That's Empress to You

Seeking to Supplement Otherwise Perfect Fiancee

White male seeking supplementary girlfriend - something along the lines of a walker, only the opposite sex, and no patent leather dress shoes or knowledge of opera and/or Martha's Vineyard ferry schedule required. Ideal candidate:

Loves spicy Mexican and Chinese food. Make that: loves any Mexican and Chinese food. Okay, make that: eats Mexican and Chinese food.

Sleeps in tents outside.

Listens to and appreciates Gillian Welsh and other whiny white female singer/songwriters.

Embraces all variety of men's footwear, including Van slip-ons (plaid), and Crocs.

Enjoys huge, crowded outdoor concerts like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and Outside Lands in spite - or even because - of the possibility of death by trampling and the sight of old guys in khakis and fleece really getting down, man.

Likes bacon fried in butter, butter soup sprinkled with peas, spaghetti sauce with shaved butter, and fish marinated and sauteed in butter, served with a butter topping.

No sex or talking required. Just have a sleeping bag, UV protective hat, collection of folk vinyl, faulty peripheral vision that doesn't allow you to see below the knees and a good cardiologist.

My Day in the Kitchen

Made ramen for breakfast. Prepped ahead of time: cut open outer package and inner foil packet and arranged them neatly on counter while water was boiling. Put in egg (see swirling froth in center) to simulate actual nutrition.

 

Made chicken soup, but overcooked the egg noodles. Picked out chicken, carrots and celery, using a strainer, spoons, and several bowls. Finally resorted to using my fingers. Recooked egg noodles and put it all back together again.  

 

Cooked "beets" for 2 1/2 hours because they didn't seem to get done. Finally took them off stove. They taste like nail polish remover. I have no idea what this food is. The house smells so bad we may need to evacuate.

 

Determined by clever use of internet that Quince ($4.99/lb. at Bi-Rite) is inedible unless cooked. Too cheap to buy more to make poached Quince, or Quince jam or whatever. Also, still don't know how to pronounce Quince.

 

Created extremely effective fruit fly trap by placing tomato and plum scraps in container, sealing it with paper, poking small holes in the paper with a pencil and watching for hours as fruit flies crawl in and find themselves unable to escape, outsmarted, because they're fruit flies and I'm a human.

A Totally Not-Funny Screed

Having just read a blog post called A Message To Women From A Man: You Are Not “Crazy” written, by, of course, a man, I wanted to put my fist through my computer screen. First of all, the guy uses an overbroad definition of the word gaslighting, defining all simple overbearing, dismissive rudeness (often but not always perpetrated by men against women) as gaslighting. Sometimes it is, but most of the behavior he describes, while intolerable, is not gaslighting. Gaslighting is insisting to another that an untruth is true, either unconcerned with the psychological damage this will do, or wreaking this damage purposely. I don’t think men go around saying, “You’re so sensitive. You’re so emotional. You’re defensive. You’re overreacting. Calm down. Relax. Stop freaking out! You’re crazy! I was just joking, don’t you have a sense of humor? You’re so dramatic. Just get over it already!” to drive women crazy. Most men who do this do it because they’re tools to begin with, and they’re too lazy or emotionally inept to deal with the reactions they are provoking.  

But what I really want to say is: Dude you don’t have to tell me stuff I already know. Having you say it – even if there is truth in your simplistic diatribe – in this sanctimonious tone, with your male empathy smeared all over it, makes me want to smack you.

I don’t like men taking over women’s issues, and I don’t appreciate their trying to look all post new-age, generation-we-are-all-sisters, more-feminist-than-thou. You’re not more feminist than I am. And women don’t need you to save us. We need you to cooperate, but we can save our damn selves. Don’t get me wrong. I am glad you recognize that there’s a problem. And I know your heart is in the right place. Maybe all you’re trying to do is convince your less enlightened brothers that they should stop oppressing women.

But when you are all marching around in Take Back the Night rallies, I want to grab you by your crotches, yank you over to the curb, and scream, “You’re the ones who took the night away in the first place, asshole!” It pisses me off to watch you wave your righteousness around in my face. You do not know what it is like to be raped by a person who is bigger, stronger, and who, by virtue of his gender, is in almost every social and cultural respect more powerful than you. I do and you don’t.

