Rob: I wonder if that girl from “The Ring” could crawl out of an HDTV LCD screen?
Me: I don’t know, she might not be up-to-date with the latest technology.
Rob: Yeah. That’s an all-digital signal. I don’t think that could carry the damned.
I woke up early this morning to put some stuff in a crock pot for tonight’s dinner. (Doesn’t that make me sound like a domestic goddess? Don’t get excited — it was a Banquet frozen crock pot meal that took approximately three minutes to prepare. I had to wake up early because I’m always running so late in the mornings that every minute is crucial.) I managed to get ready, prepare dinner, get out the door, stop at the mailboxes to send off some bills, and actually clock in to work on time — well, I was two minutes late, but that’s close enough. Life was good.
I spent all day thinking about the delicious dinner that awaited me, knowing it would be ready minutes after I walked through the door, with little extra work required.
When I got home from work, I was soooo ready to relax in front of a bowl of hot chicken pasta. I went into the kitchen and prepared to add the noodles, when I made a devastating realization: In my exhausted stupor this morning, I’d completely forgotten to plug in the crock pot.
%$#@! Rob could hear my swearing from beyond his closed office door.
We used this and the fact that it’s my birthday eve as excuses to go get takeout food and come home to watch episodes of Saved By The Bell on DVD, which I’d ordered off of Netflix in a moment of lunacy.
When I saw that the very first episode involved a dance-off between Zach and Slater, I knew we were in for a treat. The spandex leggings/skirt combinations were whirling and the latent homosexuality was in the air. It was wonderful. And let me say this: The inspired performances of the cast were pure acting brilliance. You could almost feel Max’s (proprietor of teen hangout “The Max”) aching desire to fit in with the Bayside teen crowd, trying so desperately to woo them with magic tricks, dreaming of one day marrying Jessie and moving out of his mom’s basement.
And A.C. Slater, with his sleeveless shirts and acid-washed pleated jeans, obviously was struggling between his desire to maintain a tough-jock exterior and his pressing need to reveal his true sexual identity and go on to a distinguished career dancing in Broadway musicals. (I offer episode two as evidence: He “pretended” to be interested in wearing a girl’s shirt so that Mr. Belding would invite him back to his office.) There was a lot going on beneath that chiseled, dimpled surface.
Zach Morris was clearly manic-depressive, cleverly calculating schemes and tricks designed to make other people find him so annoying that they wanted desperately to beat him to death with a folding chair. If they’d only known that he was constantly in the middle of such expertly disguised suicide attempts, maybe someone could have gotten him some help.
And Kelly. Kelly, Kelly, Kelly. The poor girl can’t decide whether to appear virginal or whorish. One minute she’s saying, “Oh, I don’t know how I’ll ever choose between these two boys who like me. Ok, you can kiss me, but not with tongue.” (All right, I may have made up that second sentence.) And the next moment she’s dancing around in a skimpy outfit that leaves very, very little to the imagination. I imagine that the adult Kelly has gone on to a hard-knock life as a stripper with a heart of gold.
There’s so much more to say about the show and its superb cast of characters. Screech himself is worthy of entire book, especially now that he’s homeless. But let’s just leave it at this: The fact that this show never received an Emmy is a crime not only against television, but against the dramatic arts as a whole. Shame on you, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Shame on you.
The biggest thing I’ve accomplished today was to get the theme song from “Charles In Charge” stuck in a coworker’s head.
It’s important to have goals.
I’ve just taken a shower and started a load of laundry in an effort to wash away the last traces of a traumatic experience at Village Inn.
Rob and I have recently rediscovered our love of late-night meals at all-night diners, so we’ve been finding ourselves at places like Denny’s, Ihop and Village Inn a lot lately. Tonight seemed like a good night for chicken strips and an ultimate skillet, so off we went.
The Village Inn we went to is brand-new, and as such the whole place is just sparkling clean. I took care of that rather quickly.
Most of the meal was uneventful and involved us pondering the acting abilities of those who starred in American Pie, and discussing all the child actors we could think of who are now in rehab. Typical stuff.
I’d finished most of my meal when I decided I needed ketchup on my French fries, so I picked up the glass ketchup bottle and shook it. I knew something was wrong when I sensed something flying over my shoulder.
I paused.
Rob stared at me.
I set the ketchup bottle – now lidless – back on the table.
Rob tried not to laugh.
He says this was the funniest part of the ketchup catastrophe – those few seconds when I sat there stunned, wide-eyed, thinking “What just happened?”
