I know this will be a huge shock, but most of my life I’ve had more guy friends than girl friends. Many things about girls bug me. I will be honest and say that I shake my head in great confusion over the antics of my gender far too often. (someone explain to me about $40 lipsticks please? And also dogs in purses? And girls gone wild – why do they go wild? What makes them go wild like this? Does this wild-going seem like a good idea to anybody? Any girl body, I mean? But I digress) I often shake my head at guy stuff too (tell me again why it makes sense to call your friend a fag? And pee on their shoe?) but the stupid things that guys do are both funny (yes they are) and also don’t reflect poorly on me beyond my choosing to be around them when they’re doing it.
And as a result I’ve always had more guy friends than girl friends. I’m kind of like the Jane Goodall of dudes. I speak their language and they accept me as one of their own. (and all sorts of female readers are adding another item to their personal “why Femtastic is lucky to have had a boyfriend ever in her whole life!!” list)
But there are a few exceptions to this list, and top-most of those exceptions are two of my oldest friends, my three amigas, my fellow musketeers, my… another thing that’s famous and three… The Queen and Risky. I’ve known Risky since I was too young to remember what age I was when I met her (so like 5 or 6?) and though I’ve known The Queen for less actual year-times we’ve made up for lost time like gangbusters and I find it kind of amazing that I ever didn’t know her either.
I get to see the Queen all the time (I get to. She has to) but Risky lives a good 90 minutes away, so the three of us try to get together for some serious girl bonding time every few months at the least; we call these our Ladies Days. They are an estrogen feeding frenzy of epic proportions where the uterus of strangers around us are enflamed with envy and we cause entire shopping malls of women to synch their periods up instantaneously. It’s days of shopping or ladies’ lunches or whatnot. In April?
It was Femtastic’s first pedicure.
It’s true! Just last month I allowed someone, NAY, PAID someone, to put their hands on my feet. MY FEET! And not only did I not kill them with the smells and other noxious things that are associated with feet I also did not kill them with spontaneous face kicking in response to them doing their feet touching. Which was actually my chief concern. The idea of letting someone touch my feet just kind of wigged me out. Also I was afraid that my feet would be some new benchmark of serious grossness, or that I’d have to pretend I didn’t see the poor pedicurist squelching her gag reflex.
But no! Not only did she tell me that my feet were really pretty good (and nothing like the troll she had the day before) but I also TOTALLY LOVED the feet touching!
Important to note: I’ve always been hugely enamored of foot massages. HUUUUGELY. I tried and tried to make my one exmanfriend understand that he could skip foreplay and even sex and all the pesky worrying about whether I got my special reward in bed if only he would rub my feet, but this is something he never, ever got. But such foot massages have generally been given by people with whom I’ve already crossed familiarity boundaries. Not strangers in fashion-colored aprons with 80’s rock playing in the background who’s names I only know because it’s embroidered on their front. I could make an analogy of how strange a boundary cross that seemed like it would be, but they’d all give you the heebie-jeebies. Let’s just say I thought it would be weird.
And it was totally not weird.
Also when we were done we had the prettiest toes ever! SO PRETTY! Who knew toes could even BE pretty? Not me, I had no idea, and yet there I was. Admiring my very own painted piggies. There was Chinese food and book shopping and coffee (for people who drink coffee, and coffee mocking for those of us who don’t.) and it was a very excellent day.
And now I love me the pedicure. I would have another please.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Where Was I...?
It’s not my fault.
I swear, it’s not! I was totally gonna post two weeks ago to tell you about any number of things (there are actually numbers of things. As in more than one thing. I think maybe even more than TWO! It’s entirely possible that I could legitimately use the words ‘a few’ to quantify the things I planned to write about!) but I ran out of time before the annual Mother’s Day at the Coast (also called “Hey, let’s hang out and eat for a solid two days and oh look, water!”). But no problem, I’d just write one of my number of things when I got back on Sunday.
But then instead of spending the whole weekend at the coast and coming home on Sunday my house broke. It sprung a leak. One of those leaks that results in water coming to live in your carpeting which, as I understand it, is a bad thing.