You can do your part by treating all women, and especially the women in your life, equitably and with respect, by voting for and legislating equality in every aspect of society. You can even stop that frat guy from mauling the drunk freshman girl. But I think you’re more likely to be able to do it by saying, “Stop that, motherfucker,” than by painting gender signs on a bedsheet and reciting Adrienne Rich poems. Recite away, if you love Adrienne Rich, but don’t do it to prove how bad you feel about gender inequality.

Okay activate, activize, whatever the verb is, as much as you want. Maybe it will help. But just know that there’s a generation of women who don’t appreciate it that much, who kind of want to say, “Just stop treating women like shit already, and shut up about it.”

 

Michele Bachman's World

Got rid of the muskrat. Pawlenty. What a wimp. Where's my eyeliner? Makeup girl is an idiot; Minnesota girls are dumb, that's why I'm from Iowa. This week. Submissive means respect. Good line. Should repurpose that. Default means potted plant. Oh that's good. Ew, jiggly. Where's that dumbbell? Triceps, triceps, triceps. Founding Fathers were all about triceps. James Madison: big fan of the sleeveless shift. Notice I said James Madison. Gotcha' media loses again. Rick Perry. I don't see you. I'm not look-ing. Dum-duh-duh. I am not eating any more corn, no way. I earned this victory and I am done with corn. What I'm going to eat is, I'm going to eat this Huntsman guy for lunch. That's a good one. I wonder if Marcus is right when he says the triple strand overpowers the slash neckline. What's a caucus anyway? Whatever. Bet I win. Still, I should Google it so I don't look dumber than that Palin creature. My clothes are better. Hair too. Economic fix: poor people = pedicab drivers. Rich people's money that they don't have to spend on taxes + pedicab drivers = JOB GROWTH!!! Hey, also: poor people + pedicabs = healthy weight loss. Bonus health care solution! Bonus quote unquote environmental benefit! Bingo. Where's my eyeliner?

should have gone to business school

Obama: We must come together in the spirit of bipartisanship to strike a deal.
Them: Fuck you.
Obama: I'll give you my lunch money.
Them: Fuck you.
Obama: Okay, then you can take my shoes too.
Them: Fuck you.
Obama: I'll give you a ride to my house so you can take my mom's stereo, how's that?
Biden: Wow. Neat. I love this.

Not that you can see them as he walks out of the room...

There is something very creepy about this guy's eyes. Opaque, like the dusty windows of an unlived-in house. Or a dead fish, Monday’s catch in Saturday’s supermarket.

And when he cries, they shimmer and seep, and he looks a lot like the pervy guy on the corner that all the little kids run away from.

Beauty Solutions

This stuff smells like insecticide. Seriously. I'm walking around smelling like I sprayed myself in the face with Deep Woods Off. I bought it because it was on sale at Safeway for $11. And it has the words "Age" and "Perfect" in it, so obviously it's supposed to help with the problem of having to strategize the angle of your head when you're having sex, and maybe even that leprous-y looking skin on the upper lip.

But I'm thinking, as I sniff the air around my face, which I can't really avoid, since my nose is ON my face, I'm thinking, if you go to the right place, you can get two martinis for $11 and I know for sure those would make you feel a lot younger than this crap. So I am done with economizing. I can look and feel beautiful and carefree, plus smell pretty, like a flower, not like a camp counselor at Bible Camp. And have nice cashews at the same time.

 

Truth Schmuth

I’m reading David Shields' Reality Hunger in preparation for our North 24^th Writing Group retreat on Monday, where I’m expected to write for hours on end without getting up and eating potato chips, one at a time, which requires numerous trips downstairs to the kitchen. Most everyone else is staying three days. I am staying one and a half.

I have gotten over my man-hating observation and subsequent irritation that only men write manifestos, although I think it’s both true and annoying. At first I compare Shields’ book unfavorably to Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse, because its form is similar – numbered little literary bullet points, and a surfeit of hyperbole. And because it’s the only book like that on my bookshelf.

