Tag Archives: Calling this Stream of Consciousness because it sounds better than desultory

Random Randomness

I confess the reason why I took to Twitter so passionately was because I am the ultimate “idea man”. You know, like those people that go in front of movie studios execs to pitch movie ideas? (I learned of the movie industry from TV shows so YMMV) I have lots of one-liner ideas but that is the extent of my “genius”. Every day I walk through life making running commentaries on people I see, things I observe, news I hear, and [invisible] thought bubbles that pop up over my head. Not to mention the memes and quotes that make me laugh as I rapidly scroll through Facebook streams on my phone.

Oh, I should write about THAT.

I’d open my laptop, jotting a couple of lines down, and immediately running out of steam.

Dead. Nothing. Void. Hollow caverns echoing with the witty one-liners.

“There should never be a BUT following a true apology. Lance Armstrong apologizes like my husband.”

Manti Te’o would have stood out like a sore thumb in NFL since he’d probably be the most faithful and gentlemanly boyfriend amongst all the NFL players.”

“Frankly I could care less that he lied. I am more concerned about the culture that forced Manti Te’o to fabricate a girlfriend who died of a [fake] tragic death.”

Echo. Echo. Echo.

 

I hope you will forgive me for the mental purge here. My brains are hurting with all the echo. Ok, smart ass. I know you can’t really get rid of echo by “purging” them. It’s just a figure of speech though I am definitely mixing analogies here.

 

I am sitting inside the train station again on a Saturday morning, waiting for Mr. Monk, my 10-year-old boy, to get out of the weekly religious class run by a Catholic Church that more than one Catholics have told me is TOO conservative even for them. There are reasons we are keeping him there and I will not get into them. Suffice it to say that my sons and I have had a lot of great discussions and I hope, we are “training” them to be critical thinkers.

What don’t kill you will only make you stronger.

 

What does it say about me that I love being in a crowd of strangers and feeling alive amongst the hustle and bustle? Invisible yet alive. This is the kind of crowd different from say, going to a conference or a party. There is no pressure, no obligation, no anticipation to socialize with each other. And absolutely no networking. I ABHOR the concept of “networking” by the way. I’d rather die. There I said it. Probably why I will never get ahead on the career ladder. I wish for my kids super-duper Google-Fiber-grade networking capability (ha ha I slay me). That’s all that matters nowadays isn’t it no matter what kind of job you are holding?

 

Got my new Kindle Paperwhite this week. I could not shut up about it, I know. I am sorry, ok? Leading to the moment before Marvin arrived (yes, I named my Kindle Marvin. 2 points if you guess Marvin who?) I had been restless, full of anticipation. I have never felt such excitement since… I can’t remember really. I lead a pathetic existence, yes. Now I curl up with Marvin in bed in the dark, caressing his comfortingly textured, paradoxically smooth skin (and promptly fall asleep. I like the concept of reading though). In the recess of my consciousness however I cry, “Traitor!” indignant for my deep love of rubbing my fingers with a book page in between, feeling the heft of somebody else’s words and thoughts in my palm.

Mr. Monk inherited the ex-Marvin now named Tardis. “Bigger on the inside”, get it? 10% into The Hobbit, he exclaimed, “I love Kindle!” he who previously had adamantly been on an anti-electronic-book tirade. “It is just so amazing. It’s like a book but more awe…” I held my tongue that wanted to argue as he curled up in bed with Tardis, so absorbed by what was happening in The Hobbit that he did not even bother to finish his sentence.

 

Facebook introduced GRAPH SEARCH this week. To me it boiled down to one thing: Discoverability. They are not changing their privacy policies per se and you continue to keep your privacy settings. The biggest (only?) difference now is that we can no longer afford to mindlessly LIKE or comment. Your friends will now see what you are liking and commenting on on their streams. We need to watch for WHAT we are liking, and if you are Interneting at work, WHEN you are liking because obviously when you are LIKING you are not WORKING.

I am not liking this.

 

A friend of mine noticed that I LIKED this article:

I Can’t Stop Looking at These South Korean Women Who’ve Had Plastic Surgery (thank goodness it is not something I’d be ashamed of when caught liking) and shared a piece of wisdom from Tina Fey with me. Of course a long tirade swirled inside my head that would have become an awesome blog post were I able to form cohesive sentences and string them together logically into paragraphs. Instead, Imma taking the easy way out. Ctrl C. Ctrl V. SHARE.

