening when I start thinking about things.

Anyhow, humans as a race are loosing out on all sorts of opportunities to exercise a little healthy creativity. So I propose that we all start taking imaginary vacations and passing them off as real. There's no harm. Nobody will be assassinated because I made up a tall tale about stalking Johnny Depp through the southern French countryside. But I will have 20 times more fun dealling with nosy people if I know that I can completely mess with them.

So here's what I did last week. It's even slightly plausible, which makes it that much more devious. They really have to think hard about whether or not I'm pulling their legs. As a fun creative exercise, see if you can pick out the parts that are not true. (I will post the correct answers tomorrow.)

1) I have some relatives in France. Cunin's over there are like Smith's over here.

2) I have this cousin twice removed on my dad's dad side, Adriene.

3) Adriene is a hacker. He gets himself in trouble sometimes.

4) His great aunt is Marie Cunin, like Marie Curie but not spelled the same.

5) Marie is a biochemist.

6) She chain smokes and looks like an 80-year-old crack adict.

7) She's been published in the French science journals. She's, like, some big shit over there.

8) She has a chateau in the countryside.

9) It's near the ruins of some old Roman era fort in what was once Illyria or Iberia or something Latin-sounding.

10) I would have stalked Johnny Depp instead of poking around crumbly old piles of rocks, but he was not at his little French house last week.

11) I bought some nice French-sounding wine.

12) I got detained at customs on my way back. They suspected me of trying to smuggle antiquities into the US.

13) They weren't just any antiquities - they were black market loot from the Bagdad museum.

14) For some reason, most of what was looted from the Bagdad museum ended up on the French black market instead of someplace closer like Israel or Egypt.

15) I actually got to touch a piece of tablet 12 of the Gilgamesh saga, which came from the actual library of Asherbanipal II in Nineveh!

16) Touching the tablet was great...like having a religious experience.

17) I ate a taco.

18) I got drunk with Adriene on some cheap booze.

19) While drunk, I role-played various scenes from my fourth book, which is only half finished.

20) The dog ate some poo out of the grass and got worms.

There! Now everybody see if you can sort out the real from the fakes! I will be offering a prize to the person who scores the highest. It is a one year free membership in the Cult of the Four-Legged Fish's innermost circle of wine-tasters and blasphemy conoisseurs.

(And just so you know, we are cult people, not spelling bee people, so if I spelled connoisseurs wrong at any point while typing the work conisewer, it's George Bush's fault. I was standardized tested and guessed the right spelling on a multiple-choice quiz once. That made me eligible for high school graduation.)

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.

8:54 AM - 10 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

If it looks like a door, I should be able to open it
Category: Blogging

Especially if it's on a Starbucks at 1:00pm on a day when I have not yet consumed a single ounce of caffeinated goodness.

I am commuting to Columbus all of this week to train a new person and to see what the heck goes on in the columbus office. From a Clevelander's point of view, it appears as if Columbus may be inhabited by gnomes whose sole concern is knitting stocking caps and screwing with Cleveland. I have discovered that this is indeed the case, except that no one is knitting and the people here are too tall to be real gnomes. That means that they're all just a bunch of wanna-be gnomes.

*you scratch your head and ponder*

Yeah, I'm just giving them a hard time. Columbus is great in many ways. There was no traffic on my way in. And when I say no traffic, I mean of course that there was no traffic to speak of. Even me, lost and trying to drink coffee while driving stick and consulting a map with a magnifying glass, was able to get to the Columbus office without running into any pedestrians or causing any 14 car pile-ups. Now that's something spectacular.

Columbus radio stations are cool too. They actually play music during the commute. I heard 27 songs and two 30-second traffic spots. That is also spectacular.

And everyone is so laid back around here. There are no pedestrians running over other pedestrians, no cars playing chicken with buses and small children, the homeless dudes are smiling as they sit and shiver in the snow puddle on the sidewalk, the sandwich dudes at Subway are happy and intelligible...

Spectacular.

And then there's the Starbucks.

So I go out for lunch and I find a Subway restaurant before I can locate a coffee place. Being muzzy-headed and rather hungry, I can't stop myself from going in and getting a footlong, and then consumming the entire thing. Caffeine withdrawal can do that to a person. Now I'm not skinny by any means, but that's twice as much sub as I customarily eat, plus a fountain drink, 2 cookies and a bag of low-fat potato chips. (I had to counteract the cookies without actually abstaining from more food.) Then I wandered outside again and meandered past the state capitol building. I even chit-chatted with a random pedestrian at the crosswalk. I never chit-chat with pedestrians at crosswalks, especially if they're random. Randomness stinks.

Anywho, as I lope across the street, I happen to glance up at the side of a grey building. Written on this grey building in grey letters is "Starbucks." I could only see the grey letters against the side of the grey building because there was some snow resting on the tops of the letters and inside the curve of the "b."