I now have a personal understanding of ketchup trajectory. Let me tell you this: It can fly a long way.
I looked like a stabbing victim. I had a thick line of ketchup going from my hair down across my neck and shirt and across our table. A couple of globs of ketchup and the lid had also flown over my shoulder onto the booth seat behind me, where fortunately no one was sitting.
While I was trying to clean ketchup out of my hair, the waitress came by to see if we needed anything. Rob asked for maple syrup, and I asked for napkins. When she said “no problem,” her voice had that distinct tone that comes from a superhuman effort to contain laughter. I considered explaining that the lid hadn’t been screwed on, but I realized that there was absolutely nothing I could do to make this situation any less embarrassing.
Rob hurried to eat his pancakes, understanding that I had just become disenchanted with the Village Inn dining experience. The ride home was … ketchup-scented.
So, here’s your after-school special lesson: Be careful with your condiments. They can leave clothing stains and lasting psychological scars.
Within minutes of our wedding, people started asking Rob and me when we planned to start having kids. Maybe not within minutes, but at least within a couple of days. So far, we?ve always had other things to do. Rob is finishing school, I considered going to grad school, etc.
As Rob’s undergraduate career gets closer to completion, we’re running out of reasons to put off having our first child. This has been a huge topic of discussion between the two of us over the last couple of weeks, and I think we’re just about ready to start really trying. Weird.
Parenthood is a scary, exciting, daunting idea, and there are lots of things that worry me about it. Chief among those:
These, of course, are just the major concerns. Then there are all the minor ones like raising a decent person with good morals, bringing a child into a scary world where scary things happen, how to survive the many months before she’s old enough to tell me why she’s so upset, and that I’ll never get any sleep again.
Casey says, though, that Rob and I will be fun parents. I guess I’ll just have to remember that and hope for the best.
I often have a dream where I suddenly realize that I have a pet hamster (sometimes it’s a rabbit) and I’ve forgotten to feed him for about a year. I rush into the room where I keep the cage – and apparently never ever go into normally – and find my poor little pet barely clinging to life, gasping out his dying breaths in between a bowl of rotten food and an empty water bottle. I then begin a frantic struggle to revive him, which for some reason usually involves pouring a bunch of cold water on him. The dream never lasts long enough to find out whether the hamster lives or dies.
I’m sure this dream means that I’m subconsciously afraid that I’m letting some part of my life wither and die, and if I don’t do something about it soon I’ll lose it forever – or some other sort of psychobabble bullshit. But mostly I wake up thinking that hamsters are really cute, and I’d like to get one.
Rob gave me a hamster cage and various hamster care supplies for Christmas, and despite everything in the cage having an “Xtreme” name (probably because the whole thing is purple and neon green), it’s actually pretty cool. I’m sure any hamster would be honored to call that cage home. So yesterday I prepared the cage with bedding, food, water and treats, and we went out to buy a Chinese dwarf hamster from PetSmart.
She’s really cute, but so far I’m afraid to pick her up, because I have visions of her clamping down on my finger hard enough to hit bone. How ridiculously girly of me. But I plan to get over that soon. My problem now is that I’m having trouble deciding on a name. Here are the ones I’ve thought of so far:
Eleanor, Snuffles, Marlo, Hermione (I can’t help it that I’m a Harry Potter geek), Seth Cohen (… also an O.C. geek …), Princess Sparkles, Marissa (because she probably weighs about the same as Marissa Cooper on The O.C.), Carol Ann (after the little girl in Poltergeist), Varuca, Anastasia, Gretchen, Nancy (after the girl in Nightmare on Elm Street), or Clay Aiken (because I think that’s funny, for no good reason).
My hamster is a girl, but I’d be willing to give her a boy’s name if it’s a name I really, really like. I’m also open to suggestions if anyone has the perfect hamster name and is just dying to share it.
Wow, I’ve just written entirely too much about my hamster. I’m going to stop talking now.
My boss, Lisa, is weirdly preoccupied with death. I’m pretty sure that, if asked, she could spend hours listing off the various bizarre ways you could meet your end. Bee stings, getting trampled to death by a horse, a single-engine Cessna crashing into your car during a cross-country trip. Whatever. If anyone’s ever died of it, she’ll warn you about it. I usually ignore her.
A couple of weeks ago, she told me I had to read the paper right away, because a prescription drug that I’m on has received a new FDA black-box warning. Apparently, it causes an unusually high number of blood clots and strokes in its users. Great. I managed to shrug this off.