 Tina Fey

Lucky

Before she started telling you the story, she would have said, before anything else, “This journal entry has a happy ending.”

The red light on her phone was blinking. Somehow she’d missed a phone call when she knew that nobody would be calling her. Not on her cell anyway. Her husband was out of the country, her children only TXT now, and her mother would only call the landline (because she’d never bothered to give her her cellphone number) and always when it was way past bedtime (because figuring out time zone difference becomes a lot harder once day light savings time change is (not) taken into account)

The unfamiliar number shown had the local area code. With smart phones nowadays our relationship is discreetly judged by whether you show up as a name (from Contacts) or as a mere phone number. The persistent blinking red light indicated that the person had left a voice mail. She was annoyed. Really. Who in this day still leaves voice mails? She dreads checking her voicemails on the very few occasions when some un-indoctrinated people leave them. The problem is they never ever come out clear. Press 1 to repeat the message. Press 1 to repeat. Press 1. Often she ends up pressing 7, reasoning that if the message is important enough, the person will surely call back.

It was a call from some doctor’s office but she could not make out which. She did not think twice when she missed another call from the same number later that day. The call showed up as a mere number and therefore automatically deprioritized. Funny how stupid her logics sound in hindsight.

She jumped when her phone suddenly rang in the midst of the somber silence as she and her children huddled in front of the television, watching the retelling of the horror in Aurora, CO, unfold.

Hello. You need to go in for a follow-up. It’s probably nothing. But we just want to make sure. They noticed something… that looked… calcification…

She held her breath and blinked. She’d forgot about the mammogram the day before.

The doctor wants you to schedule an appointment with the hospital right away and she will fax the order in. Call me right back and let me know the time.

She knew that the doctor’s office was concerned when they waited to hear from her. She went back to sit in front of the television at first as if she had just received a phone call from a telemarketer. The chaos on the screen made her comment out loud how fragile life is.

Oh.

She remembered the call and what it could possibly mean. She wanted to cry.

What if? No… It can’t be, right? No way this is happening to me. Maybe I should be freaking out now? She asked herself. Let’s see how good I really am at compartmentalizing.

She shook her head violently. Stop thinking about it! There is nothing you can do about it except waiting until Monday morning.

When her mind immediately, out of habit, presented silver linings to the worst case scenario, “I can finally quit my job!” I am such a fucking idiot, she chastised herself, ashamed and worried that if her friends who had fought and survived knew this was her first thought, they’d be offended by how she’s trivializing the whole thing. It’s not a fucking excuse! This is no child’s play. For some people, this is real. Too many people actually.

She shook her head violently. Stop thinking about it! There is nothing you can do about it.

She did not tell anybody about the phone call. In fact, by Monday, she herself had forgot about the follow-up appointment and almost missed it. She woke up late on Monday morning because for three nights she stayed up channel surfing. She cried through Brideshead Revisited.

At the hospital, the technician made her stay for the result. Just in case he needs to see something more, she said.

When she pulled her book out from the purse, she felt guilty for not feeling anything. Maybe I should cry, she wondered, what’s the proper behavior at a moment like this? When the radiologist walked into the gowned waiting room and called her husband’s name, she was startled by how scholarly he looked. Almost bookish. Like a professor. He blurted out even before their hands parted, “Everything looks fine,” and smiled. “I didn’t want you to walk down the hallway wondering.”

The humid air rushed into her lung when she pushed open the heavy door to the garage. Her breath suddenly caught in her throat. She fled into the car and shut the door before the violent tears came.

You are such an idiot, she murmured.

Keep on Fighting

Motherhood in the beginning is sickeningly isolating, especially if La Leche League gets their hold on your conscience. Your partner may be super duper awesome and really do the concept of 50/50 co-parenting justice. BUT. When you are up at night alone (because someone has to get up to go to work so you can pay for the diapers and shit) with a crying baby that simply will not go to sleep without putting up a fierce fight, yeah, it really sucks. You (ok, I) feel so helpless, abandoned even. Day after day. Night after night. Waiting for that tyrant who took over your existence to relent and show you some mercy.

