Category — Mental Sampler

Once upon a time, I posted the thirteenth Friday Blog Roundup.  I wasn’t numbering them at the time, so I didn’t think about that fact at all.  But this is the thirteenth mental sampler (like a Whitmans sampler, except with 100% less chocolate).  That feels ominous even if it isn’t a Friday.

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I got a dress!  The ChickieNob also got a dress.  She put it on, looked in the mirror and said, “This is the one.”  But this isn’t about her.  This is about meeeeeeee.

When we left off, I had a dress in hand that we all felt meh about.  (“We” not being a royal we.  I’m including my sister and Josh in that statement.)  It was fine.  It felt like the best I was going to do.

But I grabbed a few dresses to try on after the ChickieNob was set with her dress.  A bunch definitely looked worse than the meh dress, and I got stuck in one.  (There was a lot of frantic tugging by the ChickieNob while I moaned, “It will never come off.  Never.  Never.  I will have a dress bunched under my arms for the rest of my life.”)  But one was exquisite.  It was exactly what I was looking for: simple, timeless-ish, and whimsical.

And the most bizarre thing about this dress?  It’s not online.  Anywhere.  It’s not on the designer’s site.  It’s not on the store site.  I have Googled it incessantly.  It’s like a ghost dress.  I keep opening the bag to check that it’s still there.  It sort of looks like this, but it’s tea-length and doesn’t have an open back.

I’m actually excited to wear this dress, so I’m glad I didn’t settle for meh.

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We tried giving Linus his first bath.  He lasted about 15 seconds.  I put him down in the water, and he flipped out and immediately tried jumping out of the bathtub.  Then I soothed him by gently stroking his back while I told him about water and he cried.  Then he went back to trying to claw his way out, so I scooped him up and swaddled him in the towel.  You have never seen a sadder pig.

Unfortunately, even though he didn’t actually have a bath, his fur was wet so I needed to use the hair dryer to dry him.  But that?  That thing that comes with a loud noise and hot air?  That he loved.  He totally chilled and let us dry him for about ten minutes.  Such a weirdo.

He tends to do better with things the second time around, so hopefully next time we’ll make it to the shampoo stage.

I am inordinately upset about the cancellation of @Midnight.  It’s like having your best friend move across country.

When I saw the news in the morning, it affected my whole day.  Which is crazy because it’s just a television show.  But it wasn’t just a television show.  It’s how we found out about new comedians.  And it’s how we found out about memes so we could be “hip” and “in the know.”  (You know, like the teens.)  I cannot tell you how many late night, “I can’t sleep” conversations we’ve had with a child with Chris Hardwick’s face frozen on pause on the television screen.

It was our routine, and now Comedy Central is taking away our routine.

Thanks a lot, Comedy Central, for ruining everything.

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The Wolvog had an audition.  We could have waited in the hallway — we had planned to wait in the hallway — but the guy invited us to sit in the room and watch the audition.  So we sat in the room because I was curious to see how he would do and the Wolvog wanted us to stay.

But midway through the audition, I noticed the ChickieNob was sitting with her arm floating in mid-air.  I gave her an inquisitive glance, and she returned an inquisitive glance.  I mouthed at her, “What are you doing?” and she screwed her face up to mirror mine and murmured, “What are you doing?”

MY CHILD WAS FREAKIN’ MIMICKING ME.

Her arm was up in the air because my arm was draped across the edge of the sofa.  But she was sitting next to me instead of at the other end of the sofa, so her arm needed to hang in space to be my mirror.  She continued to match my movements for the next ten minutes.

Of course I thought this was hysterically funny, but I was trying not to laugh aloud and ruin the audition.  So my body was shaking from trying to hold in the laughter.  Which meant the ChickieNob had to make her body shake as if she was holding in laughter.

She stopped the moment the audition was done and arranged her face into a supportive, benign smile for her brother.

She’s too much sometimes.

