karma

On several occasions, I have heard people say that in their next life, they want to come back as a cat. If that is the case for any of you, Bailey (see photo) wants to save you a ton of fruitless searching by letting you know that the absolute best place to urinate is on a pair of high heeled black leather boots. The best time to do this is approximately 15 minutes before your person attempts to put them on. If you do this more than once (on the old boots and then the REPLACEMENT boots), Bailey says that it is the best thing ever. Bailey also says, "You're welcome."

Serenity

There is a small lake next to the building where I work. During lunch, many of us park our cars there, hoping to find a brief oasis in the landscape of our stressful days. I stare at the water as it shimmers ever so slightly, and the same quiet thought drifts slowly into my brain: This would be a terrible place to dump a body.

Walk the walk, talk the talk

Any business that takes 3 weeks to get a computer for a new employee loses the right to use the expression "things move pretty fast around here."

About Last Night. . .

As a temporarilyy hiatus-ed professional, I don't get a lot of opportunities for intelligent dialogue. The majority of my conversations are discussions with the cat about who really owns my desk chair, pressing or saying 1 to continue in English, and intellectual discourses on whether or not I want fries with that. So, I was really excited when the folks on Twitter started a game last night: #lessernovels. The goal: come up with lesser-known novel titles. It was a brilliant follow up to the previous night's #lesserquotes (which included my contributions "Want to see me make farty noises with my armpit?" - N. Bonaparte, "We'll always have Paris. . .and syphilis." - H. Bogart, and "You're off to a good start, but have you considered spelling S-E-X-Y in Old English font across the buttock?" - Tim Gunn)

There were many, many, many submissions. I joined at about 11:30 and stayed in the action until 4 am, when my funny fell out. I read way too many good ones to mention, but here are all of mine, plus a few from others (with the author's Twitter name in parentheses). If you've got your own (which I'm sure you do, as my friends are all very brilliant people), post them in the comments. I can't wait to see them.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the noise of my brain exploding. . .

#Lessernovels by Me

1. The Prime of Miss Jane Fonda
2. The Muffled Sniffles of Lot 49
3. A Prius for Owen Meaney
4. Uncle Tom’s Cabana Boy
5. JacksonHouse Five
6. The Lion, the Witch, and the Ward of the State
7. Jurassic Parking Lot
8. The Agony and the Expletive Deleted
9. The Canterbury Webisodes
10. The What Do You Call That Thing They Use to Mash Up Medicine and Stuff, You Know Like in the Olden Days by Arthur Miller
11. Call of the Girls Gone Wild
12. The Man in the Iron-On Mask
13. Beokitty
14. Gilliganmesh
15. Of Human Band-Aids
16. Of Human Bond Film
17. The GPS Says We’re East of Eden but All I See is a Walmart
18. The Autobiography of Malcolm in the Middle
19. James and the Giant Bleach
20. Jacob, Have I Hooked Up With
21. The Swiss Family Fahrvergnügen
22. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderbra
23. The Five People You Meet at Work (by KateC)
24. I Know Why the Caged Bird Poops on Newspaper
25. Who Cut My Cheese
26. The Old Man and the Sea Monkey (by krud)
27. The Mime-Traveler’s Wife
28. Cyrano de Tom Bergeron
29. Tom Jones’ Diary
30. Pair of Dice, Lost
31. AbD Zhivago
32. Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Jewish
33. TMZ Footage of the Vampire
34. Adobe Dick
35. The Last of the MoeHowards
36. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. . .because the Big Stuff is Coming and You’re Totally Screwed
37. The Naked Brunch
38. The Clan of the Care Bear
39. Kon Tiki Barber
40. The Rachel is a Lonely Hunter
41. A Winkler in Time
42. Nicholas Nickelback
43. The Font of the Baskervilles
44. The Wind in the Widows
45. All Things Great and Small, but Mostly Great
46. Battleship Down
47. Of Mice and Men Who Are Too Proud to Admit That They Are Freaked Out by Mice
48. Waterpark Down
49. Gulliver’s Extended Layovers
50. Adequate Expectations
51. How the Grinch Stole Pittsburgh
52. Alternating Tuesdays from 1:45 to 2:15 with Morrie
53. The Red Badge of Cowerage
54. Bob Marley and Me
55. The Little Artist Formerly Known as Prince
56. Angela’s Rashes
57. The Three Mouseketeers
58. A Tale of Two Suburbs
59. War and Peace and then More War
60. The Grapes of Wrath of Khan
61. The Catheter in the Rye
62. Thongs of Innocence and Experience (thedrollhouse)
63. Les Liaisons Contagieuses
64. Kanye West of the D'Ubervilles
65. Kvetch 22

Also, if the sound of my brain exploding amuses you, follow me on twitter at miss_sarah_s.

p.s. At what point do I get to list this as a skill on my resume?

