Beating the feminist donkey drum

News that should be accompanied by a resounding "Duh":

Young Americans are more likely than the general public to favor a government-run universal health care insurance system, an open-door policy on immigration and the legalization of gay marriage, according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll.

Is this actually news to anybody? Isn’t there some kind of running joke out there about how most people age into their Republican party affiliation (i.e. as they become wealthier and more crotchety)? I think there is. I’m too lazy to look it up. Instead, I will just say that when I was at school, the College Republicans were unique among campus political groups in that they had to go knocking, door-to-door through the dorms, in the hope that they’d overturn a stone under which additional young Republicans were hiding. (The one who knocked on my door looked so exhausted and haggard that my roommate and I invited him in, and we gave him a Strawberry Pop Tart, and then he watched A League of Their Own with us, and nobody talked about politics, and everybody had a very nice time. And I like to think that we all learned an important lesson that night about tolerating the views of others.)

Anyway, like I said, not so astonished by the “young people are left-leaning” revelation.

This stuff, however, will never cease to amaze me:

Their views on abortion mirror those of the public at large: 24 percent said it should not be permitted at all, while 38 percent said it should be made available but with greater restrictions. Thirty-seven percent said it should be generally available.

Um, hey? You guys, the 24 percent? Not permitted at all, huh? Are you 100% sure on that? Because if abortion is outlawed across the board, I guess one of you guys will be happy to take on the delightful task of telling a pregnant sixteen year-old that she is legally required to have a baby, right? Bonus points if it’s a case of rape or incest. Or if the sixteen year-old is actually fourteen. Oh yeah, and extra bonus points if it’s your daughter.

An open letter to the guy who walks my dog

Dear Sir,

As we have met only once (on the day that I stayed home sick from work and thus was in the apartment when you came to walk the dog), I hope that you will forgive the personal and sensitive nature of this letter. You may believe me when I say that it is as awkward for me to write as it is for you to read, but I just can’t in good conscience allow the events of yesterday to go unremarked. It is for your own good, not to mention the good of myself and the dog.

We like you, sir: you perform a valuable service for people whose jobs do not allow a midday return to care for their pets. You walk our dog. You are a Great Guy. And as such, we grant you a level of access to our home which a total stranger would not otherwise be provided. You use our keys. You sit in our chairs. You write us notes about the dog’s performance that day using pens belonging to us. And, of course, when necessary, you use our bathroom.

We were aware of this in the abstract, of course. It’s a fact that has occasionally been further elucidated by your sometimes forgetting to put the seat down when you finish. We come home at night, find the toilet un-lidded, look at each other in confusion, and then – in a dawning light of understanding – we snap our fingers and say, “Ah! The dog walker!” And that’s fine.

However, after the scene which confronted us upon entering the bathroom yesterday evening, there was no dawning light of understanding. There was only horror. Brutal, gaping, hand-pressed-to-mouth horror.

Let me first say that, to your credit, you did not leave the seat up. But what you did leave, to be honest, rather trumps in its nastiness any goodwill you might have earned by lidding the toilet. It is unclear to me how one could even accomplish such a thing without the use of explosives. I wonder at the strength of your sphincter, sir. And I wonder what happened to the entire roll of toilet paper that vanished from our bathroom sometime between the hours of 9:00am and 5:00pm. (Although, given the toilet’s non-flushing status, I have my suspicions about where it might have gone.) And I wonder, too, at your making not even the most perfunctory attempt to clean the astonishing spray of shit that was coating the inside of the toilet bowl like ghastly, fecal tea leaves. Why, sir? And how?! What did you eat? Did you think, somehow, that we wouldn’t notice?

But of all these things, what I wonder most is: Are you alright?

