crooked house

Buzzfeed Headlines I Would Write if I Worked for Buzzfeed

Have you noticed you can't look at Facebook or Twitter without seeing some Buzzfeed (or Upworthy or HuffPo) headline you just have to click on, even though every atom in your body is screaming not to? Yeah, and you probably noticed this phenomenon last year, right? I take a while to notice these things. I'm really quick, in a very slow way. Anyway, it got me to thinking about headlines I'd write, if I worked for Buzzfeed (which I would be more than happy to do. Please hire me!)

You Won’t Be Able to Resist This Headline: It’s Like a Gun to Your Head Or A Bag of Chips After You Haven’t Eaten All Day, One or the Other or Maybe Even Both.

Bully Taunts Handicapped Toddler: Handicapped Toddler Sets Bully’s Hair on Fire! What Happens Next Will Make You Weep in Terror and Joy and Perhaps Run Screaming From the Room.

If This Makes You Uncomfortable, Then You Make Me Uncomfortable, Which In Turn Makes Everyone Else Uncomfortable, And No One Wants to Be Uncomfortable, So For God’s Sake, Lighten Up Already.

101 Deeply Personal Opinions About Pubic Hair and How They Can Help You Retire NOW On A Guaranteed Income for Life!

How a Strict Diet and Exercise Regimen Actually Caused This Woman to Gain Fifty Pounds While This Other Woman Lost One Hundred Pounds Eating Whatever the Hell She Wanted: And Yes, She’d Like Fries With That.

The Secret to Uncovering All the Secrets: Everyone Knows But You. FREE! For a limited time.

How Finger and Toenail Parings Can Actually Be Used As a Substitute for Money: 15 Easy Ways.

At Last, Scientists Have Discovered How Humans Can Live Forever! If You Don’t Try It, You’ll Hate Yourself Later. You Know, When You’re Dead and Everyone Else Is Still Alive.

9 Out of 10 People Are Completely Wrong About This Incredible Fact: You Think You Know But You Don’t, Unless You Do Know, In Which Case You Probably Don’t Think You Know.

There’s Something Deeply, Inexplicably Wrong With You. You’ve Always Sensed It. Click Through to Find Out What It Is.

You Look Pretty Today.

Lillet and Grapefruit Juice and Rose Birthday Cake

My new favourite treat. Lillet and pink grapefruit juice on ice, accompanied by a slice of leftover rose birthday cake. Spent the afternoon painting a bookcase grey and two old seatless chairs, one in bright red, the other in turquoise, in preparation for a project similar to this one. I can barely type now but I can certainly shovel that cake into my mouth. And the drink has disappeared in the time it's taken to type this. Perhaps I should have another one...

Shhh. Don't Tell Anyone But...

Sometimes I buy things only because I like what they are called. Hence these Sticks and Twigs. Feeding them to my children makes me feel like we're living in Hansel and Gretel. I don't know if that makes me the very evil stepmother or the extremely evil witch. They are organic and supposedly good for you. And they look pretty much like real sticks and twigs:

Of course the children do not really like them. We've had this half-eaten bag for several weeks. Every now and then I take out a couple and eat them while chortling. Marketers, I am your target. (Maybe that makes me more like the far too easily influenced woodcutter father.)

Don't Laugh At Me

From what I’ve gleaned, some mornings at Luke's school, instead of “Oh Canada,” they sing “Don’t Laugh At Me” as a kind of anthem against bullying. He loves this song and sings it loudly and sweetly and over and over again. The chorus goes like this:

Don't laugh at me
Don't call me names
Don't get your pleasure from my pain
In God's eyes we're all the same
Someday we'll all have perfect wings
Don't laugh at me

Only Luke sings that first bit like this:

Don't laugh at me
Don't call me names
Don't get your pleasure from my face...

And so on.

The first time I noticed his mondegreen, I laughed, which was, shall we say... unfortunate. But I do. I do get my pleasure from his face.  Especially when it’s got that adorable earnest expression on it.

Luke calls the song "Perfect Wings" and I managed to find this version on youtube once he started singing snippets of the lyrics at home:

I'm not sure about the wisdom of evoking death in a song on this topic through the mention of those wings. ("Being bullied? Don't worry! They can't hurt you in heaven!") I'm also sort of flabbergasted that Mark Wills changed the verse about the "beggar" on the corner to the "cripple" on the corner. Way to make that word choice even more politically incorrect. Although "homeless person" has a lot of syllables -- it would've been tough to squeeze them all in there. But whatever.  It makes my little boy happy. And I get my pleasure -- my shameless, shameless pleasure -- from that, too.

Sleep or Lack Thereof: Patricia Morrisroe's Wide Awake

This beautiful photo (published here under the creative commons) was posted by bitzcelt on flickr. I concur with his comment.