Highlights

Having had (although mostly ignored) a blog for several weeks, I decided that it was a good idea to check out the competition. Blogspot has a tool where you can randomly surf to one of their blogs. Here's what popped up today. I may be jumping to conclusions here, but I think a babel-fish type translator MAY have been used on this:

Hi your on the road to taking much, i mean huge from forex market if you will follow my little advice and adapt it, i will be so pls to see your testimony rolling in.my analyzer will give you take-profit, stoploss, buy- level, sell-level and i have the nitty gritty way i use to make bug from this indicator which i will give you everything, Here is the demo i run with this great analyzer also i decide to use a broker platform that is popular so that you will not say i dont know them.if you are interested in this forex analyzer am going to give out, it worth $97 from my mentor but i will give it out at a very affordable amount so that each time you see my flag flying on anything about fx market you will be interest to try it. see you later......

Trivia: Part 13

Little known fact - in movies from the 1940's, if they show people have sex, it's a metaphor for riding a train into a tunnel. True story.

Dear Fellow Salvation Army Shopper,

I hate to make something out of nothing, but the shoes with the thick, corkboard soles are called WEDGES, not WEDGIES.

Yours in style,
Me

If. . . . .

Reasons not to clap your hands:

1.You are not happy, and you know it.
2. You are happy, but you do not know it.
3. You are happy and you know, but you don't really want to show it.
4. You do not have hands.

Possibly the Most Stupid Thing Ever Said in the History of Human Speech

Person 1: Hi! I'm here to conduct a surprise pricing audit of your store.

Person 2: Why didn't you call to let me know you were coming?

Because Fridays are for procrastination

Pineapple: glucose-spiking nature treat or trusted, faithful companion. You decide

http://www.usanetwork.com/series/psych/games/pineapplepal/

Sign of Immaturity AND Old Age

I just got the weekly list of upcoming concerts from Ticketmaster, and the only performer whose name I recognized was Elmo.

Have camera, will drive irresponsibly (note to insurance agencies: I'm just kidding)

Because I'm earning a living as a mystery shopper and because no one has constructed a shopping mall in my house (believe me, I've checked. There is not so much as a Sbarro's), I've been driving a lot. I often have to bring a digital camera so that I can photograph things like landscaping, signage, and restrooms (yeah, let's just not speak about that, ok?).

Since I've been photographing too many restrooms to be profound lately, I thought I would show off some of the highlights of my week so far. . . .

This little guy was on the grass next to the road. He was 80 feet long. I think he asked to be directed towards Tokyo, although it was hard to understand him with his mouth so full of pedestrian. Actually, he was only (only) about 3 1/2 feet long. And he was asking about New York.

Ah, back to school time, when we all show off our new fall wardrobes. This comes from the *Raiden collection at Sears. I wanted to take a picture of him from the front, but that would have required me to turn my body backwards while driving forwards, which I'm not legally allowed to do until I've lived in Florida for at least 5 more years. Also, I was afraid that if he saw me, he would decapitate me with his **magic hat. Total fatality.

(* and ** were both Mortal Kombat references. If you don't get them, congratulations, you either have a life or are younger than I am).

Oh, and yes. That Jamaican restaurant is really called "Nice Mon."

Nice, but I bet they're not real.

When I was little, I had a doll that peed when you squeezed her. Not all children were that lucky.

Flower of the World. Now accepting reservations for February 14, 2026.

This car was in back of me while we were in the merge lane, merging onto I-95. And then he decided that he wanted to be next to me. In the one and only merge lane. Merging onto I-95. At 65 miles per hour. And then he got about 3/4 of the way in front of me (single lane, high speed, righteous indignation, etcetera, etcetera). And then he stopped, nearly running me off the road to avoid him. We could have had an accident. Luckily, we didn't. That would have totally interrupted his phone conversation.

There is nothing I could say here that does not make me seem like a completely awful human being. Believe me, I've tried. Ok, here's one. . .if you were eating while reading this post, I'm very, very sorry.

Nope, I'm still horrible. Sorry.

Verb, present tense

Pandering: To specially construct your communication so that it is better understood by pandas.

How you know you've been married a long time

Me: Hey, wanna see what happened to my toenail?

Him: Yeah! Cool!