Because given the force with which you appear to have expelled the contents of your bowels, I have been plagued since discovering the mess by terrible, terrible images. Images — not of the horrific brown soup that confronted us in our bathroom yesterday, and not of the water steadily rising toward the rim of the bowl like a Mississippi flash flood — but rather, images of you dragging yourself out of our apartment, down the stairs, and along the sidewalk with your pants around your ankles and your intestines trailing behind you like paper streamers.

We, and the dog, are a tad worried. Let us know.

Best wishes,

Kat

Sunday Styles: In which one guy claims to find hope in the bottom of a keg cup

The New York Times ran a truly illuminating feature this weekend about some men who… well, who defy classification, really. Who are they, you ask? They are those unmarried 40-something gents who continue to rub shoulders (and, uh, also some other things) with the 20-something Jitney-hopping set at summer share houses up and down the Long Island coast.

In what I assume to be a nod toward the need for unbiased reporting (or maybe just man-solidarity, I just noticed that the writer of the piece is named “Allen”), the piece tends toward describing these guys as living “a bittersweet existence”, numbing the pain of failed relationships and midlife regret with the exquisite anesthetic of Hamptons summering.

I, on the other hand, would tend toward describing them as “douchebags”.

Consider the story’s lead paragraph, which appears to be on a record-setting mission for eyebrow raise-worthy content per line:

JOHN IVERS, 42, did not want to commit¹. His girlfriend of a year, a 25-year-old² investment banker³ he met at a bar in the Hamptons⁴, wanted to join his summer house in Amagansett, a five-bedroom modified Cape Cod he shares with about 20 others⁵, male and female⁶. But Labor Day is a long time away, with nearly three months of sunbathing, bikinis and cocktails to come⁷. Mr. Ivers, who has been in 14 share houses over the years, turned her down⁸, although the relationship continues for now⁹.

1. Um, ok.
2. Wait, what?
3. Oh my god.
4. OH MY GOD.
5. Hmm… twenty divided by five equals…
6. …having sex with your roommates, right.
7. Cock-tails, huh.
8. Ok, really for the love of God please stop.
9. And someone rescue that poor girl!

Is John Ivers an asshole? Only time (and the next ten paragraphs) will tell. In the meantime, try answering this question: In your ideal relationship, at what point would it be no longer acceptable to say, “I’d rather not have you around this summer, because I might just feel the need to bang somebody else?” Because for John, a year isn’t long enough.

Still, as bad as I feel for the guy’s girlfriend (she’s my age, for Christ’s sake), it’s actually hard not to feel a little bit sorry for some of the men profiled here. The article is full of howlers, among them:

Theirs can be a bittersweet existence, where the highs of the evening’s party are occasionally doused by the recognition that matrimony and fatherhood may be slipping away with each relationship that dissipates on a cool September wind.

and this, about another stallion of 42:

Mr. Mahony, whose light brown hair is flecked with gray, considered how his life had brought him here tonight, one of the oldest people in a crowd drinking Heineken from plastic cups. “Relationships I thought were going to last didn’t last,” he said. “And to tell you the truth, the past five years, the older I get the shorter the relationships get, and now it’s like a game of musical chairs. There’s nobody left. It’s sad.”

“So I come here for hope,” he said.

and this one, about a 60 year-old:

He says he still finds it easy to meet younger women in nightspots at the shore. “The secret is I never divulge my age,” he said. “It doesn’t work all the time, especially with women who are single and want kids. But if they’re in their late 30s or 40s, they don’t care as much.”

Ooooh, you hear that, girls? As long as you’re not looking to fertilize your lady-eggs, there’s an AARP member who’s just dying to meet you.

Fix my television-- quick, before Stanley comes home!

Brad left the apartment yesterday at 9:00am to play golf. I stuck around at home. Getting the place to myself for awhile sounded exciting; prior to cohabiting couplehood, when I was single and carefree, I spent a lot of time by myself. I liked it; I’d plan entire days around watching Gone With the Wind in its entirety, or baking ten different kinds of muffins, or sitting in front of the television with a bag of Cheetos tied to my head and a six-pack of diet Coke close at hand.