When I got to work today, I read an article on the wire about the asthma drug I’m taking, saying that it carries a statistically significant risk of causing fatal asthma attacks. This is in addition, of course, to a risk of hoarseness, headache, cough, dry mouth, swollen tongue or mouth, white patches on the mouth, weight gain, vision changes, tremors, trouble sleeping, seizures, severe muscle weakness or cramping, irregular heartbeat, numbness of the hands and feet, chest pain, or worsening of breathing symptoms. Umm … yay for medical science.
Maybe Lisa has a point, and I should be afraid of everything.
Also, I’m pretty sure my neighbors are running some sort of black market furniture operation. Once they realize that I’ve figured out what they’re doing, they’ll probably try to kill me, too.
Goodbye everybody. This was fun while it lasted.
I often think that I’d be a lot less warped if my parents had never let me watch Poltergeist as a child. The movie was released in 1982, when I was 4 years old. I don’t know when exactly I saw it, but it was probably shortly thereafter. In any event, I remember getting all excited and hunkering down in front of the TV any time Poltergeist was being shown. In fact, even when it wasn’t on, I’d sometimes channel surf hoping that, by some stroke of luck, that movie would be playing somewhere.
I dearly loved Poltergeist, even though it scared the ever-loving shit out of me. That creepy little girl was just a little older than me, but close enough that I could pretend we were the same age – plus the actress’s name was Heather, which made it easier to pretend she was me. So if my parents ever actually made an effort to keep me from watching such a mentally scarring film, they probably would have been in for a major temper tantrum. Maybe they recognized that, and chose instead to let me scare myself.
I’m guessing that this movie caused my fear of clowns. Remember that scene where Robbie’s toy clown with the oh-so-happy face grabs him and pulls him under the bed to his almost-certain demise? Not to mention the fact that Poltergeist launched my love of scary movies in general, many of which have their own scary clown moments. Remember when that kid gets his arm ripped off by a fanged clown in IT? Holy crap, how can anyone in the world not be afraid of clowns? They eat children!
Nowadays, I find that I can associate just about anything that happens in real life to something I’ve seen in a scary movie. That kid that’s giggling the next aisle over in the grocery store? Hmm, he sounds a lot like Gage from Pet Sematary, just before he slices through Jud’s Achilles tendon with a scalpel. Because of that, children’s laughter in general makes me a little nervous. What the hell am I going to do when I have my own children? Movies have taught me to fear them. Anybody seen The Ring, The Others, The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes, Godsend, The Good Son or even the new Dawn of the Dead? Every one of those movies has taught me that it’s best to just run the other way if my child even has a thoughtful look on his face, because he’s either about to tell me he sees ghosts in my kitchen or he’s about to tear my throat out with his teeth.
For the most part, I’m able to be relatively normal around others, without making scenes by running from small children in the grocery store or bursting into tears when I see a clown on a cereal box. The only times I get myself into trouble are when I point out to others why our present situation belongs in a horror movie. When I suggest that my niece’s teddy bear looks exactly like the type that we can expect to come alive in the night and wield a butcher knife, it earns me a few uncomfortable looks and an inevitable “Heather, you’re kind of weird.” They never take my suggestion and bind the bear’s arms with duct tape before bed. I don’t know what the big deal is; I’m just saying that they should err on the side of caution. Because really, how do you know a toy will never become possessed by the spirit of a dead serial killer? It’s just like buckling your seat belt before going for a drive, just in case you have an accident. You have to be careful about these things.
…All right. I’m done now. 
The other day I learned something about myself: I don’t know how to walk. Fortunately, I think this is a defect most people don’t really notice about me, since no one points at me and laughs at the grocery store or anything. Then again, maybe everyone’s just being nice to the poor gimpy girl.
One of my coworkers, Lisa, got a pedometer for Christmas so she can count the number of steps she takes every day and figure out whether she’s moving enough to consider herself healthy. According to her, you should take 10,000 steps per day. She said that the first day she wore it, she took a little less than 4,000 steps, which made her feel very lazy. Since then, though, she’s passed the 10,000 mark several times.
This made me wonder about my own health. Rob went to a seminar for Blue Cross Blue Shield just before Christmas, and among the free gifts he got was a little pedometer, which we never opened. After my conversation with Lisa, I decided to use the pedometer to determine whether I’m as much of a lazy-ass as I think I am.