Well, who can pass up coffee? I look down to street level, expecting to see an entrance. There was no entrance. I looked back and forth at the entire front of the building. No Starbucks. I'm sure that I looked awfully funny standing there on the sidewalk, staring up at the invisible grey letters with a bewildered expression pasted upon my face. I looked about at the pedestrians in confusion, then snorted and walked around the corner to the other side of the building.

And lo! There is the street-level Starbucks. My world made sense once again.

I walked along the side of the building, which sits on a slight hill so that ground level at the corner is about 3 feet higher than ground level over at the Starbucks door. What I don't realize is that they start a little ramp-thing halfway to the Starbucks door so that eventually, you're level with it as you walk. So I plodded along on this ramp, thinking that it is a sidewalk. It's not. I ended up standing in a planter. There was no planter warning sign, no indication that I was leaving the sidewalk and entering the landscaping. I just ended up in the planter. Once again, I'm sure that I looked pretty stupid.

So I traipse out of the planter and end up back on the real sidewalk, and finally, I reach what appears to be the door to Starbucks. It's a glass pane with the Starbucks logo on it and a little metal panel at door-handle-level that looks like one of those new-age, modern art push-panes on a beveled glass door. So I push on it for a while.

It was just a window. The door was on the other side of yet another camoflaged planter.

Normally, I just leave after making this much of an ass of myself. I really don't relish the thought of walking inside to confront the coffee people who had been staring at me just a few seconds ago as I whaled on the window pane in sheer frustration. But these are desperate times...caffeine-free times...and sometimes, you just have to have your Starbucks. Let me tell you - I experienced the definition of awkward in there.

So yes. In short, Columbus is great. I'm just not Columbus-compatible. Maybe today, I'll be able to enter and exit the coffee shop without incident.

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.
Desi

7:16 AM - 20 Comments - 16 Kudos - Add Comment

Peeve of the Day - Things You Shouldn’t Make into Lollipops
Category: Blogging

I know what you're thinking, all you gutter-minded pervs. That's not the sort of lollipop I'm talking about. Though if I were going to talk about that, then the topic would be "Things You SHOULD Make into Lollipops." It would make candy ten times more fun than it already is, and believe me, that's no easy feat.

But I digress.

I went down to visit the mail room peoples today and they were all sucking on lollipops. I thought that maybe this was some trend that had passed me by, as all trends seem to do, but I was mistaken. Somebody had brought in a clear garbage bag full of suckers. (Pun intended...I do, after all, work for lawyers...) 

Anyways, one of the guys offered me a lollipop. I hapenned to make one of those polite overture-type questions when he plopped the bag down on the counter. "Dang - where did you get all of these?" I should have been concerned at the fact that no one actually knew where they came from.

A garbage bag full of lollipops isn't something that one normally finds suspicious, though, so I selected a red one and went back to my office. I should know better by now - I celebrate things that aren't what they appear to be, and I LOVE surprise endings to things. You know - endings that no one suspects, like in the movie "Titanic."

Who could have predicted that the boat would sink? It was a real shocker.

Anywho...

I get up here all set to enjoy a nice cherry sucker, and I think to myself. "Hm...tastes kind of like cardboard." And then the real flavor hits. It's a cinamonn sucker.

I. Hate. Cinamonn.

So I had to wash my mouth out with coffee. And on top of that, I now have a craving for a real cherry sucker. Damn bag full of mystery-cinamonn-suckers.

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.

Desi

PS - An you know that swig of coffee that I used to wash the cinamonn taste out of my mouth? Well, somehow, grounds leaked into the coffee pot and I poured them into my cup without noticing. So I had to chew that big sip of coffee.

1:03 PM - 22 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment

Okay, will someone please remind me: why do I hang out with my parents on holidays?
Category: Blogging

Two reasons:

1. It's informative.

2. It's mildly nauseating.

You're all going to think I'm an idiot. Surprisingly, I'm used to this. People as awe-inspiringly smart as me are often consumate idiots. And since I am a conformist posing as a wanna-be liberal disestablishmentarialist, I am forced to conform to this very sad norm. Yes, that's right - I am stoopid, with a double oo.

Will the Cult Keeper of the Stoopid Stick, Janet, please bring out the stick.

I am, at this very moment, sitting at my parents' computer while my mother annoys me with plastic tongs, waiting for the New Years' fare to cook. We are having wonderful steaks (which will figure into this later), and lobster (which is icky, what with its little legs and all of that).

Now, please be kind to an old dumb Cult leader...my wittle bwain is sorely taxed of late. After all, it isn't easy leading the gullible - I mean astute - masses, diseminating knowledge and Official Cult t-shirts as I go. There are limits to the sorts of things that my mind can comprehend, and lobster happens to be one of those things that falls beyond the pale.