Here’s the other crazy part, by the way: this is the SECOND time this house has flooded since I’ve lived here. Most people go their whole lives without ever having to walk across a room to the dulcet tones of “Squelch. Squish. Other sounds of water inside the floor-stuff” and yet I’ve done it now twice! Oh yes, there’s no doubt about it: I’m special. (I’m just now realizing I should probably have included that in my online dating profiles: “has magical ability to fill homes with an over-abundance of water.” Drat.)
Last time it was much worse and it was an insurance claim and I spent a couple of weeks living on concrete flooring with all of my belongings either boxed up by strangers or up on these little foam blocks. The foam blocks were actually really cool – I kept as many of them as I could and still use them for stuff. For about 6 of those days I felt like I was living inside the jet engine of a 747 preparing for take-off – there were fans, fans, fans running all the time. ALL. THE. TIME.
This time around it was only about 1/2 as bad – we kept the laminate flooring and the carpet, just replacing one pad and drying it all out for a week. Baseboards were removed and dime-sized holes punched in the sheetrock to make sure the air could circulate behind there and dry out the wall because hey, did you know that sheetrock is basically made out of paper? PAPER. All of our homes are essentially 2X4s covered up with thick paper and paint. Go ahead and try not to think of that tonight while you’re going to sleep. One solid sneeze and I’m pretty sure the whole thing comes down.
Where was I? Oh right, not my fault.
So I spent all of last week living at my parent’s house while mine was filled with a dozen mini-tornadoes. (I’ll admit that it was pretty amusing to drive past the place and see the front curtains in a constant state of mini-twister.) My parents do have a computer, but frankly it was three days of falling down sleepy every time I stopped moving for more than five minutes (I would so suck as a shark) followed by another three days of catching up on my life and then I had to move everything all back IN—
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I had to box up about 75% of my entire house, along with all the furniture, and store it in my carport. And I had to do all of the packing and schlepping and storing in about 6 hours. And that I’m awesome, because I did it in 5 hours. And then I spent a week saying “I need to get my {whatever} – oh, that’s right. It’s somewhere in my carport. Somewhere.” Followed by a healthy shaking of my fist to the skies. Good times.
Now where was I? NOT MY FAULT! RIGHT!
So now I’m back in and the boxes are about 2/3rd unpacked and somethings are actually improved by the whole exercise – why does anyone need two copies of Orson Scott Card’s Children of the Mind (the least accessible of all the Ender books if you ask me) or the second of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy? Hmmm? Why? Exactly. Still it’s taken me this long to get over the non-stop tired and finally be reflective contemplative narrative tell-you-guys-stuff-ive enough to get this out on the interwebs. Now that you’re caught up there will be a whole bunch of catch-up posts about the few (see? I told you I could l legitimately use it!) things I was going to post before. Think of it like the “Next on Unlikely In Love…” flash-forward thing.
Oh, one other thing: I saw the new Star Trek movie and LOVE, LOVE, LOVED IT! And I promise I won’t tell you anything from the whole movie if you guys all promise NOT to tell me anything about the last few episodes of Lost because I’m VERY, VERY BEHIND.
Even though it's totally NOT my fault.
I swear, it’s not! I was totally gonna post two weeks ago to tell you about any number of things (there are actually numbers of things. As in more than one thing. I think maybe even more than TWO! It’s entirely possible that I could legitimately use the words ‘a few’ to quantify the things I planned to write about!) but I ran out of time before the annual Mother’s Day at the Coast (also called “Hey, let’s hang out and eat for a solid two days and oh look, water!”). But no problem, I’d just write one of my number of things when I got back on Sunday.
But then instead of spending the whole weekend at the coast and coming home on Sunday my house broke. It sprung a leak. One of those leaks that results in water coming to live in your carpeting which, as I understand it, is a bad thing.
Here’s the other crazy part, by the way: this is the SECOND time this house has flooded since I’ve lived here. Most people go their whole lives without ever having to walk across a room to the dulcet tones of “Squelch. Squish. Other sounds of water inside the floor-stuff” and yet I’ve done it now twice! Oh yes, there’s no doubt about it: I’m special. (I’m just now realizing I should probably have included that in my online dating profiles: “has magical ability to fill homes with an over-abundance of water.” Drat.)
