Random Margarita Thoughts

They’re supposed to be mixed berry, which is really Tequila Heresy and kind of a pussy drink, but that’s what was in the pantry.  (You know how I know a certain person is gay?  He likes mixed berry margaritas.)  The blender beat me this time, too, and so they’re really just diluted and not frozen.  Better luck next time—I’ll get you, you pesky blender!

Interesting bit on The Corner today about Jefferson vs. Adams.  Was Jefferson just a pre-incarnation of Obama?  Elitist patrician knows best; keeps rabble happy and peers in place.  And go find it yourself, I’m too lazy to post the link.

Where is today’s John Adams?  No doubt labeled as a “thug” by Obama and Nancy Pelosi.  Sadly, I am afraid we may be beyond the point where an Adams could fix things…we may indeed need to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.  Leviathan has awakened from his slumber; we are doomed to be Ahab, slain by the whale.  Maybe Ahab wasn’t just an unhinged maniac intent on revenge, but a symbol of the individual failing to vanquish the vast bureaucracy. 

 Horus is the only cat we have who knows his name.  Odd that.  Cats don’t usually know their names; I’ve never before had a cat that did, at least.  I can sit here and say “Tiger” or “baseball” or “aborigine” all night, and Tiger continues to sit sphinx-like on the ottoman.  Jetta, at least as far as I’m concerned, must think her name is “ssssst.”  (OK!  She comes in my room and hides under the bed, then picks a fight with Horus after I turn the light out.  I get tired of the feline bickering, so I hiss her out of my room all the time.)  But I can call Horus, and he comes.  Sometimes we talk to each other.  I merow, and he merows back.  To and fro.  Then he gives this funny little chortle and head-butts me.  I have no clue what we’re talking about—probably male cat genitalia—but he seems satisfied.

Dennis Miller gave me the willies the other day.  Here I am, in middle America, listening to some famous guy I’ll never meet; he’s riffing on his life on talk radio….and he drops this line in the middle of his riff:  “I was having lunch the other day with Herb Simon.”  I felt the ghost of Kevin Bacon walk on my grave.  The Simons are from Middle America.  I went to school with the Simon kids.  They were just the Simons.  Now when I walk through Ceasar’s Forum Shops (one of my favorite malls ever), I feel like a little piece of Indianapolis has been transplanted to Vegas.  And here is Dennis Miller, talking about Herb Simon, without knowing the Simons the way we know the Simons, really.  I appreciate Dennis Miller’s thoughts and opinions, and I enjoy his radio show tremendously, finding him much more thoughtful and thought-provoking than any other conservative on the radio; I get a tickle from feeling like I am just a person away from really knowing him.  (And of course, I can’t think about Kevin Bacon without thinking about grouper.)

Are people really surprised by the idea that they’re going to die?  That’s what I wondered while watching “Funny People.”  George Simmons was reduced to tearful isolation by the news that he had probably terminal cancer.  Is this news to most people?  Do most people manage not to think about death for most of their lives, until it’s right there, calling “shotgun” for the passenger seat?  I think about it all the time—always have, as far back as I can remember, at least.  (Then again, maybe that’s why I was not a popular kid at school.)  We are all inhabiting bodies of death, from the moment of our conception.  I would rather put it off (or die trying), but every time I look in the mirror, I see death gazing back at me.  (Maybe I’m just too skinny.)  I shrug Death off with humor, mostly, with existential absurdity, but ultimately with a surrender to grace.  If, when, I survive Death, I will do so through grace.  We all will die.  My parents will; I will; my kids will—and their kids—and so on.  And we all will live, because God, but not just God—God and Man—vanquished the grave and tore the sting from the serpent.  I am already dead, but thanks be to God—I am also already and forever alive in Christ.  My fervent prayer every night is to share the Kingdom with my children.  Sooner rather than later.

 I still wish we could get there getting BETTER (i.e., less wrinkled), rather than WORSE; ah well.  My trainer told me this week he expects me to do a bodybuilding competition next spring, and some random guy took a picture of my back today at the gym, so I guess I can’t look all that bad.  I just want to last more than three seconds with Chuck Norris.  (Or Charles Bronson.  Rope….we need some rope…)

Well, the margaritas are gone; and bed sounds like a better place to be than the couch.  Max wants pancakes in the morning; have to have a good night’s sleep for pancake duty.  I just relish this kind of moment:  an absolutely quiet house.

Do Men Really Give Their Anatomy That Much Thought?

Just saw “Funny People” while the younger two watched “G. I. Joe.”  (Thank the Lord the theater was still standing when FP ended, since it was much longer than I had anticipated!)  Hmmm.

