Friday, November 21, 2003

Milestoned

It's a great day here at the Champagne Tasting Room, as I've passed a serious mile marker in my life as a blogger: The first brush with the Techno Humor Impaired.

Dave Barry sometimes dedicates entire columns to the Humor Impaired, those fine citizens among us who plod through life peering around the corners of sarcasm and irony thinking, and I quote, "Meh?" I've had plenty of exposure to the Humor Impaired as a print columnist, but it's taken them a while to discover BlondeChampagne, possibly because of all the typing and spelling and clicking involved.

But Bianca, bless her, found me! Read me! And ripped me! Because life is serious! Very very serious! No frivolity is to be had! NEIN! GET BACK IN LINE, DAMMIT!

"This was a trivial topic, indeed, but that's not what bugged me most about this piece. What really bothered me the most, I guess, is the fact that I was left with the overwhelming urge to yell: there are hundreds of millions of people who are forced to subsist on the discards of other humans for lack of a better option. Your nutritious meal, which you are fortunate to have, was wrapped in layers of plastic and paper. I think you'll live."

Well, I must say, Bianca has it all wrong. All. Wrong. That "nutritious meal" consisted largely of animal cookies, the frosted kind, and I don't know about you but I'm encouraging my sister and every other pregnant lady I know to eat the HELL out of those little elephants and lions so that Taufling pops out big and strong and coated with nonpareils. So, cookieless as I am, I really don't think I WILL live, seeing how I've paved paradise and put up a parking lot and all.

room...getting... dimmer....will.... to mock.... Bianca.... fading.....

Send emergency animal cookies, but not the iced animal cookies, they must be the FROSTED kind, to: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Hurling Chads

Thanks to all of you who responded to last night's George Costanza Memorial Dinner In the Garbage Flash Poll. I am overwhelmed by the number of readers encouraging me to risk death by poisoned roast beef. I love you too, readers. (It's back in the garbage now, by the way, there to stay, unless the downstairs deli closes early today.)

Email The All-Powerful Great Pale One at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Sympathy Hormones

I think I'm experiencing pregnancy sympathy hormones in honor of the Taufling. I'm a weeper by nature, but it's even worse these days.

This in combination with working late is never, ever a good thing. It's like beer before liquor. Staying here past office hours always plunges me into an awful state: I'm tired, I'm trapped, and I'm putting my college degree to work assembling three-ring binders. My freedom is dependent upon the efficiency of other people. If you don't drive home in tears after eighteen hours of this, you're in need of a need of a near-death experience or a bender or both. The phones are set on night ring and it echoes through the empty offices as Orlando sleeps below. I stream Savage in through tinny computer speakers and all of a sudden I'm back in Cape Canaveral, driving island to mainland after midnight, selling roses in bars to cover the full cost of three different prescriptions.

A couple hours ago I was flipping through a pile of resumes, and tears welled up when my eye caught the word "Kentucky." I've never lived there, but my parents' home faces it across the Ohio River. I ached for things I never knew; a Churchill Downs afternoon or a flying run through fall leaves.

Then I took a closer look at the resume. The word I had been crying over was "Keenhouse." "Kentucky" had never been there at all.

Email The Human Country Song at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Dinner, Resolved

Somebody's ordering in food. I toasted the wheat bun, which I had been keeping safely in my tote bag, and ate it with butter to tide me over. Because when in doubt: Butter. Always turn to butter.

Email Cholesterol Central at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

FLASH CHAMPAGNE POLL

Okay, I need your help on this one. Moment of truth here.

I have to stay very, very late at work tonight (I know, color me shocked) and I brought an extra meal for dinner. Cheese and roast beef and an apple and animal cookies and a cherry Coke. So, really healthy. And we got an email from the office manager announcing that she was going to clean out the break room refrigerator, which I give her mad props for, as some of that shit has started to colonize and form its own federal systems in there. General office protocol dictates that whenever the refrigerator is cleaned, we are sent a warning, and those of us who have food in there we want to protect mark it with our names and a "do not throw away" label. Which I did.