So I was looking forward to Saturday; I had no plans, no constraints, free to do whatever I pleased all day long. I just had one, single responsibility – I was supposed to let the Time Warner guy in to repair our cable box at 2:00pm.

That was it: Answer the phone, open the door, sit blithely by while cable was repaired, and thank him on his way out for having restored our ability to watch baseball.

Because I have a history of missing utility appointments (for instance, we didn’t have gas in the apartment for 3 weeks and it was ALL MY FAULT for being in the bathroom when Keyspan called to say they were downstairs), Brad called me on his way to the golf course to remind me about my Only Responsibility.

“So if you don’t hear the phone, or whatever, they’ll leave and they won’t come back,” he warned me.

“Got it!” I said, switched my phone to uber-vibrate so that the sound of it rattling against the table would be audible from any room in the apartment, set it down in the kitchen, and proceeded to lie on the fire escape in a bikini for the next four hours.

Just before 2:00, I walked to the front of the apartment and peered out the windows in search of the cable guy.

Two minutes later, I walked back, picked up my phone from the kitchen table, and saw the following:

1 Missed Call

Time Warner NYC

Have you ever seen Kill Bill, in which Uma Thurman’s confrontations with members of her Death List are always preceded by that wailing, high-low, two-note siren sound that really, really conveyed the panic and bloodshed to come?

I swear, as I looked at the phone, I heard that sound.

Swearing violently, I hit “callback” and ran back to the front window, nearly falling out of it as I leaned out to see whether I could still see the van.

”Time Warner, this is Robert speaking!” came a voice in my ear.

“Yes!” I shouted. “Help, I think I just missed my appointment with the cable guy!”

“Alright, ma’am,” said Robert. “I’ll be happy to help you with that.”

“Ok,” I said.

“But first,” said Robert, “Would you like to hear about our high-quality cable phone service options, which can be added to your existing package at minimal additional cost?”

“What?”

“I said, would y— “

“ No! No, I missed an appointment, you have to connect me to… to… to the appointment people! I have to tell them to come back!”

“Surely will, ma’am!” said Robert, cheerfully. There was a click, a brief silence, and then…

…classical music floated faintly from the earpiece.

I was on hold.

I was also, seriously, on the verge of a pants-wetting panic. We had been without cable for a week. This had been My Responsibility. I had Fucked It Up.

For the next ten minutes, I paced back and forth and hung out the window and made little whimpering noises into the receiver. Finally, an operator came on the line. I explained the situation. The operator made a negative, tsk-tsk sound.

“Well honey, they’re awfully short-handed today, I don’t think they can come back,” she said.

My voice jumped an octave higher than its usual register. “But I left the door open and everything, and they never even tried to come in!”

“I understand, but I’m afraid you’ll have to reschedule. I could give you a date next week,” she offered.

“Oh, shit, I don’t know,” I said.

And then – feeling so defeated and lame for having screwed up that I thought I might cry — I added, “my boyfriend is going to be so, so mad at me.”

“Honey, you sit tight,” said the operator, sounding alarmed. “I’m going to call you right back.”

Five minutes later, the phone rang. It was her.

“Okay,” she said. “They’re coming back now. You just hang in there and wait for them, alright?”

I was silent as it dawned on me what I’d basically implied in my last statement: that Brad was a hotheaded inflicter of domestic beat-downs and, had he come home to find the cable un-repaired, I might have been limping to the emergency room later that night and telling everyone that no, I hadn’t been hit in the eye with the cable box, I had just accidentally fallen on it.

I pictured her on the phone to the cable guy, saying, “You’d better get back there! If he kills her, it’ll be on your head!”

“Okay?” the operator repeated.

I considered explaining that I hadn’t meant to imply that there was potential violence in the cable remaining unfixed. I wanted to set the record straight.

But I wanted them to fix the cable more.