I don’t think I’ve ever properly recovered from that trauma of isolation and abandonment. And I believe this psychological scar greatly contributes to my loss of faith in the myth of motherhood and my subsequent cynicism. Paying lip service to what a great sacrifice it is to be a mother is the society’s way of keeping our mouths shut: Yes you are all awesome superwomen. Without you, the civilization will end. Now STFU and make me a sandwich. Nobody in power (yes, balding white male I am talking about you) gives a shit about making it easier for women who maybe want to be mothers and something more.

 

By now you probably have heard of /read the article on The Atlantic penned by Anne Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All: The Myth of Work-Life Balance”. Dr. Slaughter is a professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She served as Director of Policy Planning under Hilary Clinton from 2009 to 2011. Eventually she did quit the high-demanding job that frequently kept her away from her children, a fact that spurred the authoring of this article.

The premise of this article that has been shared and re-shared, lauded, debated, and of course, critiqued, thousands of times could be summed up in this:

Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.

 

Although the article does not end in a despairing note, the hope it provides, the solutions suggested — necessary changes in policies, laws, representations, and cultures, simply seems too far to be within imaginable reach. Nevertheless, I actually felt relieved after I read this, that I have not simply been a whiner, or been less fortunate in terms of my choice of a spouse, or timed having children incorrectly, or not been committed enough. It is also good to know that “wanting to have it all” has been grossly exaggerated into “becoming a super human”

I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).

When in fact all we are asking for is to NOT to have to make compromises that our male counterparts in marriage/relationship (i.e. fathers of our children) are less likely to be asked to make, and when they do make those compromises, are less likely to be judged or criticized for it.

I have no wisdom to part with nor intelligent comments on the debate that has been raging on somewhere out there.

One minute I am all Let’s take over the world mother-f-ers. The next minute I wish I had never got into my head to be somebody when I grew up. [Please don’t leave angry comments about how being a mother IS somebody. You know that’s not what I meant. Take your mommy war and agenda somewhere else please.]

Why do we tell our girls to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, mathematicians, that they can be all that they want to be, if in the end, should they get married, they are expected to bear children, and should they become mothers, they are expected to become perfect mothers?

There are regrets that I would never dare to have, What-if questions that I would never dare to ask. If I get to stand at the crossroads of life, which would I choose, hypothetically? And which hypothetical answers will hurt whom and how much?

 

I am from the Internet

I’m waiting for the day when, if you tell someone ‘I’m from the internet’, instead of laughing they just ask ‘oh, what part?’                        

xkcd

I met a fellow blogger yesterday.  It no longer feels weird to me to meet someone who I have been talking to online, “sight unseen”, for a long time, in real-life 3D.

The Internet is magical in this regard.

Velva from Tomatoes On The Vine and I saw each other in real life, flesh and blood (thank goodness it was all flesh and no blood), for the first time. It did not occur to me how amazing it was that there was no awkward moment at all. It certainly helped a lot that both Velva and her husband are absolutely lovely and warm and easygoing. As soon as we found each other outside the restaurant (no red rose necessary) and gave each other a big giant hug, without a beat, we launched into a fabulous night of great food and even greater conversations as if we have known each other for a long time.

And we have indeed. I guess that is the point.

When we are participating in the blogging community, and its extension on Facebook and Twitter, what I like to call “the greatest social experiment that nobody knows they are in”, we inevitably suspend our suspicion, or rather, we give in to our natural tendency as human beings to trust each other. Although a healthy dose of wariness towards strangers must have helped guarantee the survival of the human race, I believe that the basic trust in people’s goodness must have played just as significant a role. The virtual social network is an interesting arena for us to exercise that push and pull, and if you are lucky, you found yourself getting pulled into the inner circles of some absolutely fabulous people. When that happens, it feels so natural, you don’t even hear the bang when your virtual world and your real life collide.

It is strange how it is not strange at all.