Well. Guess what was not in the fridge when I went to check on it a couple of hours ago, along with the bottle of my own mayo I use when I concoct my elaborate 45-cent meals. (My extreme rage over this situation shall not be discussed here; know only that it exists, far larger than myself.)

Guess what was in the trash can instead, buried with the penicillin-in-Rubbermaid, the green and runny pizza, the sub sandwiches with extreme attitudes.

So I rescued it, placed it back in the fridge, and went about my stupid, horrible, meaningless job (because I am not in any way bitter about the fact that I work here) and there it sits. De-trashed.

Now:

What do I do? Should I still eat this stuff? It was all in plastic Ziplock bags, including the apple, so it's not like it was touching the nasty stuff directly, and not for any serious length of time. So it's not exactly George Costanza eating the eclair out of the garbage can. But still. My. Dinner. Was. In. The. Trash. Can.

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Offers of marriage into health insurance so that I may leave this damnable place?


Email your choke-vote to: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Glenn Beck re: Monica Lewinsky

Apparently the whole "I defiled the Oval Office" thing is hurting her love life, for some reason. "People think I'm a whore," she whines. "Actually, Monica," says Glenn, "people think you're a fat whore."

I love Glenn.

It's Not Easy Not Being Easy

Here's a fairly good sign you're not handling the whole virginity thing too well: I'm at Mass the other day, and I'm kind of checking out the priest going, "Heeeeeeeey, he's cute."

I'm not particularly shopping around right now, because 1) I'm tired and 2) I have this feeling that God is saving me up for somebody really, really spectacular who is going to drop into my life when I least expect it. He's this, like, astronaut/billionaire/duke/rockstar who finds my lack of control over my own hair endearing and understands why it's so important for a model lightsaber to have the proper heft. We're going to make each other laugh while we're mucking stalls or having dinner at the White House. He is going to be awesome, and I will gently hold his heart like the miracle it is.

Monday, November 17, 2003

Mopping Up the Blood and Entrails

One of the things that sucks the most about blogging is being away from it. It's like coming back to work with a piled-up inbox. (Oh God, work. Only eleven hours of my very first vacation day to go. Sob, stamp foot.)

Some odds and ends:

Rush

I listened to his return to the airwaves with a sense of great urgency, as I was in my car at the time and really really had to pee. (Those large apple juices, they'll just run right through you.) I thought he sounded (and here the writing major meets the political science major with dazzling results) like himself, but different. Mean evil hard-hearted conservative that I am, I quite unexpectedly found myself moved by his opening monologue. He said he was nervous. He said he was filled with love for his audience. And, most importantly: He said he was sorry.

Rush has always been very private about his life, which is cool and all, but I was taken aback by how open he was about the recovery process. There was all sorts of psychospeak crossing the Golden Microphone: He needs to accept himself! He only has himself to blame for the addiction! He wishes he could learned these things about himself thirty years ago! Rush never talks like that, and you know, I liked it. It was very endearing. I've been so mad at him for so long, and I just wanted to go over and hug him and go, "You've really learned from this, haven't you?" He's going to be okay. I, as usual, will continue to be a hot chick with an amazing rack.

Herbie the Rental Car

I took Julie, her husband Britton, and the Taufling to a fairly huge tourist destination for their first dinner in town (in this sense, "took" means, "I told them to turn the wrong way on I-4 and we were lost for half an hour and then they paid for my meal") and when we got back to the parking garage, their rental car was gone. I mean, gone. It had vanished from the Earth. We wandered up and down the rows, we knew we were on the correct level (you don't hear roaring dinosaurs over the PA system as you exit the garage and wonder, "Is this the Jurassic Park level, or the Spider Man level?") and the damn thing had just plain disappeared. It was the Osama bin Ladin of midsize sedans. Julie kept walking around muttering, "Who would steal a Dodge Stratus?" Britton stalked from car to car with a steadily increasing Male Frown of Concentration and Anger, and I had an opportunity to put my mad aunting skeelz to the test. Julie began to get upset since I'd left Britton's birthday present and Taulfing's baby gifts in the car, and I put my arms around her and said, "It's okay. It's nothing that can't be replaced. Everything's going to be fine" while thinking "YOU BASTARDS I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU TOOK TAUFLING'S BOOTIES WITH THE LITTLE HORSIES ON THE TOES."