I realize I've been relying heavily on photos instead of words here on the blog lately -- that's because I've been having a lot of trouble stringing them together when speaking, let alone writing. I am just. so. tired. At about four or five months of age Sylvie started to pretty much sleep through the night. Regular readers of this blog could probably go back and check for the exact date -- I'm too tired to bother. Because ever since Sylvie started to crawl, about two months or so ago, she's been waking up pretty much every two or three hours at night. At first I thought she was excited by her new ability and simply wanted to get moving; then I chalked it up to teething. She had an ear infection in B.C., which certainly didn't help, and now, as a result of the antibiotics, she has thrush. So it's probably been all of those things, in sequence or in combination. I don't consider it sleep deprivation on par with that caused by a newborn -- those wakenings, at least for me and my babies, always lasted an hour or more at a time. These wakenings are usually mercifully brief, except for an early morning one that generally lasts forty-five minutes to an hour, around  four a.m.

I'm a big sleeper -- love to sleep! Loved it before I had children. Love it even more now. And I need a lot of it. I've always needed more than the average eight hours a night. I need about nine to feel normal. And I'll happily steal ten if I can. I also like to read in bed, so those ten hours are, ideally, book-ended by a couple of hours lying there reading. Of course, this does not happen nearly often enough for my liking, not with two small children, and probably too often for David's. (The man is a saint. And he doesn't need very much sleep. And I haven't said a word about all the hockey lately. Isn't there some kind of playoff thingy going on?)

One of the subjects I like to read about in bed is, drum roll please: sleep. So this week, I absolutely devoured Patricia Morrisroe's new memoir of insomnia, Wide Awake. A magazine writer, Morrisroe, who is best known for her biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, has been an insomniac since childhood. She has no trouble falling asleep -- it takes her an enviable five minutes. It's staying asleep that's the problem. She generally wakes up for at least a couple of hours in the dead middle of the night. At least, she used to. Because during the writing of this book, which she decided to write in order to find a cure, she did indeed solve the problem of her insomnia.  This is actually quite surprising, given how unyielding the problem tends to be. The book belongs as much in the popular science genre as it does in the memoir category-- it is science made light, personal and, whenever possible, amusing. In fact, even though I'm utterly sleep-deprived at the moment, it actually kept me up, reading into the night for way too long.

For a little taste of Morrisroe on sleep, check out this article about how her mother-in-law, who is 87, takes advantage of her insomnia to work her way through the classics.

I like sleep so much, I've often thought of writing a novel about it. (I wrote "dreamed" instead of "thought" first and then changed it. That was too much of a groaner, even for me.) A novel about sleep would be exciting, huh? Here's a tiny flash I once wrote on the subject.

Also, if you like the subject of sleep and you haven't read Steven Millhauser's novella Enchanted Night, you really should. There's a lot more activity in it than just sleeping but it's very ... sleepy. And it beautifully evokes a small-town summer night.

If you know of any more really good books on the subject of sleep -- or somehow related to it -- please do drop me a line or leave a comment.

Wondering What Happened to the Moon?

Screw that whole "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good so be good for goodness sake" technique. We've had rather more than the usual share of crying and pouting around here lately. Until this morning, when we played "I hope the bad guy doesn't <insert chore here>" successfully for at least two hours. All you have to do is shriek something like, "I hope the bad guy doesn't brush his teeth... Oh no! He's getting  his tooth brush... Stop him! Horrors, he's putting toothpaste on it! The moon is going to spin out of the sky if the bad guy brushes his teeth... He's... wait... the bad guy's brushing his teeth! Oh noooooooo! There goes the moooooooooooon!"

The bad guy took off his pajamas, put them in the wash, picked out his clothes and got dressed entirely by himself, brushed his teeth, brushed his hair, picked up all his toys, picked up all his sister's toys, took some dirty laundry upstairs, took all the dirty dishes out to the kitchen, took out the garbage, scrubbed the bathroom toilets, did the grocery shopping, and reshingled the roof.

Okay, so maybe those last three are a bit of an exaggeration. 

If you're wondering where the moon went, why the sun has turned black, why the earth's orbit has suddenly stopped, and why an alien spacecraft has landed on the White House lawn, well, I'm afraid we might be responsible. We're sorry for the inconvenience but David and I feel it was totally worth it.

Strange New Interest: Perfume

It's Day Way Too Many of the new exercise and diet program, an effort to get rid of the baby weight. Weirdly, over the past couple of days I have developed an intense interest in perfume, something I've never had much time for. I think it must have something to do with sensual deprivation -- food was my go-to for gratification before and now I need something else. (And please don't suggest sex. Clearly, sex can be very fattening -- it is responsible for this baby weight in the first place.)

I've been perusing Now Smell This, a top perfume blog; I've added both Perfumes: The A-Z Guide and The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession to my Christmas list; and I've just ordered a bunch of samples from The Posh Peasant, a place that decants expensive and/or hard to find perfumes into smaller (and thus cheaper) bottles. I ordered samples of the  Top 10 according to Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, Top Cult Favorites from Style.com, the Maternal Magic set, and the Best for Winter set, as well as teensy tiny samples of Annick Goutal Songes, Diptyque Philosykos, and L'Artisan The Pour Un Ete, three perfumes I now feel compelled to smell, thanks to the descriptions at Now Smell This. I may have officially lost my mind. Now if only I could lose this weight, too.