So when I came home from work a few days ago, I clipped the pedometer to my jeans and took a few test laps around the apartment, counting my steps myself to check the pedometer’s accuracy. On a typical trip across a room, the pedometer counted fewer than half of my steps. Figuring there was something wrong with the pedometer, I checked the tiny little instruction paper that came with it. According to that, the pedometer wasn’t the problem – I was. Apparently I have an improper walking technique. The instruction sheet didn’t bother to explain how to walk correctly, just that my walking style must be wrong, wrong, wrong.
That left me to try to figure out how to walk correctly. There’s a little lever dealy inside the pedometer that bounces when you walk, and each bounce counts as a step, which means that my typical non-bouncy steps don’t usually register.
The only way I could get the pedometer to work was to walk with exaggeratedly bouncy steps and swaying hips that reminded me of how I used to walk when I was a kid playing dress-up, prancing around the house in my mom’s best dress, walking the way I believed all adult women did.
I kept the pedometer on while I took some stuff down to the car, to see how many steps it took and whether the gadget would register them all. The pedometer counted 107 steps from my dining room to the car and back again, which means I’d have to make about 100 of those trips a day, bouncing and swaying like an idiot, in order to consider myself healthy.
I’ve decided it’s not worth it. I mean, don’t we all know skinny, bouncy people who just make us want to commit murder? I’d rather keep my graceful glide – that’s how I’m gonna refer to my incorrect walking method – and be non-annoying and get fat.
Since the pedometer obviously wasn’t going to work out for me, I tried hooking it to Bella’s collar to count her steps. After 15 minutes of running, playing and wrestling with Kody, she had only registered 79 steps. I hooked it to Kody, too, and he only registered 71 steps in the same amount of time. Looks like my dogs are going to be fat with me. At least I’ll have company.
Note: This blog entry was actually written yesterday, on Dec. 23. Not that it matters, but in the interest of being honest, I thought I’d tell you that.
A couple of days ago, the federal government raised the U.S. Terror alerting system or whatever it’s called to orange – the second highest rating. Apparently the government has some intelligence that indicates the nation is under severe threat from evil terrorists, and this newest attack could rival what we saw on Sept. 11.
What this means to me is that a stranger got to rifle through my bras today at the airport. Rob’s parents bought us plane tickets to Dallas for Christmas, so we flew down this evening after a short day at work for me. At the baggage check, a guy with blue latex gloves opened my suitcase and ran a doily over everything inside, looking for explosive materials. At the security checkpoint, they made us take off our shoes and take our laptops out of the bags. We went through unscathed, but the guy in line in front of us was almost tackled and arrested when the security guy mistook the word “fortunately” for “unfortunately” during casual conversation.
After all that fuss, it was almost anticlimactic that the most traumatizing event of the whole flight was that I found a little piece of napkin floating in my complimentary Pepsi.
When we landed in Dallas, Rob’s parents took us out to eat at a steak place, where we stuffed ourselves stupid on buffalo chicken strips and slabs of cow. It was definitely a good welcome to Texas.
On the way out of the restaurant, I found myself distracted by a tray of plasticky looking desserts that had been sitting there the whole time we were eating dinner. Thinking they were just plastic, I reached out and touched the ice cream part of a sundae. Ok, imagine ice cream that’s room temperature, but hasn’t melted and has kept its shape. Squishy, right? So I wound up with this weird substance on my finger that may or may not have been food. Thinking back, I’m pretty sure that the temperature and the plasticky look to the dessert safely indicates that it wasn’t real, but my first reaction was, “Oh my God, I just stuck my hand in someone’s food!”
How do you react to that? Do you hunt down a waitress and tell her, “Um, I just stuck my finger in that person’s dessert . . . You might want to serve them another one.” Or do you just pretend nothing happened and hope no one noticed?
Rob’s parents were right behind me walking out of the restaurant, and I didn’t know if they’d seen what I did. Because I’m continually trying to fool them into thinking that I’m not an idiot, I decided that the best course of action would be to pretend I hadn’t stuck my hand into squishy pretend ice cream and that I didn’t now have that fake ice cream all over my finger. After keeping my hand in a fist for a while, I eventually managed to discreetly wipe it on my pants, all the while still panicking a little because I thought some unsuspecting diner was about to be served my cooties.
As far as I know, Rob’s parents never suspected a thing. Of course, if I ever decide to post this on my blog, my cover will be totally blown. Rob’s parents are two of the three people who do occasionally read my ramblings.