Last time it was much worse and it was an insurance claim and I spent a couple of weeks living on concrete flooring with all of my belongings either boxed up by strangers or up on these little foam blocks. The foam blocks were actually really cool – I kept as many of them as I could and still use them for stuff. For about 6 of those days I felt like I was living inside the jet engine of a 747 preparing for take-off – there were fans, fans, fans running all the time. ALL. THE. TIME.
This time around it was only about 1/2 as bad – we kept the laminate flooring and the carpet, just replacing one pad and drying it all out for a week. Baseboards were removed and dime-sized holes punched in the sheetrock to make sure the air could circulate behind there and dry out the wall because hey, did you know that sheetrock is basically made out of paper? PAPER. All of our homes are essentially 2X4s covered up with thick paper and paint. Go ahead and try not to think of that tonight while you’re going to sleep. One solid sneeze and I’m pretty sure the whole thing comes down.
Where was I? Oh right, not my fault.
So I spent all of last week living at my parent’s house while mine was filled with a dozen mini-tornadoes. (I’ll admit that it was pretty amusing to drive past the place and see the front curtains in a constant state of mini-twister.) My parents do have a computer, but frankly it was three days of falling down sleepy every time I stopped moving for more than five minutes (I would so suck as a shark) followed by another three days of catching up on my life and then I had to move everything all back IN—
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I had to box up about 75% of my entire house, along with all the furniture, and store it in my carport. And I had to do all of the packing and schlepping and storing in about 6 hours. And that I’m awesome, because I did it in 5 hours. And then I spent a week saying “I need to get my {whatever} – oh, that’s right. It’s somewhere in my carport. Somewhere.” Followed by a healthy shaking of my fist to the skies. Good times.
Now where was I? NOT MY FAULT! RIGHT!
So now I’m back in and the boxes are about 2/3rd unpacked and somethings are actually improved by the whole exercise – why does anyone need two copies of Orson Scott Card’s Children of the Mind (the least accessible of all the Ender books if you ask me) or the second of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy? Hmmm? Why? Exactly. Still it’s taken me this long to get over the non-stop tired and finally be reflective contemplative narrative tell-you-guys-stuff-ive enough to get this out on the interwebs. Now that you’re caught up there will be a whole bunch of catch-up posts about the few (see? I told you I could l legitimately use it!) things I was going to post before. Think of it like the “Next on Unlikely In Love…” flash-forward thing.
Oh, one other thing: I saw the new Star Trek movie and LOVE, LOVE, LOVED IT! And I promise I won’t tell you anything from the whole movie if you guys all promise NOT to tell me anything about the last few episodes of Lost because I’m VERY, VERY BEHIND.
Even though it's totally NOT my fault.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Staycation = Yaycation!
I have a very hard and fast rule, and it is hard and fast this: I don’t work on my birthday.
I. Don’t. Work. On. My. Birthday.
With only a few sad exceptions I always take my birthday off from work. I do this both because I DON’T WORK ON MY BIRTHDAY (you may have heard rumors to this effect) and also I really hate having to do the birthday celebration thing at work. It just always feels forced and awkward and also in my family really the rule is that you get to decide how your birthday goes. You get to decide. You get to pick the theme for the party and You get to buy the cake and You get to invite the guests and all these good things.
And yet? When they celebrate a birthday at work it pretty much never gets to be YOU who decides on the method of celebration. Like you should be spared that chore, which usually means that you get to stand around with people you’re not really friendly with (um, who is that guy over there? The one eating the entire slice of cake in one bite? Is it just me, or is he maybe a homeless guy? Anyone? Hellooo?), eating cake you don’t really like (Oh gosh, German Chocolate Carrot Cake with coconut frosting! Was there no vomit-flavored cake with turd frosting left in the bakery section?), having an inane conversation you’d just a soon avoid (no, I have never heard the story of how you got that scar there. Oh, I don’t know, how do you define “easily freaked out by stories about spurting blood”?). And if you don’t grin and bare it you’re considered ungrateful because here your co-workers went and did all of this FOR YOU. HAPPY F*CKING BIRTHDAY, JERK.
