I loathe four things most people love:
Coffee tables (where did the entire freaking room go and just how many bruises do I have to endure on my legs?).
Parades (Is it over yet? How about now? Haven't I seen this band before?)
Star Wars (None of this would ever happen nor do I want to pretend that it could like with Jurassic Park.)
The beach (the salt and/or murky water, the lack of shade, and by far the number one reason I hate the beach: the sand that I'll still be finding in my ear folds a month later.
I begrudgingly accepted an invitation to play volleyball with my colleagues today because the last few times they played, I was legitimately unavailable to play. I promised them last time that I'd go the next time they played, and that happened to be today. On the beach. In the sand. Ugh.
So I rode the bus up to Oak Street Beach today and got off pleasantly surprised by the beauty of the park area near the beach. Then I walked down to the walkway that runs under the street and then up to a bike path adjacent to the beach.
And the sight was breathtaking. I actually paused to take in the beauty of the sparkling water and the vast span of white sand in front of me stretching out to my left and the city of Chicago to my right and behind me flanked by small patches of greenery.
I was even able to ignore the cigarette butts and pieces of garbage poking up through the sand to enjoy the gorgeous day and my hilarious colleagues, pausing several times to marvel at the beauty of the juxtaposition of sand, water, and nature and the bustling city.
Not even the sand clinging to my legs and arms after diving into it to bump the ball bothered me - and I even quit dusting myself off after the first few times I dove and allowed the sand to stay on my skin, which is virtually unheard of when it comes to myself.
Remember the time I actually enjoyed being at the beach? It's hard not to with great weather, great company, and great scenery. Maybe as I get older, times will continue to be a changin'.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Day 36: If I Ruled Lichtenstein... There Would Be No Miss Lichtenstein
I'm generally a pretty open-minded person, but absolutely cannot get behind anything that resembles exploiting children for profit and pedophiles.
Yes, I'm talking about beauty pageants for children.
The TV show Toddlers and Tiaras often crops up on a show I love called The Soup, in which Joel McHale pokes fun at events that happened on TV shows over the past week. I have learned to mute the TV at that point and read a magazine or otherwise occupy myself because if I would watch whatever clip they feature, I would most likely launch into a violent rant at whomever happens to be in close proximity.
I loathe parents who live their own dreams vicariously through their children. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the child of a soccer player playing soccer, for example, but as long as it's what the child wants to do. The moment they don't want to do it anymore, the parents should not force the issue.
It just makes me sick seeing the children complaining to their parents about practicing and having to put on pounds of makeup and fake their way through a pretentious routine in skimpy clothing. There's even a bathing suit round - for kids! What are they judging - who's lost the most baby fat? And if that's the case, I shudder to think of the diet their parents force them to eat. They're children! They should be being loud, getting dirty, spilling ice cream on their shirts, and playing off the cuff instead of having their every move be scripted.
OK so before I get really upset, there will be an absolute ban on beauty pageants of any kind for anyone under the age of 18 in Lichtenstein. No exceptions. In fact, I don't want there to be any kind of beauty pageants at all in my country. People will be too busy having fun the good 'ol-fashioned unscripted way.
Yes, I'm talking about beauty pageants for children.
The TV show Toddlers and Tiaras often crops up on a show I love called The Soup, in which Joel McHale pokes fun at events that happened on TV shows over the past week. I have learned to mute the TV at that point and read a magazine or otherwise occupy myself because if I would watch whatever clip they feature, I would most likely launch into a violent rant at whomever happens to be in close proximity.
I loathe parents who live their own dreams vicariously through their children. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the child of a soccer player playing soccer, for example, but as long as it's what the child wants to do. The moment they don't want to do it anymore, the parents should not force the issue.
It just makes me sick seeing the children complaining to their parents about practicing and having to put on pounds of makeup and fake their way through a pretentious routine in skimpy clothing. There's even a bathing suit round - for kids! What are they judging - who's lost the most baby fat? And if that's the case, I shudder to think of the diet their parents force them to eat. They're children! They should be being loud, getting dirty, spilling ice cream on their shirts, and playing off the cuff instead of having their every move be scripted.
OK so before I get really upset, there will be an absolute ban on beauty pageants of any kind for anyone under the age of 18 in Lichtenstein. No exceptions. In fact, I don't want there to be any kind of beauty pageants at all in my country. People will be too busy having fun the good 'ol-fashioned unscripted way.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Day 35: What Did Batman Say To Robin...About Mannorexic Magicians
Holy Yankee Doodle Dandy Batman!