1.  Charlie will not be seeing this movie.  Neither will my parents.

2.  Men seem preoccupied with their genitals—length, girth, relationship among the three major pieces, where they put them, where they want to put them, putting them on each other or in each other, you name it, apparently.  Can this be possible, and we women just miss it because, well, we’re girls?  So it goes something like this.  Men are in polite company (meaning there are persons with XX chromosomes present), and they talk about the weather and TV and politics or whatever.  But, as soon as the women leave the room?  It’s all about dicks and balls.  And every happening is interpreted through how one could handle it using male genitalia.  Suppose a stray women walks in?  Back to sports and the weather.  Curious.  I welcome insight into this phenomenon from those who have penises and testicles attached to their torsos.

3.  Adam Sandler is just adorable, which of course, he knows and plays to the hilt nowadays.  And he does have some acting chops, not just funny-man stuff.  Did he get pudgy just for this movie?

4.  Seth Rogen just does not look right on the skinnier side.  He needs to play a bad guy, too, push the boundaries of his characters a little bit.  It’s hard seeing him as The Joker, isn’t it?

The popcorn wasn’t hot, though, by the time the teenager at the counter managed to bring herself to do her job.  Teenage lethargy is a problem with the particular theater we patronized tonight.  From here on out, it’s only Exit 10, even if it is 10 miles farther away.

Why I Adore Jonah Goldberg

He thinks of phrases like this:

“Nancy Pelosi, who will get her own bound volume in the annals of asininity…”

Priceless.  Jonah has the most marvelous neural connections between his limbic system, his verbal centers and his temporal lobe….like me, his frontal lobe is frequently nowhere to be found, which is what makes him so hilariously forthright.

So Maybe There Are THREE Kinds of People

During something of a dust-up between me and the QC last night, I tried to explain to him that the world of humans is made up of more than one kind of person—and that I am one of the other kinds.  He wants everyone to be a verb-noun sort of person, that is, an asker rather than a teller.  But I am a noun-verb sort of person, most definitely a teller.  More nuanced than that, actually.  I state facts, then make logical deductions and assertions from those facts. 

Honestly, when he told me I would be more likely to get what I wanted if I gently took his hand and said something along the lines of “Honey, I am feeling [emotion x] and need your help to get past this; would you think about [doing y] so that I feel safer/reassured/something?” I almost snorted milk out of my nose, and I wasn’t even drinking anything.  I am quite certain that in 48 years of life on this earth, I have never come close to saying anything like that to anyone—certainly not in the 13 years of our marriage.  I mean really!  Does he think he can work miracles here?  A scorpion is a scorpion; the leopard can’t change his spots; old dogs and new tricks, and all that.  Did he not notice that particular character trait of mine before he married me?  We are talking about a woman who got a “C” in citizenship in the first grade!  The teacher said I was too outspoken.  I criticized my mother from the womb.  I’ll be arguing politics at my funeral from the coffin.  (“I told you Obamacare would kill us all!”)

So after I established that some people in this world are indeed noun-verb people (and occasionally they drop the beginning noun, when time is of the essence), I did have to add that there are also number people.  They go along, “number, number, number, number, oh dear, a person, number, number, number…”

And really, a fourth type, who just want to make sure no one makes any waves and everything is orderly and on a steady course.  I worked very closely for many years with a woman who was a Steady Courser.  We had somewhat of a rocky start, since I am (despite being an introvert) ebulliently curious (and asked many questions, as children often do…), and her greatest fear is loss of privacy.  But we worked out the kinks, got along famously and won several awards during our partnership.  I quite miss her.

I like categorizing things into neat little piles.  I know that life is messier than that, with the edges blurring one into another, but really most categories have a normal distribution and you just follow the 80/20 rule anyway.

Probably the QC and I should have thought about our Myers-Briggs categories before we got married.  I am an INTJ and he is an E/ISFP.  The Thinking Judger in me drives him nuts, because he feels commanded and managed; while I just don’t get how anyone can use their feelings to make judgments about the world.  Things are what they are, and your feelings are not a reliable lens through which to view what is going on around you.  I have feelings; I just don’t find them very useful when I want to figure out what to do or what I want someone else to do.  Sigh.  The world is full of feelers, though, which is why so many bad decisions get made.

She's Baaaaack!

The Queen, that is.   We had a week in the Bahamas during which we made plenty of vitamin D, snorkeled with rays, rode jet skis and parasailed.  Being completely out of touch with what was going on in the U.S. was soothing, really. I was like a little kid covering her eyes, thinking if I can’t see the bad stuff, it isn’t happening.  Then I come back to Nancy Pelosi hallucinating about swastika-bearing Americans (doesn’t she know Godwin’s law?), Obama’s Chicago cronies threatening to bust out the union bats at senior citizens protesting their imminent demise under Obamacare and a sort of mass insane undertaking in which America destroys millions of dollars worth of material assets in yet another pay-off of the Obama administration to its union and automaker owners. 

I believe America has gone mad.