Day: August 6, 2008

I’m not posting the link, because my spine curls and my skin shrivels at the notion of linking to ANYthing with Paris Hilton in it, but Paris Hilton’s response video to McCain is pretty funny.  I think my favourite part is where she’s trying really hard to look presidential….

I guess there are a lot of sites I don’t like admitting going to, but hey, once you’ve admitted you had a picture of Trudeau on your wall when you were a kid, and that you pooped your pants in the Parliament buildings when you were a kid, and that you like classic seventies porn especially anything with Marilyn Chambers in it,  it’s obvious that shame is not the motivating factor. Mike showed me Autobiography of a Flea on the weekend, and I loved it.

Shame…. is there any?  I mean, I’m not exhibiting much.  I must claim to some.  After all, my parents read this blog, but I know that my mother isn’t reading right now and my dad doesn’t bother when my mom’s not around, so bwa ha ha!  I feel liberated to talk about badshit!  Actually not, if I want to talk about badshit I use the “whining” or “sexxxay” filter in livejournal.

Whining is for when it’s obvious that it’s time to ‘bang a teakettle’ in the shtetl phrase.  What?  No Yiddish?  Let me elaborate.  This is from Every Goy’s Guide to Common Jewish Expressions by Arthur Naiman, as I recollect (and Cousin Reck likes it too, so there).  Anyway, in the days of the pogroms back in oldt contry, when a woman had absolutely had her fill of her domestic situation, she would grab a wooden spoon and a teakettle and run into the middle of the street banging the snot out of the teakettle and yelling like a she’d been trodden on by a golem.  All her neighbours who were able would run out into the street too and there would be an impromptu therapy session.  A magnificent social invention.  Also, I have girlfriends I can call, whose lives are every bit as ‘interesting’, ‘difficult’ and ‘complicated’ as mine, some more so because they have more children and screw YOU if you don’t think that doesn’t make for more complexification, especially once you get into steps, grands, adoptees and homestays, so I can ‘bang a teakettle’ with them, but sometimes as a writer I want to keep the mood green and nothing beats that like writing it down.  After all, if I hadn’t written down my long, long paragraph of vituperative venom, I would not have kept hold of the expression “pig’s ass in vomit” which was how I characterized somebody I was, uh, not very fond of at the time.  Then I learned that you’re defined by what you hate and had to give that emotional tone up, but it’s still a damned evocative expression and I have every intention of using it where appropriate.  Except when the Dalai Lama’s in town, that would be wrong.

Sexxxay is for all the stuff that can’t make it into this blog because my mother would wince and my dad would heave.  Then they would stare at each other uncomprehendingly.  They do that a lot, with respect to their children.  I am still at the involved stage, which means I long to slap my kids instead of just look uncomprehending.

Speaking of the kids, Katie said something re shame the other day.  “In the videos you never yell at us”  and I just looked at her like she had a closed skull fracture and said, WTF?  Of COURSE I wasn’t yelling at you in the videos!!!! Why would I want evidence of my dreadful parenting and worse vocabulary immortalized for all time?  whassamatta u????  One of the best women I know thought about drowning her offspring in a bathtub when she was a young mother.  I can’t recollect ever wanting to harm the kids, but they will attest to the fact that I did use physical discipline, and they’ll also stand right by me and defend me for doing it, such are the strange ways of the simian brain.

Well, I’d simply love to ramble on more about shame.  There are times I want to take all my clothes off at work.  The right people would dig it, and the right people would get completely freaked out.  But my boss has told me that I should just let that urge roll right on over and straight on through, because she doesn’t think there’s a snowball’s chance I’d stay employed, no matter what she said in my defense afterwards.  She has a point.  Now it’s time to go to work.  Shame about that, really.