I was especially excited for this week's Batman and Robin posting after a night of looking through yearbooks from the early '70s. My mom's best friend and sister came into town for the holiday and were reminiscing with the dusty volumes, which turned into a laugh-until-you-cry episode for everyone when my mom started reading aloud what her friend and their former classmates wrote in her yearbook all those years ago.
Among all the queer comments (everything was referred to as "queer" back then, apparently) were that generation's very own Batman and Robin jokes:
Don’t ever catch a cold at the football games because of all the fans.
I was especially excited for this week's Batman and Robin posting after a night of looking through yearbooks from the early '70s. My mom's best friend and sister came into town for the holiday and were reminiscing with the dusty volumes, which turned into a laugh-until-you-cry episode for everyone when my mom started reading aloud what her friend and their former classmates wrote in her yearbook all those years ago.
Among all the queer comments (everything was referred to as "queer" back then, apparently) were that generation's very own Batman and Robin jokes:
Don’t ever catch a cold at the football games because of all the fans.
Why are there so many fans at basketball games?
Because they are so cool and air-conditioned.
Because they are so cool and air-conditioned.
Did you ever hear about the pencil that talked?
But they don’t so shut up.
Awesome. Simply awesome.
But now getting back to this generation's Batman and Robin joke... today's question is, "Why did Yankee Doodle call a feather in his hat macaroni?"
My partner in crime weighs in:
Yankee doodle went to town
riding on a pony
stuck a feather in his cap
and called it macaroni
This is a popular childhood song. It's catchy, innocent and easy to remember. It reminds me of another song with all the same qualities.
Ring around the rosies
pocket full of posies
ashes, ashes
we all fall down.
We all know, or at least I know, that the legend following this song revolves around the Black Plague that took place during the middle ages. The original lyrics were "Achoo, Achoo we all fall down." A victim of the plague would enter a sneezing fit before collapsing to the ground and dying.
Though Yankee Doodle did not die with the song about death, it too has its own message. The original verse goes "stuck a feather down his throat and threw up macaroni." You see dear reader, Yankee Doodle suffered from what is now labeled as "Mannorexia." He was very image conscious and would make himself vomit after a meal, which was usually macaroni salad.
Simply, the song describes the tale of a young Yankee Doodle and his struggle with body image. He would binge eat on his favorite foods, stick a feather down his throat and throw up macaroni salad. It is indeed a sad, sad story. However, since the diddy was so catchy, future song writers decided to change the lyrics. Days turned to weeks. Weeks turned to months and 300-some-odd years later, we have a song whose origins very few people now remember. A song which recorded the very first case of Mannorexia.
My response: The reason Yankee Doodle was image conscious was because he was constantly being scrutinized by his audiences, many of whom weren't used to the big city folk coming into their towns. You see, Yankee Doodle was a traveling magician. He took his magic show on the road by riding his horse, Macaroni, from town to town (yes, the horse's name was "Macaroni").
Macaroni was involved in one of the tricks in which the magician Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in a hat, and called it Macaroni because he then pulled out the horse from the hat. It was amazing.
Yes, Yankee Doodle was the original Houdini, but is not as well known because he just did his show for small audiences in small towns with no phone lines to pass the word along. And he and his horse ate hardily with all the dough they were rolling in, but Yankee occasionally felt bloated and didn't like to perform on his "fat" days, but sometimes had no choice, so he found his own solution.
So why did Yankee Doodle call a feather in his hat macaroni? Because he was a mannorexic, macaroni-salad-loving magician with a horse named Macaroni.
But they don’t so shut up.
Awesome. Simply awesome.
But now getting back to this generation's Batman and Robin joke... today's question is, "Why did Yankee Doodle call a feather in his hat macaroni?"
My partner in crime weighs in:
Yankee doodle went to town
riding on a pony
stuck a feather in his cap
and called it macaroni
This is a popular childhood song. It's catchy, innocent and easy to remember. It reminds me of another song with all the same qualities.
Ring around the rosies
pocket full of posies
ashes, ashes
we all fall down.
We all know, or at least I know, that the legend following this song revolves around the Black Plague that took place during the middle ages. The original lyrics were "Achoo, Achoo we all fall down." A victim of the plague would enter a sneezing fit before collapsing to the ground and dying.
Though Yankee Doodle did not die with the song about death, it too has its own message. The original verse goes "stuck a feather down his throat and threw up macaroni." You see dear reader, Yankee Doodle suffered from what is now labeled as "Mannorexia." He was very image conscious and would make himself vomit after a meal, which was usually macaroni salad.