This post is unavailable in Connecticut

My grandfather has a rule for everything. For example, he firmly believes that there are certain things, like socks, shirts and undershirts, which you should only have a specific number of. At Christmas, if you buy him something from one of those categories, he’ll open it, chuckle, and ask, “What the hell do I need one of these for?” It’s not that he’s not grateful. He just can’t imagine why anyone would need x+1 of those things for which x is clearly sufficient.

And so, after the presents are unwrapped and the bows put in a box to be used again next year, my grandfather shuffles off to the bedroom to cast off the oldest or shabbiest member of the “whatever thing you gave him” group to make room for the new kid on the block.

Rules work well for my grandfather. There’s a rule for paying bills (the day they arrive), a rule for playing cards (Monday afternoons and Tuesday and Thursday evenings, rain, shine, snow, or sleet), and even a rule for eating dinner (4:30 pm, on the dot).

But sometimes he struggles with basic decisions, and he has a hard time knowing when enough is enough. When the grocery stores in New Jersey started honoring triple coupons (so 30 cents off became 90 cents off) my grandfather began marathon shopping, often getting a cartload of merchandise for less than the price of a pizza. The year his shopping started, I went to my parents’ house for Christmas, and my mother asked if I needed any deodorant. “Maybe a little,” I said. “What kind do you have?” My mother walked me to the garage. “Welcome to aisle five,” she said, opening the door with a flourish. I stepped inside the garage and saw my old bedroom furniture, hundreds of sticks of deodorant lined up on the bookshelves like pieces from the world’s strangest dominoes game. “Shampoo,” she said, “is in aisle seven.”

I’m the same way. I have a hard time saying when enough is enough, and I sometimes struggle with decisions. In first grade, the teacher would hand out a ditto, with a comic strip of Jimmy and Sally playing with a ball. Word balloons floating above their heads featured stilted, single-syllable banter about who had the ball, what to do with the ball, and whether or not the ball was good, bad, blue, or green (there are precious few appropriate single-syllable adjectives). Strategic letters were missing in each panel. “Fill in the missing letters,” she’d say, “and then color the whole thing.”

I had no problem filling in the letters. I was already a fluent reader with a collection of Nancy Drew, Bobbsey Twins, and Helen Keller biographies at home. But I would struggle for 20 minutes at a time, wringing my hands over whether Jimmy’s S-H-I-R-T should be cornflower or sky blue. Would Sally’s skin tone L-O-O-K better next to brick red or vermilion? I was convinced that my academic career hinged on Sally and Jimmy’s wardrobe decisions. “Mrs. S,” the teacher would say on the next parent teacher conference day,”your daughter is reading at a high school grade level, but what I really want to commend her on is her use of colors in the blue spectrum.”

As I struggled with difficult decisions, I started developing some rules of my own – things that would make decisions easier. I drafted a schedule for which stuffed animals I would sleep with each night of the week, making sure that each bear and baby doll got an adequate amount of pillow time without making any of the others jealous. One Halloween, I came home from trick-or-treating, dumped the treasures on my Holly Hobbie bedspread, and made a schedule for eating all of the candy, one day at a time, paying special attention to variety (a chocolate day could not follow another chocolate day) and portion control (with 1 Good n’ Plenty clearly equaling 2 Dum Dum lollipops, for instance).

I know, this all makes me seem crazy. Trust me, I’m not. I get up every morning, eat my oatmeal, drink my coffee, and that’s pretty much where my routine ends for the day. K-Mart does not suck, and Wapner is not on at 4 pm. What I do depends on what I need to do, and that is based on what needs to get done.

Here’s what I am saying, though. I am currently on a professional hiatus. I have a master’s degree in my field from an Ivy League institution. I left a wonderful job (my dream job, in fact) as the management's sensibilities started to differ from my own. I know I love my field, but I need to figure out where I want to be and what else I want to do, because for so long, my job has been the only thing to define me.

During the hiatus, I’ve been mystery shopping as a way to bring in some money. For 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I pretend to shop, read name tags, and write about whether the high school student working a summer job at a fast food restaurant over the summer remembered to greet me within 30 seconds of my arrival. I’m worried that without some rules to say “ok, you’re doing enough,” I’ll never have the courage or the conviction to take on fewer assignments – to bring in less money while I get real life stuff done. My life will be summed up by how many pairs of sunglasses I bought and returned in a single quarter.

I need to set new rules. I’ve set some in place already, and I’m torn between telling you and just having you trust that those rules are enough. What they will do, however, is help me to decide which assignments to take, which to give up, and which days are mine to work on growing in whatever direction I choose.

And so, the adventure begins.