But this particular manifesto does, like Barthes’, have some interesting parts and some beautiful parts. So even though Shields, like other manifesto-writing men includes many too many declarative statements that allow no room for disagreement or even much in the way of eyebrow-raising, he does address the reality conundrum, and writes stuff like (about poor James Frey who wrote a memoir that was not true in every exact detail or even very many of them, strictly speaking) “I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one.”

I’ve always believed that a true memoir is impossible. Or if possible, impossibly dull.

I read this book while doing planks in a bikini. It’s a girl thing, having to do with trying on swimsuits to see which one looks least hideous – in anticipation of the sitting around by the lake part of the retreat – and then feeling like a big fat pig. The semi-true part of this is that I read four pages, tops, while in a plank wearing a bikini. The true and boring part is that I read most of it while sitting at the kitchen table, with sesame seeds scattered around me. Or on the sofa. Plus I‘m only on page 53.

 

 

Thanks but no thanks

David Berreby, in his Big Think column waxes forgiving (esque) about the fact that Anthony Weiner’s gaze strayed from his pregnant wife’s burgeoning belly and landed on the adoring Twitter feeds of total strangers. Berreby cites statistics indicating that men become less faithful as they face fatherhood, and posits that, even while men can be doting, devoted partners who look forward to raising a child with the woman they love, a wife’s pregnancy “… can also be the moment when the prospective father is most prey to a prickly, eager nostalgia for aspects of life that feel, somehow, incompatible with fatherly gravitas.”

So just when we’re puking and acquiring fat asses and our skin is getting all blotchy and we no longer have an arabesque (although we’re just as wildly happy as Anthony Weiner et al, don’t get us wrong), these people are trying to set up little ego tents in campgrounds in counties where they’ve never even set foot. 

That said, I completely agree with (my friend David) Berreby when he says that men can be both devoted husbands/fathers-to-be and twitchy unreliable douchebags. That makes total sense. Because seriously, you don’t think a pregnant woman would rather be having hot sex at the George V with a young Spanish intellectual than rubbing cocoa butter all over her stretch marks?

My question is unrelated to this.  What I want to know is what makes men think that women are interested in weird abstract images of penises. Or chests. Specifically their penises or chests. My kid tells me that a central tenet of the Vagina Monologues (which I truthfully never saw) is that men should simply find women’s genitalia beautiful. Alright, so unattached weird vaginas are supposed to be beautiful. No. Ew. I furthermore assert that weird immaterial penises, that are almost surely not going to be, you know, of particular proximity or use, are also kind of icky. Ditto chests. They’re just not that attractive, unless you’re attached to the owner. I’m not sure if this makes me a romantic or a pragmatist, or just a ho. In any case, sending photos of your parts to strange women is just asinine. And it belies an all too familiar testosterone-driven lunacy wherein powerful men think their things are so fucking cool.

I don’t think Weiner should resign because he did anything so egregious. But I do think we are at a point in our country’s history where we say that men in power ought to be stripped of the fantasy that everyone on planet earth is besotted with every part of their being. Because we’re not. They should know that they’re not that big – really, Anthony, seriously – and that their chest has weird bony protrusions. Just like most women know that we are not in every aspect universally attractive.

 

 

Thank you AP Chemistry

If you ever leave your hummingbird nectar - because you are the queen of hummingbirds, to whose feeder hummingbirds flock like pilgrims - boiling for like two hours while you sit in your office doing heinous work which you are professional enough not to name, and the alarm company calls to see if you are being consumed in a house fire, and the hummingbird nectar is now a hardened lava mass in your expensive saucepan, do not fear. Scrape out most of it, and then boil a mixture of baking soda and water. You will watch as the hopelessly hardened tar-like mass flakes off as if by magic.You will watch the black flakes form the image of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and Lance Armstrong, one after the other. And you will thank your kid who told you to try this rather than to follow the bad Google advice which says to boil hydrogen peroxide, because while it may work, it may also explode, or catch on fire. You only have to nod and smile when the kid starts talking about carbon and oxygen and so on.