Simply, the song describes the tale of a young Yankee Doodle and his struggle with body image. He would binge eat on his favorite foods, stick a feather down his throat and throw up macaroni salad. It is indeed a sad, sad story. However, since the diddy was so catchy, future song writers decided to change the lyrics. Days turned to weeks. Weeks turned to months and 300-some-odd years later, we have a song whose origins very few people now remember. A song which recorded the very first case of Mannorexia.
My response: The reason Yankee Doodle was image conscious was because he was constantly being scrutinized by his audiences, many of whom weren't used to the big city folk coming into their towns. You see, Yankee Doodle was a traveling magician. He took his magic show on the road by riding his horse, Macaroni, from town to town (yes, the horse's name was "Macaroni").
Macaroni was involved in one of the tricks in which the magician Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in a hat, and called it Macaroni because he then pulled out the horse from the hat. It was amazing.
Yes, Yankee Doodle was the original Houdini, but is not as well known because he just did his show for small audiences in small towns with no phone lines to pass the word along. And he and his horse ate hardily with all the dough they were rolling in, but Yankee occasionally felt bloated and didn't like to perform on his "fat" days, but sometimes had no choice, so he found his own solution.
So why did Yankee Doodle call a feather in his hat macaroni? Because he was a mannorexic, macaroni-salad-loving magician with a horse named Macaroni.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Day 34: Never Have I Ever... Actually Hated The Truth Table
Never have I ever actually hated the truth table, even though I've insisted at every single 4th of July that I did. But I'll explain more tomorrow. Too much fun eating too many cocktail weenies, catching up with family, watching tank wars, handing out sparklers to all the kids, oohing and aahing over the fireworks, roasting marshmallows and telling stories around the fire pit, and skinny dipping. I love being home.
Happy 4th of July everyone.
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Edit: It was 2:30 a.m. when I finally went to bed yesterday after an absolutely fantastic holiday at home. The weather could not have been more perfect, the company was great, and it was just plain good to be home. So I postponed writing this post until today.
In true Ray family tradition, the impromptu truth table turned up again this year. The truth table was accidentally created a few years ago among myself, my cousins Emma and Breanne, my aunts Liza and Kathy and my Uncle David, and has since appeared at the 4th of July every year.
The six of us were sitting and talking around the six-seated, circular table on my parents' back porch when a few touchy, juicy topics came up and the more senior members of the family started goading the younger generation to tell them the "real" story, which we did. And, apparently we had to tell the truth because someone started yelling "Truth table! Truth table!" and the truth came out.
The same concept has cropped up every year since then whenever someone has said "truth table." Although I pretend I hate it and always say something along the lines of "How did we get to this topic and why are we still talking about it?!?! (referring to sex, embarrassing stories from childhood, etc.) I not-so-secretly love being able to be so open with my extended family.
This year's topic revolved around drinking in college because my Aunt Liza's youngest son, Nate, is headed to Central Michigan University in the fall. Emma recently graduated from the party school, so my Aunt Liza (who did not attend college) wanted to know "the real story" about college kids and drinking, and could not believe some of the stories we were telling her (which, in the grand scheme of things, were "normal" stories about underage drinking in college at parties).
This somehow led to the names of sexual acts (yes, the Generation X- and Y-ers had to explain to some of our Baby Boomer aunts and uncles about tea bagging, dingle berries, a dirty Sanchez, and the superman dance); what middle schoolers are advertising with bracelets these days (what sexual acts they're willing to do); and what my mom thinks happens at teen parties (all the girls put on different shades of lipstick and give the boys oral sex, apparently).
It was a little embarrassing seeing the reaction of my aunts and uncles as we explained that yes there is a name for those stray balls of poop that are missed with toilet paper, but actually pretty dang hilarious at the same time.
This closeness is something I cherish in my family, have fought like hell to keep through the years, and will continue to do so as long as I'm breathing. It's too important to just let it go.
Happy 4th of July everyone.
Edit: It was 2:30 a.m. when I finally went to bed yesterday after an absolutely fantastic holiday at home. The weather could not have been more perfect, the company was great, and it was just plain good to be home. So I postponed writing this post until today.
In true Ray family tradition, the impromptu truth table turned up again this year. The truth table was accidentally created a few years ago among myself, my cousins Emma and Breanne, my aunts Liza and Kathy and my Uncle David, and has since appeared at the 4th of July every year.
The six of us were sitting and talking around the six-seated, circular table on my parents' back porch when a few touchy, juicy topics came up and the more senior members of the family started goading the younger generation to tell them the "real" story, which we did. And, apparently we had to tell the truth because someone started yelling "Truth table! Truth table!" and the truth came out.
