Currently viewing the tag: "happy hands at home"
I had every intention of canceling my membership at my gym, which is located above a hellmouth of bedbug and cologne contamination, but when I went in there I was talked out of it by a sympathetic lady with a house in LI and a 4-year-old-son — so she understood, really, but why don’t I just go to the other gym locations if that’s the issue — and arms like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 [warning: sound]. How will I ever get those arms if I don’t stay at 24 Hour Infestation & Racquet Club?*
So instead of leaving, and because I’m too lazy to go to one of the other locations, I followed the advice of a friend who’s dealt with Biblical-proportion bedbugs and when I get to the gym I put all my clothes and my entire gym bag inside of a giant Ziploc bag. I really like these bags. They speak to me as only a high-quality plastic bag can. I can see myself a few months down the line ditching my gym bag and using just the Ziploc to transport all my stuff. That will also be the day on which I have Entirely Given Up.
As you know already, I am interested in Internet phenomena and memes [warning: lazy Wikipedia links], particularly when they involve bullshit medical conditions** such as Morgellons Disease. How has a condition that pretty much no one in meatspace believes exists (except biased researchers) gotten so much traction online? Precisely because IT’S A DISEASE NO ONE IN MEATSPACE BELIEVES EXISTS!*** Surely there is some sort of Internet Law that explains this principle: The more improbable your illness is in the real world, the more credulously received it will be online.
I went to the dermatologist a few weeks ago for my annual Maybe THIS Year It’s Cancerous consult. I like him even though his paper gowns are the flimsiest I’ve ever seen. Halfway through my full-body exam I’ve already ripped the gown in half as though I’ve mistaken it for a tearaway track suit. Anyhow, after we were done he asked me if I had any questions.
Me: Yeah, do you know what Morgellons is?
Him: No.
Me: It’s a medical condition that most doctors think is a form of delusional parasitosis and it’s characterized by colorful threads growing out of people’s skin.
Him: And why do you care about this?
I guess we don’t get fake diseases in NYC all that much because we already have real things to contend with….like BEDBUGS.
Anyhow, I have kinda weird feet that are always, always calloused and virtually impervious to things like sharp rocks and glass shards and hypodermic needles. Shortly after my trip to el dermo, I noticed the pad of my left foot was hurting when I put pressure on it. I sat down and looked at it really closely and saw that something dark appeared to be embedded a few layers of skin down. I love doing home surgery, so I started poking at it with a pair of tweezers, hoping it wasn’t a plantar’s wart.
After considerable digging, I extracted a half-inch-long black, wiry hair. Seriously. I weighed two possibilities: that God was punishing me for making fun of people with bullshit maladies all these years, and that a hair of foreign origin had somehow wormed its way into my foot. Both seemed equally implausible, but I settled for the second one.
And then, last week, I noticed the same pain, in the same part of my foot. And using the tweezers and a safety pin I pulled YET ANOTHER black, wiry hair, this one the length of an eyelash. And N witnessed it this time!
So great. I have contracted Internet Crazy Disease. I am building a website to support my cause as soon as I can find the right Celine Dion midis to embed.
*I see there was a bedbug scare at Kings County Hospital. I have been to KCH and I can assure you that a single bedbug is the least of its hygiene problems. By the way, the Linda Hamilton arms thing is a joke. I will never have those. Even at 115 lbs in high school I had Ethel Merman arms. It’s my genetic lot in life. I blame the Newfies.
**Many years back I got sick — really sick, like 100-blood-tests-and-still-no-diagnosis sick — and I had a passionate and vaguely creepy infectious diseases specialist who assured me that he believed I really was sick and he was determined to figure it out. I remember saying to him, “Please don’t tell me it’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, because I don’t believe that exists, OK?” Never did figure out what it was. It just went away on its own after two years.
***And that, my friends, actually is what is referred to as begging the question.
As I’ve mentioned before, there are days when I want to pack up — pack it all in — and move to Florida. So what if I have to be a retail slut again. So what if I have to buy a car. And drive everywhere. And go without arugula.
So what if we’ll have to have kids just to keep ourselves entertained.
So what if people knock down atheist-themed billboards with (what I presume to be) their giant trucks. Because I’ll be living in a magical land of beaches and sun and unironic beer coozies and tiny lizards and where bad highlights and leathery cleavage don’t matter.
In preparation for this parallel universe move, I spend time on the St. Augustine Craigslist, looking for things. Just things. Nothing in particular.