The Credible Hulk Performs Extensive Taste Tests

November 1st is a great day to add to Luke's wardrobe. This half price Credible Hulk (as Luke refers to him) costume will get a lot of wear over the next year.

November 1st is also a good day to perform extensive taste tests. Luke decided to compare and contrast the following fruit candies:

Each candy was given a rating of great, good, or bad:

 

And then ranked in order of preference:

 

And then Luke fell over in a sugar-induced coma.

Appropriate Names for Half-Human/ Half-Vampire Babies

Half-human/ half-vampire baby Renesmee's photo taken from this fan site.

So I finished the last of the wretchedly addictive Twilight saga last night -- it was kind of like eating four giant chocolate cakes one after the other or maybe four pot roasts and now I am feeling more than a little sick. Also: I have been suffering through lots of vivid but not particularly frightening vampire dreams. My head cold has turned into a painful sinus infection and I had to finally give in and start taking tylenol and a decongestant, which apparently acts as a stimulant, so perhaps that helps explain all the dreaming. I'm thinking it's why the baby has been kicking so hard. My teeth are killing me, especially one of my eye teeth, which seems fitting. I'll start antibiotics on Monday if this isn't getting any better by then as I cannot imagine undergoing either a c-section or a normal delivery in this state.

Obviously, now that I've read the final book and (spoiler) discovered that Bella gives birth to a half-human/half-vampire child, I can no longer write the vampire/baby allegory I was hoping would make my fortune. Great minds think alike or dull ones seldom differ, whichever. I will say that it's probably not a good idea to read the baby's birth scene/Bella's death as a human scene when you are only weeks away from giving birth yourself. I'll post an excerpt for the Babies in Literature series when I can stomach reading that section again. But half-human/half-vampire babies apparently tear their way out of the womb with their teeth.

I was amused by how Bella came up with her baby's name, as it also echoes some of my own ideas about trying to honour grandparents. She combined her own mother's name, Renee, and Edward's adoptive vampire mother's name, Esme, and came up with Renesmee. (Maybe we should go with something like Ruthinda. Or Luntha.) Astonishingly, Bella managed to go even further than that, by combining her father's name, Charlie, with Edward's vampire dad's Carlisle, to make Carlie, which she used as a middle name. Impressive feat, wouldn't you say? (We'd have to go with Jurray or Mohn or some variation thereof.) I'm wondering if we're going to see some actual Renesmees when the final movie comes out -- I've heard tell of the odd Trinity since The Matrix came out ten years ago. As of yet, Nameberry has no entry for Renesmee. Must remember to give Pam the heads-up.

Twilight Delight

I've never been much interested in vampire genre fiction -- for instance, I've never read any of the Anne Rice books on the subject and I don't think I was able to sit through any of the movies (were there more than one?). But this past week, unable to pick my head up off my pillow for more than fifteen minutes and unable even to focus on the television, I developed a bizarre craving for the stuff. Chalk it up to pregnancy.

Spurred on by something I saw over at Light Reading, I picked up Living Dead in Dallas: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel at the library. I enjoyed it very much, the way I'd enjoy downing a giant bag of potato chips if, say, the potato chips came in a delicious and as-yet-uninvented Sex'n'Violence flavour. Unfortunately the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse books were out -- and since in my state, you don't really want your nether regions stimulated any more than they already are by the pressure of an enormous fetal cranium, varicose veins, an overactive bladder, and constipated bowels (is this too much information?) -- I decided to spring for the wildly popular Twilight book, which I'd read was a teenage abstinence allegory, typed out with one finger by a Mormon housewife while she cared for a baby and two other little boys under the age of five.

I have now made a private vow to write something similarly wildly successful and lucrative just as soon as I pop out this baby. Should be a piece of cake. And speaking of cake, although the abstinence allegory is certainly very obvious, the novel also works very nicely, perhaps even better, as an allegory of dieting. Edward feels about Bella the way I feel about certain kinds of chocolate and this thought kept me giggling through many of the otherwise romantic scenes. I was not the only one in my household to notice this, either. After I finished the first book and the second, New Moon, I sent David to the video store for the movie. Early on, he commented, "She's just like M&M Slow Cooked Pot Roast to him." This is a dish I've been serving my family ever since I was diagnosed with an iron deficiency -- quite a big deal around here since we normally don't eat much red meat at all. If I do manage to write my own wildly lucrative vampire allegory of something or other, perhaps I will invite M&M to invest in a product placement. Although I have a feeling my allegory might end up having something to do with babies being the vampires, and mothers being the bloody pot roast. Milk = blood, or something. That hasn't been done before, has it? I'm still working out the details.

As for Luke's impressions, well, he didn't take note of the dieting allegory as he was not watching the inappropriate movie but was instead playing an elaborate game with his collection of McDonald's toys on the floor. He did, however, stop for a minute to notice Edward's brightly lipsticked lips. "He's got a funny mouth," he said. He watched as Edward said a bunch of romantic things to Bella and was perplexed by her serious and quivering reaction. "His mouth is so funny! Why isn't she laughing?" Because your pot roast doesn't laugh at you while you're staring it down at the end of your fork, that's why. It just quivers and looks tempting.