The same concept has cropped up every year since then whenever someone has said "truth table." Although I pretend I hate it and always say something along the lines of "How did we get to this topic and why are we still talking about it?!?! (referring to sex, embarrassing stories from childhood, etc.) I not-so-secretly love being able to be so open with my extended family.
This year's topic revolved around drinking in college because my Aunt Liza's youngest son, Nate, is headed to Central Michigan University in the fall. Emma recently graduated from the party school, so my Aunt Liza (who did not attend college) wanted to know "the real story" about college kids and drinking, and could not believe some of the stories we were telling her (which, in the grand scheme of things, were "normal" stories about underage drinking in college at parties).
This somehow led to the names of sexual acts (yes, the Generation X- and Y-ers had to explain to some of our Baby Boomer aunts and uncles about tea bagging, dingle berries, a dirty Sanchez, and the superman dance); what middle schoolers are advertising with bracelets these days (what sexual acts they're willing to do); and what my mom thinks happens at teen parties (all the girls put on different shades of lipstick and give the boys oral sex, apparently).
It was a little embarrassing seeing the reaction of my aunts and uncles as we explained that yes there is a name for those stray balls of poop that are missed with toilet paper, but actually pretty dang hilarious at the same time.
This closeness is something I cherish in my family, have fought like hell to keep through the years, and will continue to do so as long as I'm breathing. It's too important to just let it go.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Day 33: Shakespeare's High School Poetry On Top 'O The Mornin' To Ya
If I must write a poem with a rhyme scheme, I must say that I love a good limerick. Maybe it's because of my Irish background (some people believe the limerick was invented by soldiers returning from Limerick, Ireland in the 1700s) but I suspect it's mostly because of the fun, funny, and lighthearted nature of this particular style of poem.
A limerick is a five-lined, beat-centric poem with one couplet and one triplet in the rhyme scheme of a, a, b, b, a. They generally contain hyperbole, puns, and onomatopoeia (which happens to be one of my favorite words in the English language along with the words "shenanigans," "juggernaut" and "snafu") with the last line being the punchline of the poem.
I love this fun type of poem so much, in fact, that as a supervisor at Starbucks, I wrote a limerick for every one of the colleagues I worked with within a two-week period (give me a break; I got bored there a lot). I wrote my favorite limerick for my colleague Lionel, who would sometimes come to work with a Red Bull because espresso just didn't do the trick, and would drive me nuts bouncing off the walls:
There once was a boy named Lionel
Who if I could I would sell
For when his belly is full
With a venti Red Bull
I swear to God I'm in hell.
But for this post, I wanted to write a new one because I'm sitting on the couch looking at great inspiration: Chloe
Whenever Chlo falls asleep
I always hear more than a peep.
It always seems
Squirrels rule her dreams
Scaring her from her deep sleep.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Day 32: A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words... On Missing Opportunities
Today is supposed to be the day where I depict a well-known cliche with just a photo along with a caption clue. But it's my blog and I'm doing something a bit different to depict this cliche.
This photo is of a sign at the Crystal Lake Metra station - the one I rode for more than a month while I was staying with my Uncle Bill and Aunt Debbie before getting my own apartment in Arlington Heights. This same sign was mounted in all the waiting areas alongside the track, but the one I generally wound up in passing the time before the train got there was one where this sign was vandalized.
Let me be clear that I'm not a fan of hoodlums defacing public property, especially when it's just some black spray paint splashed across a stop sign or something, but sometimes vandalism is clever, quite funny, or just plain beautiful.
This was the case of vandalism striking me as funny. Someone had scratched out the "N" in "NOT SMOKING" and written a "P" so the sign became "THANK YOU FOR POT SMOKING" right above the words "THESE PREMISES ARE ELECTRONICALLY MONITORED."
I saw this sign every day for a month and every day I vowed to snap a photo, but just never got around to doing it. I either didn't want to take it with my cell phone camera, forgot, or was at the station in the nick of time to catch the train.
I was planning on crafting something clever along the lines of kids using their creativity in the wrong places or the threat of electronic monitoring apparently doing not much at all. However, I went to the station on a Saturday while running errands armed with my camera, went into my usual station and saw this brand-new, un-defaced sign. Thinking I went into the wrong waiting station, I went to the two on either side of this station and saw the same thing - a brand-new sign.
In the grand scheme of life, not snapping a photo of a graffitied sign before it's replaced is a trivial thing. But it's also a good lesson that I should live life by this cliche.
Last week's cliche: It's raining (cats and) dogs.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Day 31: Stop. Focus. Click... On The Moments Where Nothing Else Matters
Three words for three little girls I'm head over heels in love with:
Adorable. Exhausting. Bliss.
Adorable. Exhausting. Bliss.
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