“Oh, that’s so great,” I said. “That’s great, that’s awesome. Thank you so much.”

“Don’t you worry about it,” she said, her voice full of sympathy. “We don’t want your boyfriend getting mad at you.”

“That’s so great of you,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

“It’s okay, honey. I know how a man can get when he can’t watch his television.”

“Tell me about it!” I said.

And then I thought, I am SO going to hell for this.

GFY parrotting

Chris Noth: Come come, my good man. Let us make our way to the poolside bar, where we will make a gentleman’s bet on which of us can better hold his daquiris!

Parrot: Actually Chris, I just flew over to ask…

CN: Yes?!

Parrot: Well…

CN: Come now, don’t be shy!

Parrot: It’s just that… well, you’ve always been pretty sexy.

CN: Why, thank you!

Parrot: Like, when you played the stone-faced, steel-minded detective on Law & Order.

CN: Yes, of course.

Parrot: And when you oozed smarmy confidence as the powerful man who stole Carrie Bradshaw’s heart.

CN: Well, I don’t deny that I’m possessed of a certain, shall we say, masculine charm.

Parrot: Right—

CN: A charm that smells of elephant musk, whiskey, and fine cigars!

Parrot: Uh, yeah. Anyway, that’s why I wanted to ask you about your, uh, outfit.

CN: My swimming trousers? I purchased them at a 50 percent discount from Pacific Sunwear. What about them?

Parrot: They’re giving you a muffin top.

CN: I adore muffins!

Parrot: Right. What I mean is, your love handles are sort of, you know, popping over the top of your swimsuit.

CN: What?

Parrot: And also, your torso…

CN: What of it?

Parrot: It looks like a surprised face.

CN: Nonsense, my boy. My torso is surprised by nothing!

Parrot: Look, how about I just BRING you a shirt?

CN: A gentleman never covers his navel in mid-expression.

Parrot: …

CN: Now, will you cease this inane chatter and accompany me to the bar?

Parrot: I don’t think I –

CN: And later, I will permit you to feast on birdseed from my bellybutton.

Parrot: Ok.

How to have the awesomest weekend ever

Friday

4:00pm: Arrive home; walk into kitchen.

4:00:30pm: Register odd assortment of bright blue stains on floor.

4:00:32pm: Register dog lying amidst stains.

4:00:33pm: Register that dog’s paws, chest, chin, and tongue are also bright blue.

4:00:40pm: Dog has eaten a pen.

4:00:45pm: Wake boyfriend.

4:05 – 4:20pm: Wash dog.

4:20:01pm: Ink will not come off dog’s paws.

4:21pm: Put socks on stained dog.

4:22pm: Put dog in cage.

4:23 – 10:00pm: Drink.

Saturday

8:00am – 12:30pm: Walk stained dog; eat breakfast.

1:00pm: Leave apartment for mass wiffle-ball outing.

2:30pm: Arrive at friend’s apartment; drink beer.

3:30pm: Leave apartment for Central Park.

3:45 – 4:15pm: Stand under tree waiting for rain to stop; drink beer.

4:16pm: Injure ankle while attempting to climb wet tree; drink beer.

5:00pm: Injure wrists, knees, and behind while sliding into second base; search fruitlessly for water; drink beer instead.

6:00pm: Leave Central Park; take subway home to Brooklyn.

7:30pm: Walk stained dog.

8:00pm: Shower; put on dress, heels, makeup.

9:00 – 10:00pm: Walk one mile to subway; return to Manhattan.

10:00 – 10:15pm: Debate whether going out for steak dinner is Idiotic or just Very European.

11:30pm – 12:00 am: Walk one mile from chophouse to subway.

12:10am: Admit foolishness of shoe choice.

12:30am: Exit subway in Brooklyn.

12:31 – 1:00am: Remove shoes; walk one mile home drunk and barefoot.

Sunday

4:00am: Awake with urgent stomach issue.