So me, I stay AWAY from work on my birthday.
This year was the best of all the stay-away-from-work-birthday years. Because this year the birthday? It fell on a Wednesday. You just don’t take a day off to celebrate how you didn’t die, even once, for another whole year and then go back to the job the very next day. YOU JUST DON’T! And if you’re gonna take two days off to celebrate the annual not dying does it really make sense to go back to the office for one day, just to head right back into a weekend? IT DOES NOT! Therefore, my peoples, the Wednesday birthday is just another way of saying FIVE-DAY-WEEKEND, BABY!!!
All hail the five-day-weekend. I’ll wait while you all hail it… (you. Behind Debuke. I don’t see you all-hailing. What, are you too GOOD to all hail the five-day-weekend? I thought not!)
Now, the epic five-day-weekend of not-dying goodness would have been 100% perfect if I’d had a shiny new (used, but whatever) car to drive around, which I did not (and more on that in the next post.). But even without that, the following things spiced up the great and powerful five-day-weekend:
Right now? I SUPER-DUPER wanted to write to you guys.
I. Don’t. Work. On. My. Birthday.
With only a few sad exceptions I always take my birthday off from work. I do this both because I DON’T WORK ON MY BIRTHDAY (you may have heard rumors to this effect) and also I really hate having to do the birthday celebration thing at work. It just always feels forced and awkward and also in my family really the rule is that you get to decide how your birthday goes. You get to decide. You get to pick the theme for the party and You get to buy the cake and You get to invite the guests and all these good things.
And yet? When they celebrate a birthday at work it pretty much never gets to be YOU who decides on the method of celebration. Like you should be spared that chore, which usually means that you get to stand around with people you’re not really friendly with (um, who is that guy over there? The one eating the entire slice of cake in one bite? Is it just me, or is he maybe a homeless guy? Anyone? Hellooo?), eating cake you don’t really like (Oh gosh, German Chocolate Carrot Cake with coconut frosting! Was there no vomit-flavored cake with turd frosting left in the bakery section?), having an inane conversation you’d just a soon avoid (no, I have never heard the story of how you got that scar there. Oh, I don’t know, how do you define “easily freaked out by stories about spurting blood”?). And if you don’t grin and bare it you’re considered ungrateful because here your co-workers went and did all of this FOR YOU. HAPPY F*CKING BIRTHDAY, JERK.
So me, I stay AWAY from work on my birthday.
This year was the best of all the stay-away-from-work-birthday years. Because this year the birthday? It fell on a Wednesday. You just don’t take a day off to celebrate how you didn’t die, even once, for another whole year and then go back to the job the very next day. YOU JUST DON’T! And if you’re gonna take two days off to celebrate the annual not dying does it really make sense to go back to the office for one day, just to head right back into a weekend? IT DOES NOT! Therefore, my peoples, the Wednesday birthday is just another way of saying FIVE-DAY-WEEKEND, BABY!!!
All hail the five-day-weekend. I’ll wait while you all hail it… (you. Behind Debuke. I don’t see you all-hailing. What, are you too GOOD to all hail the five-day-weekend? I thought not!)
Now, the epic five-day-weekend of not-dying goodness would have been 100% perfect if I’d had a shiny new (used, but whatever) car to drive around, which I did not (and more on that in the next post.). But even without that, the following things spiced up the great and powerful five-day-weekend:
- Baby’s first pedicure. SO SHINY! (there will also be more on THAT in a future post)
- naps on three different days!
- shopping, which netted me CDs, Books AND Clothing!
- All-You-Can-Eat Mongolian BBQ, which I like to call “Mongolia is trying to kill me with their non-stop food wonders. Make Mongolia stop.” And then I like to ‘splode with Mongolian food excellence.
- A bonus ladies day with the Queen and Risky where we remembered how awesome we are and made people around us wish they were us (especially with the beautiful feet!)
- Sleep
Right now? I SUPER-DUPER wanted to write to you guys.
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