We had the Cell Phones of Defeat out and ready to call security when Britton said, "Let's just look in the other sections, see what happens." So we started walking, and the further we got away from the section we'd been searching in, the more confident I felt, all of which was confirmed when Britton unlocked the car, which was three lots away from where we'd been wandering around calling its name. The situation then officially became Amusing, and we all agreed that as far as everyone we know is concerned, this never happened.

Sean and Marc and Mark

For an unmarried product of eight years of women's education, there many, many, men in my life, and the law of averages dictates that these strong personalities would collide at some point, with fairly ugly results. Gary "'Scuse Me, Sahib" Stevens just might get into it with Boomer Esiason. Scott Hamilton could challenge Jimmy Buffett to an arm-wrestling match. You never know about these things.

Well today, in the most f'd-up sentence in the history of ever, Marc Summers had a screaming match with Sean Hannity. It was absolutely the most surreal ten minutes of talk radio I have ever heard. Here's Sean, who is wonderful and fluffy and dear and totally touched my hand when he did his radio show from the Kennedy Space Center so he clearly loves me, and here's Double Dare Marc, upon whom I developed a quasi-crush as a seven-year-old not long after I dumped Luke Duke, and with whom I am totally email buddies (okay, he emailed me once and the next communication was the restraining order). And they were taking it to the mat on Sean's radio show. I seriously almost drove off the road. (I almost always drive off the road anyway, but this time I'd have had an excuse.) It was awful, these two planets banging into one another. Marc called and basically accused Sean of ripping off Rush Limbaugh, and okay, he was kinda snotty, but snot to Sean is a red flag to the bull, and he laced into him, calling him an idiot and a liberal and all kinds of horrible things. My spleen and kidneys and skin, they were all hurting from this. Then Mark Levin called in and I'm thinking "oh God no, Levin, just let it drop" and sure enough: Out came the ad hominem hammer. "You had a problem, didn't you Marc," he said. "Obsessive-compulsive disorder, yes," Summers said. "Well, you're acting a little obsessive about Sean right now, aren't you?" Levin said, and I winced and cringed and was all, oh no he di'n't. He did not just attack someone on the basis of owning a mental disorder. Idiocy, liberalism, watching Fear Factor on purpose: these are all mockable offenses. But you do not lay into someone because of a chemical imbalance, Levin, and you are hereby on my Shit List until otherwise advised.

The Bengals

They beat somebody! They beat the Chiefs! You cannot believe the tizzy this brought to Cincinnati. A hometown tizzy is always a nice thing to see. I enjoy a good tizzy.

They celebrated the Bengals' stellar five and five record by hoisting a banner on the stadium reading, "Welcome Back To The Jungle." Oh, those straws, they are fun to grasp at.

Josh
Josh was one of my waiters over the weekend. Josh was fully and completely hot. Josh has a girlfriend. Josh sucks.

My sister and her family and I met Josh at EPCOT's Canadian restaurant (yes, I was at EPCOT again, and no, I'm not forgetting that I left you dangling in the chocolate-covered chicken of last week. We'll get back to it. Promise.) He recommended an excellent Riesling to me after I very nearly conked out when I saw the prices on the ice wine, and entertained us greatly with his general Canadianess. We got one "eh?" and about fourteen "ouuuuuuuuuuuts." It was like having our own personal Canadian minstrel. We kept ordering things just so he would say "All right, I'll have that right ouuuuuuuuut for you."

Britton knocked about four percent off Josh's tip, however, the second he draped himself over our table and said, "So, what do you think-- should I go to Africa, or what?" I'm like, "Are you going before or after you bring us our steaks?" Otherwise I couldn't give a moose's ass. I mean, he was hot and all, but: seriously. Does he run his travel plans past all his tables, or just the German-filled ones?