 

I love what xkcd said: "I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'"

 

Out of My Mind

I went to a grade school talent show on Friday evening that lasted 2.5 hours. Yesterday we had Catholic brainwashing religious class, band festival at our local senior high school, gymnastics meet and team dinner. Today is the Chinese school New Year celebration performance: reporting for rehearsals at 9 am [it’s now 3 am] and we won’t be let out until 4 pm the earliest. My youngest has two book reports/reading projects due on Monday. I may have replied to my boss’ email yesterday and promised I would send out something this weekend…

If I survive this weekend…

The following are the thoughts that went through my head over the first half of the action-packed fun-filled weekend: [And if you are lucky, I may just spare you the second half]

Why am I here at the talent show? I must be the only parent here whose child is not in the show.

Ok. Do they just let anybody in the show? I guess it would have been mean to have some sort of application process and to insist on some criteria.

Look at all these extroverted kids on stage.

Look at all these people confusing ham-ish-ness with talent.

I like Bollywood song and dance and costume. I hope the older white couple behind me don’t die of shock.

Another Bollywood number? Well, Bollywood style dance is the only thing that can fill up this huge stage with 3 tiny kids performing anyway. And this suburb needs some culture.

Pink and Adele sure are popular.

Why do girls think their dance in front of the mirror in the bathroom is going to translate well to the stage? Ok. Am I being a jackhole for even saying this inside my head?

What was that Daniel Radcliff said in his “You CAN do anything” SNL skit?  “I tried, and therefore, no one should criticize me.”

Ok. You are probably just being an asshole.

But I am hungry. I did not have dinner yet!

It is very important to know how to do a cartwheel.

When is this going to end?

People probably think my kids are in every act the way I am applauding. Every act gets me closer to the end of this.

Mother. 1.5 hour. This is only the first act?

When you have an awesome set of pipes, you are set for talent shows for life.

 

What a stupid question in the workbook: “Is Jesus a man or God?” Of course, he’s a man. He’s the Son of God I will give them that. I can rote memorize with the best of them.

Why does the religious textbook insist on Jesus being The Son of God AND God at the same time?

How did I miss this? I thought I’ve read the Bible the first thing for college… Oh… Old Testament. Dude was not even in it.

This is confusing. So all of a sudden I have to tell my son that Jesus IS, somehow, also God?

This does not even make sense. How is he the son and the father at the same time? Do people really believe in this?

How do I say this with a straight face? Am I rolling my eyes too obviously right now? [I guess this is something you just have to believe. You either believe it or you don’t. Leap of faith required]

I did not sign up for this. This feels like lying through my teeth. I refuse to say it.

I am such an idiot! Why did I not know until now?!

Good. The kid figured the “correct” answer out on his own from the textbook. We will just pay for his therapy in the future.

I am going to kill my husband.

[Later, I did express with strong emotions my inability to even verbalize the statement so could he please handle that from now on should this subject resurface again. And he laughed out loud. He just laughed. What’s up with that?! and I should probably explain: I am agnostic and did not grow up in a predominantly Christian country. My husband is one of those twice-a-year Catholics. We are bringing the kids up Catholic. Or as I believe, we are waiting for them to be confirmed to make my mother-in-law happy. I feel like I have signed some important agreement without having read the fine prints first. I feel like an idiot…]

 

[Listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me] That is Gary Oldman? Gary Oldman is British?

Oh my god oh my god oh my god.

Cars should come equipped with the ability for me to tweet and update my Facebook status and to write on my blog just by me thinking out loud.

I would be the most prolific blogger ever.

Gary Oldman is such a great character actor. I have never heard him speak as himself!

This is absolutely scary and amazing and awesome.

He scares the bejeezus out of me in The Professional.

Nobody ever cracks their neck in such a scary way. The scariest neck-cracking ever.

 

Interesting. The percussion section has quite a few tall blonde young male persons. Look in the opposite direction!!!

Yeah. And they are complaining about too many Asian kids in this neighborhood. Look who are the nerds now.

Ha ha.

[Just so we are clear on this: My son is in the band]

[Also, I love nerds and geeks and dorks and whatever labels you throw on cerebrals]

Look. There is this kid that looks like a younger Jesse Eisenberg!

And wow. He even has the same smugness about him [as Eisenberg in The Social Network]

I think I have a crush on Jesse Eisenberg.

And now whenever I think of Marc Zuckerberg, I think of Jesse Eisenberg’s face.

Does that mean I have a crush on Zuckerberg?

Shudder.

I am convinced that I will now think of that kid as Zuckerberg as played by Eisenberg. He can be a totally good person and I will still see him as a smug jerk.