5:00am: Awake with desperately urgent stomach issue.

5:15am: Confirm symptoms of food poisoning on WebMD.

5:30am: Rebuff boyfriend’s attempt to cuddle for fear of vomiting on him.

6:00am, 6:30am, 7:00am: Awake with urgent stomach issue.

7:15am: Give up on sleep.

7:16 – 9:00am: Whimper.

10:00am: Eat biscuit.

10:01am: Regret eating biscuit; run to bathroom.

10:15 – 11:30am : Whimper.

1:00pm: Return to bed. Nap for four hours.

5:00pm: Awake with urgent stomach issue; run to bathroom.

5:00:10pm: Slip on stained dog sock; fall on previously-injured ankle.

5:00:15 – 6:00pm: Swear intermittently.

9:00pm: Attempt to leave message at office explaining inability to come in tomorrow.

9:01pm: Realize that no one will believe you.

Everything's swell(ing)

In the weeks before the boyfriend and I began officially Living In Sin (having spent the previous two months in a state of constant Faux-habitating Togetherness that was mostly marked by a dearth of clean underwear), I tried to ready myself for the inevitable shock by drinking reading lots of educational materials about shacking up. When it comes to leaping into the unknown, I like to be prepared, which in this case meant devouring multiple articles with titles like, "How To Spend Every Single Day With Someone And Not Hate His Stupid Face". Thing is, they all talked about the same spate of issues -- financial agreements, chore charts, closet space, bathroom habits, etc – things which, to me, are not remotely specific to Living In Sin. (If they are, then my roommate Emily and I were Living In Sin for over a year, and all I can say is that she owes me a LOT of sex.)

So there were lots of articles about Living In Sin: The Pitfalls, and Living In Sin: The Excitement, and Living In Sin: The Remote Control.

And yet nobody bothered to cover the issue which, to me, ranks a bit higher on the scale of importance than his refusal to watch Extreme Makeover with me.

Namely, Living In Sin is Making My Ass Fat.

It seemed impossible at first. Gaining weight, for me, is usually a sign of unhappiness, boredom, etc. It makes sense-- when there’s Shit Going On, my response usually involves burying my face in a box of Cheez-its. (Logic: life’s problems seem nicely diminished when you look at them from the hazy side of a snacking coma.) But now, I was living in domestic bliss. Bliss, damn it! I was blissful! Where was this extraneous fat coming from? … And then I realized that, in this state of domestic bliss, one obvious change had taken place. Namely, I was eating like a man. And not just any man – I was eating like a 6’4, 200-pound Southern Man, because that’s who I was living with, and that’s who was doing most of the cooking. I thought back on the meals we’d shared. I thought about sliders. I thought about fried chicken. I thought about pizza and beer and the 1-lb package of bacon which I was relatively sure I’d consumed almost entirely by myself.

After ten minutes of rumination (How did that happen? How much pig is in one package of bacon? How many calories are in one pig?) I vowed to start really, really watching it. I didn’t want to cramp Brad’s man-style or force him to eat salad; I just figured that I’d keep careful track of the shitty things I did eat, and maybe make some noises about watching my intake, and hope like hell that I didn’t wake up one morning looking like Violet Beauregarde.

About a week later, Brad looked up from the computer with an eyebrow raised.

"Hey, Kat?" he said.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Have you been Google searching the calories in a White Castle chicken ring?"

I stared at him and tried to make my face into an impenetrable mask.

"Kat?" he prodded again.

"I don't think that's any of your business."

He sighed. "You're really insane."

"Shut up."

***

And here is a picture of a cat with bacon taped to it. Just 'cause.

Ranting

Lawmakers urge magazines to reject tobacco ads

NEW YORK — Dozens of members of Congress are urging women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Glamour to stop accepting tobacco ads, saying the ads threaten the health of the teenagers and young women who form a large part of their readership.

