Meow House Theatre

is my iPhone.  I might be in mad passionate love with an inanimate object.

I used to have a Mac, a computer I mean, and I don’t recall it being this much fun.

It’s nothing new that I *LOVE* small electronic devices.  I have all manner of computers, laptops, tablet PCs, phones, iPods, iTouch, graphics tablets, CD players, external drives, four small digital cameras (let alone my two DSLRs and ten, I think, lenses), and just about everything else you could think of that you can hold in your hand and play around with or connect to the Internet or take pictures or make art with.

But I might love this one best of all.  And it’s only been about 3 hours that I’ve had it.

I read this book a while back, The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor.  It’s got several intertwined stories about the residents of a low-end housing project or neighborhood in some unnamed American city.  I think it might be Baltimore, or possibly Chicago, or maybe Gary, Indiana.  Someplace big and ugly and dirty and poor, at least in the part the characters live in.  Anyway there’s one story about this woman who has about 10 children, because every time she has a baby and it gets to be about 3 years old, it changes in her mind and becomes uncute.  Oh she still loves them all (although she is exasperated at the time the older ones take away from her being able to spend more hours with the newest baby) but at some certain point, every child she has no longer has this mysterious undefinable allure that she has this inexplicable attraction to.  It’s explained, sort of, that she is drawn to the smell and feel and appearance of a sweet cute round little baby, with its big eyes and innocent smile and soft skin and total devotion to her, and even though she loves her older children more or less, nothing can compare to the joy and wonder she feels when she has an infant to kiss and cuddle and take care of.  I could never understand how this–loving one over the other–could be.

Until now.

Because this thing is freakin’ awesome.   And my formerly beloved BlackBerry is just a gangly clunky-appearanced child who used to be adorably cute and is now rather sad and pathetic since the baby came along.  Poor pre-adolescent BlackBerry, his mommy doesn’t love him anymore.

Oh god keep me away from that incredibly gorgeous Mac Book Pro I was gawking over at the store or I might do something terrible to my Windows computers.

Well I’ve broken down and submitted to the power of Mac. I am picking up an iPhone in a couple of hours. Ever since they developed support for MSExchange–which they didn’t used to offer and which I *must* have–I’ve been thinking about it and although I love my BlackBerry Pearl, the stupid problems with the goddamn trackball are driving me nuts. And there is just a lot more possible (or at least, the same things are possible but they’re easier) with an iPhone. So I am going to nearly double the cost of my my ancient grandfathered T-Mobile voice/data plan ($40/month unlimited) and start a new romance with AT&T.

I can’t decide between the black and the white phone. I have to see which is more pretty when I get there.

In order to recoup some of the money I’ll now be giving to Steve Jobs, I plan to cancel my cable since I hardly watch TV anyway. I can see CNN on line and most TV shows, if I even want to watch them which I probably don’t. I’ll keep the cable for 2-13 and get rid of all the extra channels. It’s just a waste. Sometimes I don’t turn the TV on for 3 weeks at a time. I have no idea what some of these shows are. “House”?? I thought that meant it took place in a house. Apparently it’s his name? He’s some kind of doctor? Acts like a dick but always figures out the problem, sort of like like Matlock but younger and hipper? I don’t know and don’t care. “Lost”? Wouldn’t a more apt name be “Stranded” or “Crash-Landed, Can’t Get Home”? They aren’t lost; they know where they are, just nobody else does. What’s that horrible show about Hugh Hefner’s whorehouse? Oh sorry I guess he lives there with his “girlfriends.” That is one weird arrangement they got going on there.

Hmmm I guess I know more about current TV than I thought!

Anyway today it’s an iPhone, tomorrow it might be a MacBook Pro. O it’s a thing of beauty. Oh all RIGHT I won’t get it tomorrow. That’s more of a Want than a Need.

Now don’t get started on the iPhone not being a Need either. Take your Rousseauean Philosophy and go find some jungle-inhabiting nature man to tell it to.

Well here’s a personally embarrassing story I’m going to tell to make up for all you indignant people who are mad that I’m discussing fat people’s love for Ren Faire. Oh I know you’re out there. Talking about fat people’s rights and how I must think I’m so much better than them.