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We are currently in dress shopping mode for their B’nai Mitzvah.  I am not a dress person.  At all.  I do not enjoy shopping for dresses or wearing dresses.  I don’t feel like myself when I’m in one.  (Truthfully, I only feel like myself when I’m in my jeans and boots, so it’s not as if I’d feel more like myself in a fancy pantsuit.)  But I’m getting a dress with my sister’s help.  She has spent hours combing sites and trying to find stuff for me to try on.

I’ve found something that is “not bad” that I am holding onto as I finish looking.  If I find something better, great.  If I don’t, I’m going to stick with the good enough dress and stop looking.  I’ve given myself a hard stop of next week.

The thing about the good enough dress is that when I tried it on, everyone felt meh about it.  I could get away with it, but it wasn’t great.  But when I tried it on a second time and let down my hair, everyone suddenly loved it.  They thought having my hair down changed the whole look of the dress.  Since I planned to wear my hair down, this worked in my favour.

But isn’t that strange?  That the whole look of the dress would change with my hair down vs. my hair up?

The ChickieNob has the opposite problem.  There are too many dresses she wants; too many looks she would love to wear.  Narrowing it down to a single dress, the dress, is proving difficult.  Whereas I want to stop looking because I’ve found something that works good enough, I fear we will never stop looking for the ChickieNob because there will always be that what if dress around the corner.

I don’t know which is worse: trying to find a single dress that works, or trying to choose one dress when so many of them work.  I’m thinking I’m in the harder situation.  She thinks she’s in the harder situation.  Your take?

Anyway we need to set an end date because there are still shoes and undergarments to purchase.  And we all know what happens when you wait to the last second with that…

Are goldfish shots still a thing on college campuses?  I can’t remember what jogged this memory, but I was at a party in college where they were serving goldfish shots — tiny, live goldfish swimming in the shot glass, and you downed the whole thing.  Being a vegetarian, I clearly did not partake, but I watched this girl do it and she promptly vomit afterward from the thought that she had just ingested a live goldfish.

What the hell?  I am aware that college students often make poor choices and have terrible ideas, but goldfish shots?  Is this still a thing?

A month into school, I started running in non-goldfish-offering crowds (eg. kids who dressed in all black and recited very deep poetry), but I know that goldfish shots were a pretty common occurrence on our campus at big parties.

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I was at a yogurt store that was playing the best 80s mix.  In fact a three-year-old who was chowing down on frozen yogurt, pumped his fists towards the ceiling when Bon Jovi’s Bad Medicine came out and shouted, “I love this!”  Me too, kid.

So I give you this little stroll down memory lane:

Love this song, but this video? Who walks around like this? Can you imagine a woman walking down the street like this? And what is up with the creepy gawking?

Because you can never have too much Toto.

Best video ever, amiright?

I had such a burning crush on Boy George when I was little. I wanted his hairstyle.

Best use of pan pipes in a rock song.

This was our camp song, ’87.

Our other camp song. What? We had two that summer. Midnight Oil is still my favourite concert of all time.

I personally don’t want to rule the world, unless I can do it from the comfort of my home while wearing pyjamas. But I appreciate the sentiment.

The video of the woman disappearing on live television?  She’s on the left side of the screen.  I must have watched it 50 times by now trying to figure it out.

View post on imgur.com

Where does she go? And if you watch everyone else, there is no skip in the feed.  Spooky.

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Have you heard of the brand Cotton On?  I think it’s Australian.  I can’t even remember how I heard about it this week, but it brought back memories of the brand Au Coton, which intense Googling has informed me is now defunct.  I am so sad for Generation Z and their lack of Au Coton memories.

Do you remember those clothes?  The oversized sweatshirts (damn, I wish sweatshirts that covered half your body were still in style) and the sweatpants you pegged and rolled up so they rested over your scrunch socks?  One of my happiest memories ever was the day my dad let my sister and I go shopping in Au Coton by ourselves.  The store was in Inner Harbour, and while I was a little nervous to make my own decisions because I was pretty crap at dressing myself, it was a heady rush to be around all of that sexy cotton.  Just yards and yards and yards of super soft sweat clothes.