The true highlight of the evening, however, arrived after Julie and I polished off our sorbet served with a maple leaf cookie ("Ooooooout, eh?") and I passed around my patented Birth Control Gum. This stuff is great. It's that teeth-whitening gum by Trident or somebody, and it comes in these flat foil packages, and you have to push the gum through a little foil window to get at it, just like a nice dose of Orthotricyclen. Julie and I, being women, obtained our gum without incident, but Britton somehow shot his gum across the restaurant, very nearly picking off Josh in the process, the prospect of which I was a big fan. After I found out about the girlfriend, anyway.

Mike Meyers

Please take your seat next to Mr. Levin on my Shit List, Mike. As you are responsible for Wayne's World and the first Austin Powers, I cannot in good conscience place you on the passenger list for the Celebrity Charter With One Flaming Engine, but the subsequent two Austin Powers movies consisted of the same four jokes told less funnily each time, and this Cat in the Hat business? Uh, no.

Ted

Sen. Uncle Teddy? Shut. Your. Filthy. Hypocritical. Mouth. Have you heard what this guy said? Unless you're plugged into alternative media, probably not. He referred to President Bush's judicial nominees-- two black women and a Hispanic-- as Neanderthals. Neanderthals. Are you fully digging this? Can you imagine the absolute shit falling on the head of the conservative who says anything even remotely like this? If I'm Trent Lott, I'm throwing a pretty serious Double Standard Fit right now. (Rush: "He's just lucky he didn't say it on ESPN.")

My Rollerblades

Julie and Britton didn't want me to have to haul birthday and Christmas presents back and forth (I will be 27 on the fifteenth of January-- more, oh much more, on the extreme suckedness of this later on) so they bought me Rollerblades, which I have been desperately needing. I just got new ones, but you know, you can't just get quality skates for eleven bucks anymore. I was so excited that I bladed around my kitchen, all two square inches of it. Julie and Britton were sitting next to the kitchen counter watching football, so I broke out the Woman Going Down An Escalator routine during one of the commercials, which they frankly couldn't get enough of. My family: Nothing if not easily entertained.

Anyway, I now have really quality blades for the first time ever, and I tried them out this morning, and I think I have to take them back. They're too good. I did four laps today and I wasn't even blowing. There's no friction there! No challenge! I feel no cheap plastic slicing my ankles to ribbons! That's not a workout!

I will never eat again.

Thanks to everyone who emailed wondering if I am in fact dead. You all rock, except for maybe U. Done, who wrote, "No pressure, but where the hell have you been?" See, this is what happens when you don't have a life, and you update seven hundred times a day, and then all of a sudden when you DO have a life, everybody gets hysterical. Siddown, people.

I just put Taufling and his mommy and dad on a plane. They fed me like a princess this weekend. Steak. Cheesecake. Pina coladas. Grand Slams with a large apple juice. It's great to have a sibling gainfully employed. I haven't eaten this well since my parents visited in February and hauled my overdrawn ass to Perkins and back.

Now that they're gone, I have to fend for myself. I just finished dinner. Chefboyardee. I miss Taufling.

Seeing my sister for the first time since I knew about Taufling was kind of anticlimactic. She was sitting in the rental car while her husband checked into the hotel. I thought I would cry or have some sort of divine moment or something, but that's a little difficult to pull off while leaning in the window of a Dodge Stratus. So instead I handed her a rose (yes, she made it past the Most! Emotional! Rose! Ceremony! Ever!) and asked how the flight was.

Once she was out of the car, though, I put my hands on my knees and addressed my niece or nephew. "I am your aunt," I said. "I love you. Please do not ever bring me your math homework."

Taufling is four and a half months away from his or her birthday. The books and websites have been saying that Julie should feel some movement by now, but nada so far. Friday night, though, as she drifted off to sleep, she felt a strange fluttering sensation in her abdomen. Taufling was talking back.



"Elisabeth said, 'As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!'"

"And Mary said: "My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior."

Luke 1:44-47


Email One Proud Aunt at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

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