So. I have this one hair on my chin. It’s like a whisker. Lots of women have them. A lone random hair that for some reason pops out of their chin or cheek. It’s like some male hormone got stuck in a hair follicle and is fervently hoping to grow itself into a beard, except it’s never going to work because there’s usually only one of these hairs around. I’m not talking about women who have a moustache, willingly or not. That’s a whole other issue of which I have thankfully been spared ever having to worry about, given that I’m pretty hairless and what’s there is kind of colorless. If I didn’t wear mascara, you’d think I was in the mid-stages of having chemo–my eyelashes are practically invisible. No, these wannabe-male Lone Ranger hairs are just one sneaky little hair that isn’t there and then all of a sudden, in like 5 minutes, it’s a half-inch long.

Well I have one of those on my chin. There. I’ve told my dirty little secret. It’s funny in a way because it really feels like a whisker, and if you know me even a little, you know why this is funny. Being a cat lady and all. O the irony. Anyway nobody would realize the hair is there except me. Naturally I do not share this information with anyone except people like my sister, or possibly other women who I feel a close personal connection to. I would never tell a man I had a HAIR growing out of my chin. Until now. Yes when I reveal a secret I go all out. First it’s hidden and then I’m telling thousands of people all over the world.

Anyhoo, I have this hair except after a few years of plucking it I think I might have killed it because it hasn’t appeared in at least 6 months. PHEW. I no longer have to keep checking in an OCD-like manner to see if The Hair has made an appearance. Or rather, if it’s able to be felt, because as I said nobody can really see it. As soon as I can feel it I get a flashlight and the tweezers and pluck that little fucker out. And it appeared to work. The Hair is gone.

Or so I thought. It turns out it just … migrated.

I was out to lunch and after finishing thought I better check and make sure I didn’t have food all over my face before I went walking down the street and so pulled out my little mirror and … oh god The Hair had taken revenge on me. But not by appearing it its usual spot on practically the underside of my chin, where at least it would only be barely visible if the light hits it just right. No, The Hair had decide to make itself comfortable IN MY NOSE only it was not content to hide itself UP my nose. It had decided to be in there and yet poke itself out for about a sixteenth of an inch. Yes I had a TREE practically right in the middle of my face. I mean the thing was huge. Me with that hair next to a two-headed man, well trust me you would have thought it was Brad Pitt standing next to me, or Obama, or your last postman. In other words, the only thing visible would be the GIANT ENORMOUS SWAMP THING OF A HAIR waving across my face.

I didn’t have any tweezers and anyway how could I use them while sitting in Qdoba? What was I to do, pull out a manicure kit and start pulling things off my face? Someone probably would have called the authorities. I tried to yank it with my fingers but it was very clever and although appeared as big as a baobob tree, could not really be grasped with my fingernails and if I kept trying to do so it would look like I was picking my nose, which would be worse than walking around with a big hair on my face. Who knows who could have been watching me? Maybe my future husband (imaginary & hypothetical, since I am never getting married) is in there and just about to fall madly in love with me except he thinks I am picking my nose like totally out in the open and so gets completely grossed out and moves on to True Eternal Love for some chick named Wanda at the next table. Or Hard Copy could be doing an exposé and I’d be in living color on televisions all over Wal-Mart, stared at by people in polyester pants. Yuh-huh, as if. So I was forced to just live temporarily with The Hair and walk back to work, praying that I wouldn’t run into anyone on the way. I knew I had tweezers in the office and could yank that thing out easily.

Well I got back to work and FORGOT to do it. And so my life continued on happy and unawares until I was at my rehearsal that night and thought, “Hey something is tickling my face” and I looked at the back of my iPod (nice reflective surface) and THERE IT WAS–THE HAIR IN ALL ITS DISGUSTING WHISKER-ENVY GLORY. I can only imagine what everyone who saw it all day must have been thinking. Probably something along the lines of “Um they shouldn’t let people out of the institution when they look like that” and “Whoa there’s a candidates for Extreme Makeover Electrolysis Special.” I didn’t have tweezers there either so I just kind of tilted my head down and thought maybe I could hang some of my actual hair–the hair that’s in its correct place on the top of my head–over my face and they’d just think I was being all emo and shit and not that I was trying to disguise the foliage coming out of my nose.

So anyway I finally got the sweet relief of rehearsal being over and went home, thinking the whole time that I’d pluck out The Hair when I got home. But wouldn’t you fucking know it–I forgot to do it AGAIN! I swear sometimes I turn totally Forrest Gump. I just went home and went to bed and forgot all about The Hair until the next day when I was at the gas station and happened to glance in the mirror while the attendant was filling the car and shock of shocks I remembered that not only did I *have* a hair, but that I had repeatedly forgotten to remove the hair and now I was in my car in broad daylight with a car right next to me whose passengers I KNOW were staring at me. They probably were gawking at the piece of timber coming off my face and sticking about 3 feet out the window.

But I didn’t care anymore who saw. I wasn’t waiting anymore and taking a chance on this thing turning into the Everglades on my face. I got out my tweezers and destroyed that little bastard. And it hurt like a motherfucker. The nose apparently doesn’t wish to give up its prized possessions, and it must really love hairs, or it wouldn’t have so many of them in there.

So that’s my embarrassing reveal of the day. Probably of the year. I have to keep up appearances, you know? Plus I’m pretty sure any other hairs will be too scared to make themselves known.

I hope this makes up for anyone’s thinking that I don’t love fat people at Ren Faire. Even though I don’t.

Has anyone but me noticed that about 75% of the people involved in any Ren Faire activities weigh in the 300+ pound range?  I ran across a photo gallery today and just about everyone was fresh from shopping in the Husky Department.

What about Ren Faire draws a skewed percentage of large people?  Aside from royalty, which was a small percentage of the population in the Middle Ages, I’d wager that most people in the year 1565 were not fat.  They didn’t eat junk food and they had to work at manual labor 16 hours a day just to live.  So it’s not that people are being all historically accurate.  Ren Faire is not really accurate anyway.  People think they’re trying to be accurate by using only historical patterns and moldy old lace to make their costumes but then they pull out their Calvin Klein wallet to use their debit card to pay for their lunch of KFC Hot Wings and the whole imaginary transport back into time all goes to shit.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being fat and being into Ren Faire.  I’m just wondering why the bell curve has so many of the same body type in the center.  Basketball, for instance, is skewed toward having a large percentage of tall people involved in it.  The answer as to why is obvious in basketball’s case.  It is not obvious to me what about Ren Faire causes it to skew the way it does.

Or, it could be that the weight distribution at Ren Faire is actually quite even across the scale but the percentage of people who take pictures and post them online at those Ren Faire kind of activities skews toward the 300 lb. range.  Maybe it’s a fat people/camera thing rather than a fat people/Ren Faire thing.

I think the only way to prove or disprove one point or the other is to go to Ren Faire.  Which I did once and it was ridiculous.  And there were quite a lot of fat people there but I only went to the one so maybe that’s just the Ren-Faire-loving population in my area and not representative of Ren Faire attendeees as a whole.  Coincidentally this latest set of pictures–the one that got me to write this post–also took place somewhere within probably a few hours of me so it well could be a New England / Massachusetts thing and not a nationwide love of Ren Faire by the large.

Someone ought to do a study on this.

I’ve been having dreams again that I wake up and my hair is cut off.  Not that it was cut off without my knowing; no, in the dream I apparently got it cut off because I forgot that it was so long and I accidentally told them to cut it to my shoulders.  And then I forgot having done this, until I woke up in the dream and remembered that I had my hair all cut off and can’t believe what a fucking idiot I was.

I think this ties in to my repeated dreams that I have a baby except I forget that I do, and I leave him on some counter in a store or put him in the crib and forget about him, and then a few weeks later I remember “Oh yeah I remember now that I had a kid but I guess I left him somewhere”  or “Hey wasn’t I supposed to feed that kid a while back?”  And of course he’s dead by then, all shriveled up and dehydrated.  It’s pretty gross.

I am SO not mother material.

This was made painfully, literally, obvious last night when I happened to turn on the TV and catch “17 Kids And Counting”–the show about those people in Arkansas (it *would* have to be Arkansas, right?  It could ONLY be Arkansas, practically)  who have 17 children.  I think they’re up to 19 by now.  My uterus scrunched up and put the No Parking sign out front just from watching that show.  That woman has been pregnant for 20 years straight.  The thought of it is horrifying.  I’d rather go through just about anything.  Guantanamo Bay prison system, Saw II, almost anything.  At least that torture wouldn’t take as long.

They had various clips with a bunch of the kids and they all seem pretty nice and normal, at least on TV.  Not that TV is any true measure of reality.  I’ve been on TV and believe me, I didn’t act like my own self while I was there.  They are probably not really capable of subterfuge though and likely are the nice polite kids they seem to be.  They sound happy.  I am sure they are loved, even with so many.  It kind of bugged me that all the “outdoor” chores were seemingly only done by the boys.  They cut down a tree, they go to the warehouse and do repairs, and the father always says “Yep I take the boys out and we do xyz.”  Maybe good Christian girls don’t need to know how to use a hammer down South.  Washin’ dishes is a valuable skill to learn too.  **rolleyes**  Well it’s not my concern but they *do* go on TV with this stuff so I’m entitled to make my comments on it.  It’s not like they’re keeping their private life private and someone is intruding and making judgment based on what The Star posted in its annual “Best Of The Gossipy Unauthorized Trash” issue.

Anyway the wife there deserves some kind of trophy.  And definitely one of those surgeries they do nowadays to keep things tight down there.  Although she’s gonna have to wait until her baby-factory days are over.  Maybe god will get tired of giving her more children and go find some more babies to give cancer to, or some random innocent people to blow up in Iraq.  Because as they keep saying, it’s all “god’s will” that she keeps getting pregnant.  If god didn’t want her to have more children, he would make it not happen.  God controls everything.  Except the invention and availability of birth control.

My uterus is still in pain.  Damn you, god.

If you have to faint, don’t do it in a bar or restaurant. Because then everyone assumes you have fallen off your chair because you are drunk. This has happened to me several times in my life. The fainting part I mean, not the assuming part.

Last Saturday was my birthday and I went to CT to see my mum and my cousin came down from NYC and we all went out to lunch. I was perfectly fine and we were eating and then my mother starts talking about this operation she had when she was about 15, because she had an ulcer and so they had to remove about 2/3 of her stomach, and they did this horrible thing under local anesthesia. Why, I cannot possibly imagine. She was describing how she could look up in a mirror on the ceiling and watch them cutting her open and then how at one point they lifted up her stomach and she felt the most shockingly incredibly horrendous pain imaginable and screamed bloody murder (what the FUCK were they doing with local anesthesia???) and then at some other point the doctor had this big chunk of cut-out stomach in his hand and he said “Oh well see here we only thought you had an ulcer this big but really it was THIS big and see here how it’s all bloody and perforated and rotten” and so on and so forth. Well at about the point where she was saying about the horrible pain I started to feel strange, and then definitely by the time it got to “here’s your organs in my hand!” part I knew I was going to pass out. I could feel my eyes rolling up into my head and I said “Uh I don’t feel so good … ” and then all these beautiful little stars appeared around my head and everything was dark and velvety and both quiet and buzzing at the same time somehow even though this doesn’t sound possible and I felt very small and far away like Alice In Wonderland down the rabbit hole and the next thing I knew my chair was pulled out and my head was down by my knees and my head felt very heavy and I couldn’t talk or even open my eyes.

That whole get-the-blood-up-to-your-brain position is actually quite unsettling, by the way. I mean, it’s not helping any to make the victim more comfortable. Seems evolution would have figured this out by now. Anyhoo.

I guess it was all that talk about stomach parts. Just writing this out is making me feel a little lightheaded.

I had to sit there with everyone staring and the waiter asking if I was okay for about 5 minutes. My cousin offered to take me to the ladies’ room but I knew I couldn’t make it. So I just sat and breathed. When I thought I could sit up I did. Whoops too soon, blacked out again.

I wonder what people told their friends. “We were out to lunch and there was this girl and I bet she was bombed at 1:00 in the afternoon!”

Well maybe not. I am probably overnanalyzing, which I often do.

Anyway don’t talk to me about your gory surgeries. I am apparently very suggestible. But no you cannot hypnotize me into doing the chicken dance while everyone laughs. YOU CAN’T.

My brother informed me yesterday that one of my sisters told him this Web site consists of “vulgar” postings.

I guess because I swear a lot in them.

I don’t know what she’s talking about.  She’s got nothing to say about what’s vulgar or not.  She’s a bloody Republican, a hard-core one, for chrissakes.  She once showed me her collection of photographs on her computer of George Bush–yes, that George Bush, the one you’re puzzled about right now as to how anyone, even a Republican, could have a collection of pictures of–and then as if that weren’t shocking enough by itself, she showed me her “favorite.”

Fuck that’s creepy.

FUCK.

FUCK FUCK FUCK.

-======================b=b=<——OH my adorable kitten just typed that so I will leave it in.  In case you were wondering, HE does not swear.  He doesn’t even meow.  I don’t know why.

FUCK.