Ever see commercials on TV for Red Lobster restaurants with those lobster platters and the shell fish and such? You know how the lobster tails show the lobster meat spilling out of it like a little souffle? Yeah...um...confession. I thought that when you boil lobster, you know that it's done because it explodes like a big popcorn kernel. I stood there while my mom and dad argued over how long to cook it, and then I said, "But it'll just pop open. Why do you need to time it?"

Open mouth, insert foot.

No, seriously - I really was valedictorian. I swear, I can prove it. And yes, I was a physics major too. (Actually, that part probably explains my daftness.)

And now on to the nauseating part.

My parents picked up these lovely steaks for dinner too - plump, juicy, delectible. (I'm sorry to all you vegetarians out there...sorry that you can't enjoy the succulent meatiness with me, that is.) Well, I walk into the kitchen and my parents have opened the steaks and put them on a plate and they are in the process of poking them with forks to test their tenderness. And every time they poke it, one of them says, "Oh, yeah." or "That's right." Or something like that.

Of course, they were just admiring the meat. But I hang out with the likes of Janet all day, and my mind has been corrupted by her tendency to turn even the most innocent things into a dirty joke. And as I watch my parents poke the steaks and coo at them, all I can think is, "Oh dear gods - stop playing with your meat."

And then I had to retire to the bathroom for a while, where I commenced to scrub out the inside of my skull with a bottle brush in a vain attempt to rid myself of that mental picture.

Now that I think about it, I really don't know why I keep coming over here for the holidays. It never turns out well.

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.

Desi

PS - it can be amusing too, though. My dad, the Cult Master of Horse, is ticked off at me for not blogging through the holidays. He threatened to loose his cavalry on my yard, except he doesn't have any horses. So we were pantomining him running around my yard with a horse shoe on a pole, making cavalry prints. And then, to complete the image, we needed to make it look like real horses had been there...meaning that we needed to disperse some horse poo. Meaning that we had to collect some horse poo to disperse. Which led to us acting out our attempts to sneak into an Amish horse pasture with a pooper scooper and a paper bag, collecting poo without getting caught, and then plopping said poo throughout my yard in a believably random patters to best maximize the illusion of a cavalry having been there.

4:46 PM - 28 Comments - 26 Kudos - Add Comment

Smores, anyone? They contain the subtle flavor of gasoline.
Category: Blogging

I have to share this because it qualifies as supremely mockable under section four, sub-paragraph twenty of the Mockability Guidelines established by yours truly.

I carpool with my mom most days since we both live way far out in a cow field and work in the city. On her way out of the office earlier this week, she passes a recent accident. It was a minor thing - some dude dented himself on a sidewalk fixture while trying to navigate in the snow. He was moving around and appeared perfectly fine. No one was on the scene yet because it had literally JUST happened. So my mom, being the concientious good citizen that she is, calls for the police to come. And as she's sitting at the stoplight, hanging up her cell phone, she notices that the guy in the dented car is also on his phone. He's probably calling for the police too so that he can make an accident report and get his insurance carrier on the claim.

What this man hasn't noticed is that his car has burst into flames.

Now children, pay attention. This is a prime example of how cell phone conversations can blind drivers to potentially dangerous situations, dimming their awareness and distracting them with the false assumption that Betty and Bobby's break-up is more important than steering to avoid the 18-wheeler that they are about to merge into.

So this guy is flapping his jaw at somebody in the cell phone, and his car is on fire. The stoplight turned green at that point and my mother drove off, but I tend to wonder if someone ever alerted this guy to the fact that his car was en fuego.

*tap-tap*
Driver covers the mouthpiece and looks up.
*pedestrian holds up a sign with a picture of a car and a match, and points at the dude*
Driver tilts his head sideways, afraid that he has been targeted by the crazy local starving artist.
*pedestrian holds up a second sign with a comic book 'ka-blamo!' printed on it*
Driver glances at the other people milling about outside, totally confounded. He roles down his window, planning to throw some change at the pedestrian in the hopes that he will go away.
"Good evening, sir. Thank you for the spare change. Your car is on fire. Have a nice day."

Or perchance did the driver notice it all on his own? And how does that realization play out?

*sniff-sniff* He looks around in confusion, then goes back to his conversation. "Is it hot in here, or is it just me?" He leans forward to peer past his steering wheel. "Well, I'm smoking a little bit, but I did just run into something. It's probably the radiator steam. Hey, what's that orange glow? And why have my sneakers melted to the floor? Hey, wait a minute...something's not right here."

*KA-BLOOEY!*

That deserves a Darwin Award, that does.