Thus far, I have found
- a 1967 Ford Bronco
- Lots of Lesbian Vampire paintings
- Unicorns, in excellent condition
- A free tattoo
- And a bartering posting titled Hog Pest (“Will give you pick of meat.”)
That last one makes me wonder if I should reconsider the move. I don’t want to deal with hog infestations. Especially with the kids around and all.
Oh my god you guys, I *want* to have things to share, because you all know how much I like to talk about myself, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’m going through my late-winter/early-spring my-brain-has-atrophied/I-was-never-that-great-a-writer-anyhow thing. And, like I mentioned last week, I’d rather spend my evening on the couch, or at the dining room table, with N…watching HGTV (or NCAA stuff)(and yes, I’d rather watch basketball than write; that’s how hard I’ve been avoiding it).
HGTV has become, without question, my new favorite channel (DIY is good too, but I always forget where it’s located on the cable box). It has usurped my former TV-watching routine, which could be summed up as “Freaks-n-Food.”** I love the sassy Canadian-Italian woman on Property Virgins, who manages to chide people politely (most common: “It’s just wallpaper; you can fix that”….”I can’t believe you guys don’t like this place; it has everything on your checklist!”) and Mike Holmes from Holmes on Homes and his North Dakota Gay Disco getup and his “bad-construction-as-personal-affront” persona. Curb Appeal, with its adorable crew. And it’s all G-rated.
I love Househunters especially. There’s something so calming about watching pleasant people with strange ideas about fashion (I thought that Kate Gosselin hairdo was roundly mocked everywhere? Guess not) in towns I’ll never visit look at houses I’d never buy in a million years. Every show is the same: Two reasonably attractive people — sometimes a couple, sometimes “friends” — are shown three houses, and they buy one. There’s always some drama with the offer-counteroffer. And you can tell they’ve been fed vocab words, and that paying bland compliments to each house is an enforced rule. “I like the tile here in the bathroom, how it’s on the floor and the walls.” “I like this two-car garage. I bet our two cars would drive up in here real nice.” “It’s nice that there’s no trees in the way at all, for when you mow and such.”
N and I have devised a Househunters Vocab Game. You get a certain amount of points when each of the following phrases is used:
One point:
-Finished garage
-”Mancave”
-Cathedral ceiling [and there is always a cathedral ceiling, because the houses are almost always contemporary architectural abortions set in developments]
-Kitchen island
-Finished basement
Bonus points:
-Scrapbooking
-Soaker tub
Triple bonus points:
-Home theater
-Trampoline
A lot of people on this show have dogs, and they always want a big yard for the dogs to run around in. Now, I can understand that dogs need exercise, but really, doesn’t this pretty much mean that these “homebuyers” are basically just looking for a property that they can surround with yellowed grass and piles of dog shit? Is this really acceptable?
My *absolute favorite* show, however, is Income Property, hosted by an impossibly wholesome guy named Scott McGillivray, who has teeth like Chiclets and bulging muscles and hair so thick and manicured it has to be glued on. He goes to people’s houses and builds rental apartments where there were formerly only boilers and rats and torture chambers. He is superimposed on his proposed design using green screen technology, and then he and his attractive crew start tearing shit apart and putting in Ikea cabinets. They always find something distressing, and the camera fades to commercial with Scott looking flummoxed, patting his perfect hair. And then when we come back from the break, they’ve managed to resolve the problem, and we flash forward to the finished product, with West Elm furniture (for staging purposes) and wainscoting in the “washroom” (is that a Canadian thing too?) and dove-gray walls and slate floors everywhere. And he’s just so excited to help people move TOTAL STRANGERS into their house.
I love that guy. I hope he’s not a douche in real life.
*A friend put it that way to me many years ago, before I even turned 30. He was right.
**Speaking of which: This morning at the gime I watched I’m 16 & Pregnant while I did the elliptical thing. Conservatives can bemoan the tragic state of inner cities all they want — the result of decades of Welfare Queens and “jewels in the crown” and crack babies and community organizers &c. — but they should really be looking in the fucking mirror and acknowledging their own fucking voter base, because those people are the ones whose chain-smoking, high-school-dropout, unemployed, no-prenatal-care dimwit progeny are creating an entire generation of Fucked-Up Kids. And to the parents? You’re the generation who banned sex ed, and you get what you deserve. Time for me to donate more money to Planned Parenthood.