In a letter sent on Tuesday to 11 publications, 41 lawmakers, led by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., said it is ironic that tobacco ads appear in the same pages as articles on women's health. The letter was released to the media on Wednesday.

The lawmakers said they are particularly concerned by ads for Camel No. 9, the new cigarette by R.J. Reynolds that has been heavily marketed to women.

"To our great concern, R.J. Reynolds is heavily relying on leading women's magazines, including yours, to aggressively market this deadly product to young women, including teenagers," they wrote.

Ooh, yes. THANK YOU, lawmakers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flipped through a magazine only to find myself desperately, irreparably drawn to consume every product advertised in its pages. I read Cosmoplitan once, back in 1998, and it took me weeks to undo the damage I’d wrought in my easily influence-able-ness! The cigarettes were only the beginning—I had to return five boxes of hair dye, ten styling gels, seven lip glosses, three pairs of shoes and a razor, and cancel my appointments for Lasik and liposuction, AND de-enroll myself from fat camp and modeling school (like ohmigod, those back pages are dangerous!). It’s a good thing that teenage girls – who, y’know, are just empty vessels of materialistic want without the modicum of brainpower it takes to, like, abstain from doing something they don’t want to do – have you to look out for them.

Oh, dear, sweet, innocent lawmakers. There is not a single person – male, female, whatever – who has graduated from high school in the past ten years, who doesn’t know that smoking is bad for you. I mean, really. Give yourselves some credit; in between the D.A.R.E. program, public service adverts, and the psychotic Infect Truth campaign, it’s pretty much impossible to turn a corner without having the information forcefully rammed down your throat. We get it. Smoking hurts the body. And if you’ve got a sixteen year-old girl who doesn’t want to smoke, a pink cigarette ad in the pages of Cosmo isn’t going to convince her otherwise (anymore than I can be convinced, given ten years of evidence to the contrary, that the “Ten New Sex Secrets You’ll Be Shocked To Learn!” will involve anything I haven’t already done. (Hi, Mom!)).

So, LM’s, if you want to do something for the health and well-being of teenage girls, consider this: My friends and I have flipped through many a magazine in our lives, and none of us (at least, none who didn’t already smoke) have ever, in the course of reading, looked up and said, “Ooooh, that makes me want a cigarette.”

We have, however, looked up from page after page of images of impossibly thin women, accompanied by articles with titles like “Lose Your Belly Fat In Three Days!” and “How To Blow His Mind”, and wondered if our smart decisions – decisions like going to college, pursuing careers, working for social change, and yeah, maybe, not smoking – were really all that important. Because the problem with these magazines, if you want to find one, isn’t that they sell advertising space to Philip Morris. It’s that they perpetuate the notion, through airbrushing and makeup and endless regurgitation of the same basic content, that women are worth nothing unless they’re thin, pretty, and good in bed. You don’t have to look ahead fifty years for evidence of that damage; it’s happening right now. And if young women, the ones you’re so concerned about, are as impressionable as your lobbying implies, it might make more sense – if you’re determined to go after something – to forget about this:

…and instead, go after an immediate (and documented) cause of self-loathing, anorexia, obsessive dieting, and a never-ending cycle of emphasis on the superficial. Just an idea.

This is that same guy from college who thought that "I don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die" joke was really funny

Every so often, in the news, you come across a throwaway quote that, while it doesn’t add much to the article itself, sheds a whole lotta light on the personality of its contributor. Like this one, from an article in today’s NYT Style section about menopausal women who retreated to a very air-conditioned room in their office in order to combat hot flashes:

At the Roscoe branch of the library, some have taken over a computer room that is chilled to a bracing 64 degrees, dubbing it the “Hot Flash Room.”

Recently, Diane Jacobson, 48, a circulation clerk, tacked a poster on the room’s door of “The Hot Flash Club,” a novel by Nancy Thayer about four menopausal friends.

But not everyone finds it amusing.