Better yet, some guy could run up to the dented car with a marshmallow on a stick, roast it while grinning at the driver, then show him the flaming marshmallow before stuffing it into his mouth and walking away. I'm actually quite disappointed in the fact that this will probably never happen near me again, and I will never have the opportunity to be that marshmallow roaster. On the off chance that I am near such an incident again, however, I have decided to carry marshmallows and a stick with me at all times. I would never forgive myself for missing out on that a second time.

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.
Desi

11:05 AM - 22 Comments - 16 Kudos - Add Comment

Desiree B. Cunin (Supreme Empress of All Creation) vs. The Escalator of Doom

Have I ever told you all how much I like coats? Most women go in for shoes or jewelry or handbags or feathery scarves. I go in for coats. They betray your true personality much more accurately than the other things.

Jewelry betrays your wealth (or lack thereof) and taste in fashion (or lack thereof), but rarely your personality (unless you have cute pieces or custom pieces, but that just goes back to style and wealth). Besides - people accessorize their jewelry in order to portray themselves in a certain light. It's rarely a good indicator of who they truly are.

Handbags are the same way. If you have a designer bag, you're rich and stylish. If you have a cheap knock-off, you're either too cheap to buy the real thing, too poor to buy the real thing, or too gullible to notice that it's not the real thing. Now I like knock-offs, don't get me wrong. But I like good knock-offs.

As for feathery scarves...well. That just means you have an unacknowledged fetish, and that's disturbing. I make a habit of avoiding people who wear feathery scarves...especially men who wear feathery scarves and profess NOT to be gay.

Anywho - coats.
 
So I have a bunch of long coats because those, I think, most truly convey the inner me. For instance, I have a long, sleek black leather/suede jacket that looks like something out of "The Matrix." I enjoy posing, praying-mantis style, in this coat and pretending to dodge bullets in shopping malls because I am just that cool. I thought about getting a slinky and having a friend "slink" me so that it looked like the curly-q bullet track was coming at me in slow motion. And in case you're wondering, yes I do have friends who would do that for me.

Well, one day at JC Penny, I was riding down the escalator in my Matrix coat after running out of invisible bullets to dodge, when I feel this tugging at the corner of my cool black leather jacket. I look down. Gasp! I'm caught in the escalator! I try to pull it out but it won't budge. In fact, in keeping with Matrix philosophy, my attempts to get free result in me becomming even more stuck. I tug and I twist and I put all my weight into it, and it gets sucked farther into the escalator's workings. By now, I have to crouch since so much has been pulled in, and as I near the bottom of the escalator, I have to shrug my way out of the Matrix coat and haul on the sleeve in one last desperate attempt to get my coolness back.

Then a horrendous noise issues forth from the bowels of the escalator, and all I hear is something metallic breaking. The escalator stops. I smell something akin to the odor one smells when driving with the parking brake on. I drop the coat sleeve and glance around the way little prairie dogs glance around after poking their heads out of their holes. No one's paying me any attention.

Now comes the moment of truth. Do I stroll away whistling with my hands in my pockets and feign innocence? Do I find a store manager and yell at him for breaking my cool Matrix coat until my face turns red? Do I act contrite and hope they don't bill me for the broken escalator? Better yet, should I play crazy and not only get away with breaking the escalator, but also get a free, all-inclusive vacation in a nice padded resort?

I was saved from having to choose between denying everything like our President or taking the trip when a store person ran up to me. He was more upset than I was, and let me tell you, being more upset than a person who is prone to social anxiety is a REALLY difficult thing to pull off. So he runs up and asks me four times if I'm okay, and I eventually have to calm him down. Then a security guard walks up and does pretty much the same thing, and I'm thinking to myself, "Dude, I should totally play this for all it's worth."

Unfortunately, my conscience took over short of pretending to have sustained severe whiplash from the force of the escalator's coat-sucking. I did, however, manage to convince them that the shoulder muscle I pulled had nothing to do with dodging imaginary bullets in the drapery section.

In the end, they paid to repair and clean my coat, and I didn't have to pay for breaking the escalator. I did notice, however, that after that incident, all of the JC Penny stores I went to had those little flaps installed on their escalators to prevent garment suckage. I enjoy taking credit for that. :P

Peace, Love, Recycle, Coffee.
Desi

PS - Just in case anyone is wondering, I managed to catch my camel-colored trench coat in an escalator at Sears less than a month later. Then I caught my long gray woolen work coat in an escalator downtown on my way to Starbucks. Then I caught my cool woolen, I'm-a-Hobbit-in-the-mountains cape in the escalator at Sears. Yes, the same Sears where I caught my camel trench coat. And people wonder why I get mad when they laugh at me for holding my coat up around my armpits whenever I ride the escalator. I'm a menace.

But at least I'm a menace who can dodge imaginary bullets and slinkies.

10:28 AM - 10 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment