Poopies

I had a tremendous time in New York this past weekend visiting Randy and Chris.  I experienced one of the most fun - and by far the gayest - days of my life when the city greeted me with brunch drinks within an hour of arriving, followed by a trip to Barneys and a viewing of La Cage Aux Folles, rounding off with a cabaret performance by genderqueer and lesbian separatist Justin Bond.

Since our Saturday was so drag-driven, our visit to Ellis Island on Sunday involved brainstorming potential 19th-century immigrant drag names during the ferry ride.  We came up with the following personae:

Alice Island
Deportia
Donna Corleona
Ellis Island Fairy
Quarantina
Tubercu-Laura
Typhoid Mary
Scarlett Fever
Scarlett Beaver

On Saturday evening at dinner, I started getting all (drunkenly) blubbery about my sisters-in-law and how much I love them, and how much I always wanted a little sister.  Randy had told me several years ago that when I was young I wanted a little sister named Mary (Typhoid Mary?).  I always had this maternal instinct thing going on, then Randy reminded me about the Little People play sets from Fisher-Price I used to be obsessed with. 

These were perfect little child-grip sized people (although based on the picture below, they have a much looser definition of the word "people" than my generation did, what with the example being some sort of genetic pig mutation with a thriving commercial pilot career) that fit into different little holes and whatnot.  You can spend hours organizing them and lining them up.  So fun! 



OMG, an airport!  How fun!

While I heard everyone call these toys "people," for some reason what came out of my mouth when calling them by name was quite different. 

I called them "Poopies."  I always had to run off to go play with my Poopies.  What's that you say?  You need me to do something right now?  Sorry, I'm busy ... playing with my Poopies.

Sandy H. has this to say about the matter: "Yeah, we called them People.  You called them Poopies.  People (Poopies) donate them to Habitat for Humanity.  I saw some today including the furniture which included a potty chair for the baby Poopie.  They still make them but a different version since 1990.  Apparently they were listed in a book called Toys That Kill.  That put a damper on things for a while.  But they still make them.  Also, Googling 'Little People' will catch you up on dwarfism."

Me as a child, not a self-imagined dwarf.

The Stick Candy

My brother-in-law has an unparalleled sweet tooth, unlike anyone I've ever known, including myself.  He could eat dessert for dinner and then still need dessert after that.  In spite of this trait, he manages to stay trim, and his heart hasn't yet exploded. 

When Chris visits us in Philadelphia, he waits at Capogiro for them to open in the mornings, and becomes cross with the staff members because they don't have more than two flavors of gelato on display before 10 AM.  His mood changes from pleased to ornery in 0.2 seconds, like he's in withdrawal from heroin instead of sugar.  Later, he'll have gelato for lunch and again after dinner.  And thank goodness he does this, because I love any excuse to visit Capogiro more than once a day.

In high school, he lived in Japan as an exchange student for a few months.  If he had known that in Japan his main diet would consist of white rice and a piece of raw, bloody fish, with no sweets anywhere in sight ...

... he might have considered spending his semester in Switzerland or Germany instead.

For months on end, he tried to make it through each day without any sugar, trying to control his shakes without thinking about milkshakes, trying to change his mood from sour to sweet without thinking about Sour Patch Kids, trying to play along and snicker at Japanese humor without thinking about Snickers!

Finally one day, he stumbled upon what appeared to be a Japanese sweets shop.  It glimmered in the distance like a sunrise on the horizon.  Sweet nectar!  At last he could bathe in its glory!

Being Catholic, he atoned for the sinful abuse his sweet tooth had endured for the past semester.

Hail Sugar, Full of Calories,
Butterscotch is with Thee.
Blessed Art Thou among Fatties,
And Blessed is the Fruit of thy Womb Marzipan.
Holy Sugar, Mother of Cookies,
Pray for our Cavities,
Now and at the Hour of our Insulin Shot.
Amen.

He asked his host dad to purchase the smallest item in the store.  This sounds contrary to what you might expect after having read the rest of this post, but he was ensconced in guilt, wondering if his host dad would see him as ungrateful and unappreciative of the white rice and raw, bloody fish.

He tore into the tiny candy, blindly, after so many months of deprivation, this Sugar Daddy-type item was exactly what he needed. 

And then he realized what he was eating, exactly.

Squid paste on a stick.

And thanks to his guilt over not wanting his host dad to find him ungrateful and unappreciative of the squid paste on a stick he had purchased for him, Chris ate the whole thing.

Chris has this to say about the incident:

"It was truly and honestly one of the worst moments of my life.  Just imagine any of the occasions when you've been longing for some food or drink - birthday cake, the first drink of the evening on a Friday night, hot chocolate after spending the day in the bitter cold - and then imagine it was handed to you, and looked delectable, and then you tasted it and it was SQUID!  And you had to be polite about it!  And you'd been waiting for literally months!  Imagine if your perfect-seeming wedding cake turned out to have been mistakenly made of ground squid with squid ink frosting!!!

I have to stop thinking about it now - it was 19 years ago, but I feel it just as if it were happening to me all over again now.  I think I have post-traumatic squid disorder."

**Thanks to Hyperbole and a Half for inspiring the first of what we hope will be many posts featuring Paintbrush.  Hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Everybody Puts Baby In The Middle

I didn't vote yesterday. 

Sometimes the guilt of not bothering to vote can be overwhelming, thanks to the in-your-faceness of "VOTE VOTE VOTE!" brought to my senses by every Facebook status, every blog, and simply by being on a college campus, but then I shrug my shoulders and remember why I didn't vote in the first place: because.... meh.

I think my apathy political moderateness stems from being the baby of the H. family and always feeling stuck in the middle of hair-pulling arguments lively debates at holiday gatherings and meals.  Both of my parents are SUV-driving, Wal-Mart-shopping Fox News watchers very conservative and both of my siblings are Subaru-driving, co-op-shopping, non-air-conditioning-using granola crunchers very liberal. 

In the past, if I became too uncomfortable  people at other tables started glaring at us a discussion became too heated, Mom wouldn't be able to think of anything nice to say and didn't want to perpetuate the drama, so she would force a smile and say, "That's so great that you're so passionate about this issue!  What a great country we live in!" 

Then I take the opportunity to shout, "Did you all SEE what BRITNEY SPEARS did this weekend?  OMG, it was ALL over the news!  Crazy!  Gurl needs to get her SHIT together!!!"  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes I replace Britney with Paris or Lindsay or some other troubled star.  If we were at a family gathering this week, it would be poor Demi.

Am I ashamed that I am more likely to have a knowledgeable and civilized discussion about celebrity gossip than I am about politics?  Meh.



I wonder if Britney voted yesterday.



Hooligans

I am super nervous excited for Derrick because he recently joined the rugby club at his business school.  As far as I know, he's played soccer and football before, but never rugby.  I have always heard from Chris M. that soccer is a gentleman's game played by hooligans and rugby is a hooligan's game played by gentlemen, but I think perhaps rugby is a hooligan's game played by hooligans.

Derrick came home last night kind of drunk verbally expressing the importance of being one of the last men standing.  Before stumbling out for a bit of Chinese food action, he told me about a few of the odd drinking rules to which the team adheres.  For example, if you don't touch your beer for 10 seconds, anyone can grab it from you and chug it, and then they sing a ye olde songe!  I must say, I do love the whimsical Englishness of it all, but I worry about Derrick's precious nose and teeth during all the bar-hopping rugby-playing.

I look forward to meeting some of these hooligans, and hearing about the girls they've nailed.  Do you think they'll be more like this ...

... or like this?

Image Courtesy

Frida in a Bath

Randy H. writes: "She burned us with her eyes before we could turn the water on."  And I thought I had a problem with red-eye in pictures.  I've never seen such intense disapproval from a cat in a bath that it manifests itself so terrifyingly.

Maybe she's just mad there's no bath water for her to drink, bro.  I know how Frida rolls.