Poor kid. Being judged by me.

Movies are so powerful.

 

[Watching my oldest lifting himself straight up in the air on p-bars at his gymnastics meet] Whoa.  That kid’s got some awesome biceps. When did this happen? Where did those come from?

He can probably snap my neck just like that. Ha ha. Awesome.

 

 

 

I just want to go home

Photo Courtesy of Stew Dean on Flickr

 

Sometimes, for no reason at all, I would get a severe attack of homesickness.

Without any provocation, my heart would ache and I would get a sensation of emptiness and at the same time heaviness inside my stomach.

I recognize that feeling well.

It is an intense loneliness that comes from a herd animal being away from its kind.

I am exhausted: I just want to drop everything and go home.

Do Americans feel this way?

It seems to me that, (I know I am grossly generalizing here), Americans take it for granted that they will not be living where they grew up, and that they will, most likely, be away from their parents and siblings, simply on account of how vast this country is and how geographically widely distributed job opportunities can be.

So is the pang of homesickness less acute if you know you are not expected to be there in the first place? Not being adulterated by a sense of guilt? The mutual understanding that you are where you are supposed to be? Without the gnawing sensation that eats you away as you age, as your parents age, that somehow you have pulled a bait and switch on them?

“Oh I will be back in two years. Tops.”

That somehow you ran away. You did not stay put like 99% of the population on the small island, the size of Maryland.

Betrayal.

The feeling that you may have turned away and the chasm is now irreparable because…

many years ago…

you started dreaming in English?

Narcissus: A Rambling in Four Parts

I saw these for sale when I made an emergency run for coffee at the store: a dozen for $1.99. I normally do not buy flowers, the same reason I do not make the bed: What’s the point? But I made an impulse purchase that day and I am glad I did. Whenever I pass by them, which is all too frequently since they are sitting on the kitchen table now, a smile pulls into my face. Flowers do that to you. Besides, they are so much cheaper than a diamond necklace.

 

I held out the daffodils the way He-Man pulled out his Power Sword, screaming: “By the power of Narcissus!” Willing Spring the coy bitch to finally show her face.

I did that often when I was young: holding up my umbrella, yelling, “The omnipotent gods, please endow me with the power of miracle!”, the Chinese dubbed version. I harbored this longing to be a super hero, or a swordsman. All of these fantasies involved me cross-dressing incognito. There is a lot of theorizing available behind a cross-dressing story such as HUA Mulan (Don’t say “Fa” please. Use the historically correct pronunciation, in Mandarin…) : being male in appearances somehow signified a path to empowerment and freedom, provided you are not found out.

 

Back to Spring. Or the lack of sighting of that pesky bitch forever running late or simply no-show even after she had RSVP’d when the universe was first created. The sky was dressed in blue and adorned himself with glorious white clouds yesterday, waiting for her.*

Whenever the kids and I see the sky looking like this, we’d say, “Look! The Simpsons!” And we all could hear the intro music to The Simpsons wafting in closer from behind the clouds. Or maybe it’s just me.

 

Back to the lingering thoughts of cross-dressing. Sister Merry Hellish recently wrote a great post on “Men in the corporate culture, their ties, and the women who fight them” aptly titled Sex, Ties and Reconditioning. She had asked several bloggers to send her pictures of themselves wearing a tie, and I am honored to be one of them. You really should click over and read the post. Actually, don’t even worry about finishing this post and leaving me a comment (srly sometimes I wonder what I myself would say if I had to comment on the gibberish coming out of my keyboard…). Just stop and hop over there right now!

As always, assignments of self-portrait stresses me out to no end and I did not pick up the camera until the last minute. In the end though, I had to admit that I had a lot of fun posing with a hat and a tie inside our powder room, holding a camera with my right hand, snapping pictures of myself in the bathroom mirror. I, a 40-year-old woman, was playing dress-up in a tiny bathroom, in the middle of the night, by myself. And I had not even been drinking.

Do you ever wonder now what your parents were doing when you were sleeping back then?

It was really late when I sent SMH my submissions, and I knew she waited up for me so she could work on her post before she went to bed. I continued to play with Picnik.com, or what I like to call, A Woman’s Best Friend. After much cropping (for you could see the toilet in the original picture AND I was wearing a pair of hot pink pajama pants underneath. They were only $5 on sale!), massive editing, and over-applications of effects, I have to say I love how I look in a fedora* and tie.

The funny, and slightly disturbing thing is how often I stare at this picture of myself ever since. I know it is not real: Too much cropping and softening and posterizing effects have been involved. But it makes me feel strong inside when I close my eyes and see myself in a hat and tie thusly. Does that even make any sense?

I hope I can manage to retain this mental image of myself channeling Annie Lennox (who is a very strong outspoken feminist. Yes, she does not deny that she is a feminst) on days when I feel oh so unworthy of working side by side next to all these men around the conference table.

Self: I can’t do this any more. These men think I am an idiot.

Annie Lennox:

You’re a bird in the sky now baby
Earthbound
Feet on the ground

 

 

Today, in a very self-serving way, I am going to declare that we all need a little bit Narcissus in us.

 

 

 

* On second thought, I guess we can’t blame Lady Spring for not showing up this weekend after all since blue tux & white ruffles combo inadvertently conjures up the image of Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber

The fedora actually belongs to Mr. Monk, my 8 year old. I now am convinced that every man and woman should own a fedora.

 

Can’t Hardly Wait

 

 

Some random associations from a picture I took this Sunday.

Budding.

Can’t hardly wait.

Spring Awakening.

Frank Wedekind

Frank Wedekind who in 1906 gave us a play criticizing the sexually repressed society with depictions of group masturbation and other subjects that scandalized theatre goers.

This quote attributed to Wedekind which made me chuckle because now whenever some trivial disaster happens in my otherwise mundane life, I think, “Yeah, a blog post has written itself!”

Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it.

 

The Lulu Plays by Wedekind.

Lulu, the complicated, contradictory femme fatal and victim, in a play that scandalized the audiences in the late 19th / early 20th century with its nudity, implied and not so implicit sex act, rampant confessions of lust and obsession, and an openly lesbian character.

Louise Brooks. Playing the role of Lulu in the movie adaptation of Pandora’s Box.

Louise Brooks. Writing a memoir many decades afterwards, so uncannily described how we feel now when we sit in front of our computers and pour our hearts out…

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it – learning to write – but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are “like” everybody – that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough – beauty…

 

 

 

 

Things I learned today

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I will never ever be able to fold a fitted sheet perfectly no matter how much time I spend on it. Fitted sheet, consider yourself folded.

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Checking my email is never going to be “QUICK”. I will always spend more than “Just one minute” when I log in my email account. I will be tempted to click on the links in the emails and it will always take longer than I think to read and comment on a blog post. And when you forget about your child’s lunch, he will hunt you down and demand lunch, but in a nice way that actually makes you feel even shittier.

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Corporate brand image does not necessarily mean Caution and Stodgy and Prim&Proper. “Inappropriate” innuendos are allowed in official press release; sometimes it makes it a WIN.

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"Clipart - Housewife Washing Up at the Sink Whilst a Man Sits in an Armchair Reading a Newspaper"

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My husband has blue hair!

Saturday Smörgåsbord

I have been watching SpongeBob with Mr. Monk this whole day except when I am being the Chauffeur. (And I know I am not the only Weekend Chauffeur around here…) You know what I admire SpongeBob the most? He does not seem to understand the concept of Envy and Jealousy, and therefore he is always genuinely over-the-top happy for other’s good fortune, accomplishment and success.

He is, in fact, always happy.

For this rare virtue, he comes off as insane. Unaware. Unhinged.

(Ok, fine. For you anti-random-theorizing folks out there, SpongeBob comes off as insane mostly because he understands spoken words literally…)

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It is cold. As in…

I half expected to see a polar bear floating by on one of these pieces of ice

Breaking the ice. Literally.

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My husband complained about me not responding to his email or just in general, plainly ignoring him while he travels abroad on business. What can I say? I am the Champion in Compartmentalizing. Guilty as charged. So I sent him this picture above and wrote, “Wish you were here!”

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Completely unrelated. Really. I swear. Girl Scout Honor. I just saw this on our fridge and I am proud of our family motto, so I took a picture of it. That’s it. Really. Not trying to say anything. Not a comment at all.