I really miss Au Coton.  I get the sense that Cotton On is closer to being the Australian Old Navy than a reincarnation of 80s baggy clothing.  Anyone else with me?  Au Coton, great clothing store or greatest clothing store ever?

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Josh and I have been talking about Adam LaRoche and his decision to retire from baseball and leave $13 million on his contract rather than “dial back” having his 14 year old son come to his workplace.  LaRoche is a former National, now a White Sox.  But once you are one of my boys, you are always one of my boys.

I get that it sounds sensible in theory from the point of view of the Executive Vice President, Ken Williams.  For instance, a lawyer would not bring her child to work every single day.  If she did, she probably wouldn’t be very productive, and her child would probably be bored.

But this assumes that all jobs are alike.  And they’re not.  Some jobs lend themselves better to having kids at the workplace.  Baseball seems like one of those jobs.

I’m biased because I often bring the kids with me to work things.  I’ve even pulled them out of school if I’m going somewhere special so they can be in that space, too.  I think they get a lot out of the experience, and they learn from observation.  My kids are naturally pretty quiet in public, so it works out well.  If my kids acted differently in public, I would rethink taking them.

But I think my kids act the way they do BECAUSE we’ve always included them in adult experiences such a theater events or dinners with authors.  They’ve learned how to comport themselves through observation and stated expectations and the excitement of being included in the adult world.

If LaRoche’s son was not bothering anyone — and it has been stated that no one but management had a problem with the boy being there, and their problem came from the fact that they just didn’t think it was right for the child to spend so much time with his parent — then I don’t see the point in making a new rule.  It’s not Williams’s job to tell LaRoche how to parent, especially when LaRoche was upfront during contract negotiations on how he parents.

So, yeah, I totally respect LaRoche for saying family is more important than his job, and if he can’t be the dad he wants to be while being a baseball player, he just won’t be a baseball player.

I think I just fell a little bit in love with Toronto.  They set up a scavenger hunt to take people through all 100 branches of the library system.  First of all, 100 branches?  Love.  Second of all, scavenger hunt?  Double love.  Third of all, mini passport book?  Heart explosion.

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A super deep trench has been found in Loch Ness.  Josh is sneering at this story because the person who found the trench happens to be a tourist boat captain or something like that.  But that’s not the point, science is science!  A trench — deep enough for a monster — has been found.  I told you Nessie was real!

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Am I the only person who feels as if this election has become a giant game of Gotcha!  Instead of listening to candidates, carefully weighing their worth or what they would bring to office, it feels as if both sides are more focused on catching inconsistencies, combing through personal history to find any transgression, or being offended.

Take for instance, the recent State of the Union.  I loved Obama’s speech.  He felt like a human Sorting Hat, reminding us that we don’t have to live our lives in fear, and that working together will actually get us farther than tearing each other apart.  Like the Sorting Hat, he never named Voldemort, but we all knew he was speaking about Voldemort while we had our pudding.  Amiright?

I hated all the commentary on both sides during and after the speech.  I went offline and begged Josh to turn off the television.  It was a little disheartening to hear someone saying, “Let’s not pick on each other,” while reading someone making fun of the First Lady’s dress choice or commenting on Paul Ryan’s expression.

Seriously, we have about 10 more months of this.

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Mental Floss reported on a new Fitbit-like contraption that tracks your emotions.  Do I really need a wrist band to tell me that I’m cranky?  Uh… yes.

What I think would be interesting is to have it tell me at the end of the day the break down of my moods.  Before I looked at the facts, I would write down how I thought I felt during the day.  It would be interesting to see if it matched up.  I’m going to guess that it wouldn’t.  I think we’re terrible at actually knowing our emotions on a day-to-day basis.