“I didn’t have a clue the women were using the room to cool off,” said Peter Caton, 34, the library’s network administrator who works out of the room. “I only found out it was the ‘Hot Flash Room’ after they put up the poster. I was shocked and kind of offended. It’s my office. If I was an older man and I put an erectile dysfunction ad on your cubicle, how would you feel?”

Ah, Peter Caton. Your mom must be sooo proud of you right now.

Apart from pointing out that Peter appears to be most offended, not by the poster, but by the mere proximity of menopausal women (Biology? In MY OFFICE?! How dare you!)… oh yeah, and that the poster was actually for a book about a bunch of menopausal women, and not for menopause itself… I think it’s important to answer his question. So, Peter Caton – if you were an older man (nice qualifier, by the way—are you sure you’re not having a little problem right now?), and you put an ED advert on my cubicle, how would I feel?

If, as this context implies, you put up the poster because you were using my cubicle to combat the symptoms of your erectile dysfunction – namely, jerking off in it because you found that the climate stimulated your sad, flaccid junk – then yeah, I suppose I would be a tad offended. Especially if I were in the cubicle at the time. Geez, Peter. I mean, I feel bad for you – having a limpy little peen and all — but that’s really sick. Couldn’t you just go to the bathroom or something?

(If I were labeling posts – which I’m always too lazy to bother with – this one would be tagged with “I hope someone googles this person really soon”. Bahahaa.)

How to get reamed out by The Boss

10:00am: Receive call from supervisor requesting meeting.

10:02am: Go into surpervisor’s office.

10:02:30am: Close door upon request; feel alarmed.

10:02:45am: Sit in chair.

10:02:46am: Supervisor begins yelling.

10:10am: Supervisor is still yelling.

10:10:01am: Cower.

10:12am: Make attempt to defend self against verbal onslaught; manage to say “Now wait a m-“ before getting cut off.

10:18am: Supervisor is still yelling; continue cowering.

10:20am: Work up enough gumption to say that you may have yawned during a conference call, but you really did not do it on purpose.

10:25am: Politely suggest that that yawning is not always a sign of boredom and/or laziness; suggest possible alternative of lack of sleep.

10:26am: Meet supervisor’s assertion that all tired employees are required to drink coffee until they stop yawning with incredulous stare.

10:28am: Supervisor stops yelling; commences glaring.

10:29am: Consider second attempt to defend oneself; note exceptional redness of supervisor’s face; keep quiet.

10:29:30am: Maintain impenetrable façade of calm.

10:29:35: Ask if there is anything else; continue to maintain impenetrable façade of calm.

10:29:45am: Leave office. Impenetrable façade of calm firmly in place.

10:29:50am: You are a rock.

10:29:52am: And very mature, and responsible.

10:29:55am: And professional.

10:29:58am: You are completely above being affected in any way by such meanspiritedness.

10:30am: Enter bathroom.

10:30:01am: Cry.

The road less travelled is now you guys are just f**king with me

I’d gotten used to people coming across the site through search strings containing the word “penis”, but this is taking things a bit far:

I spit out my coffee when I saw this little tidbit crop up on my computer screen this morning.

“What’s going on?” said Brad.

“Somebody found my blog by googling, ‘is masturbating with toothpaste ok’,” I said. “What the hell is the matter with people?”

“I think somebody’s just trying to mess with you,” he said.

Is that what’s going on, sir? (Or madam?) Did you search the archives, looking for the most appalling possible connection of words to appear on a single page within the blog, and then gleefully plug it into Google knowing that I would be confronted next-day with the gross-out mental image of some anonymous internet-person rubbing one out with the help of a tube of Crest?

Ugh.

Look, I know this is just a blog and all, and that pretty much anything goes out here on the internets, but we’ve got to establish some ground rules for Google search that won’t cause my eyeballs to melt from my skull, buoyed by a rising tide of disgust. So, rule number 1:

Okay? OK.