I also eat KitKats

I'm not sure what's up with this, but the other day I left two packs of KitKats in my car and they got all melted. I was going to throw them out, but then I realized I could chuck 'em in the freezer to try to salvage them. So I let them freeze overnight and then opened one to see what the results were. And the results were delicious. The KitKat had melted and reshaped itself from four individual wafers into one solid bar, the chocolate was extra flakey, and somehow the whole thing overall tasted richer. It's really the change in taste that I don't entirely understand. Maybe it was a freak occurrence. I'll have to run the experiment again and find out. But in the meantime I am recommending that everyone melt and freeze their KitKats. It's chocolatey goodness.

i eat words

I've been reading a lot lately. Actually, I've been reading a lot for the past year. This comes after a multi-year post-undergrad hiatus of not wanting to read anything at all. Now the pendulum has swung back and I can't go through books fast enough. A lot of what I've been reading are kids- and young-adult books -- everything from the Phantom Tollbooth to the His Dark Materials trilogy. I've been hitting a lot of classics, too, like Peter Pan and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; and I've read a bunch of today's fad books, like Eragon and The Wind on Fire trilogy.

All of this reading is ostensibly research for my own young adult book. But in reality I've been doing it because it's just plain fun. Even the little kid books, like The Scarecrow and His Servant, are fun (and fast) reads. And I've discovered a lot of new treasures, like Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne-Jones (which was made into an animated movie that is very different from the book, but also very good). Better still, I've rediscovered some of my childhood by digging up books I read as a kid yet which aren't published anymore. In particular, the Norby Chronicles, by Janet and Isaac Asimov, which are about a kid and his overly emotional robot. Some of these books hold up well to adult readers. Others, well, if not for the nostalgia factor, I couldn't recommend them.

The great thing about reading kids books is that they have kept me away from the "serious fiction" on the new-relases tables. Every time I walk into Borders or B&N, I of course start my browsing at the new-releases tables because they stand guard over the doors, and getting by them is like passing the Sphinx's riddle: will I or won't I be duped into picking up the loudest, most demanding, most earnest title on the table? If I fall for it, I leave the store looking like a learned New-York-Times-style intellectual, and the Sphinx kills my soul. But if I leave those books alone, I get to go see the Oracle, waiting for me in the kids section. Or the sci-fi section. Or the murder-mystery section. Or even the travel section, the history section, the women's studies section, the psychiatry section -- anywhere but the motherfucking fiction and literature section. That section is a fucking travesty.

Everyone and their fucking cousin is trying to write the next Big Important Book. And the result is one sour, downtrodden tail after another. It's depressing as hell. Not to mention the parade of egos. Every single one of those books screams, "Look at me and how artsy smartsy I am!" I do not need the bullshit enlightenment these people are trying to pass-off with their fiction. And I don't want to see life reaffirmed via triumph over tragedy. I just want to have a good time. Is that so wrong?

Butt spelunking

The ads at the top of the page are sensitive to the blog's content. If I write "butt spelunking" often enough, will they change to something cool?

I take it back

As much fun as it would be, I'm looking for more than some butt spelunking.

Holy shit it's an update

Seems I am most inclined to update my blog when I'm sitting outside in the gazebo. Being out in the warmth and sun helps fire my inspiration, gets the creative juices flowing. Even still, there's not a whole lot exciting going on in my life right now -- things are moving along at their eternal "too fast yet too boring" pace -- and there's not much happening that merits a blog entry (which is saying a lot when you consider how low the blog entry bar has been set).

But since we're all here, and the sun is setting in a non-metaphoric way on a lovely end-of-summer day (you should see the view from the gazebo here; it's sweet, with orange water and a purple sky and boats tinted pink), I may as well confide in you that these past few days I have been enduring intense internal debate on the topic of whether or not I should once again fire up the online dating machines. The issues pro and con are many and complex and I'm not going to detail them here. But I have noticed that there are two main issues that define the rest of the debate: at this point, I'm not sure if I'm looking for love, or if I'm just looking for someone to bang the shit out of for the short term.

Because I am a romantic (of the poetic variety, if not the candles and flowers variety), I believe that love, though harder to find, is worthier of pursuit. But I'm not sure I'm ready to face the risks of the pursuit just yet -- heart break, rejection, the feeling that everyone but me has found their special someone (which is a retarded term, "special someone," -- it's a vulgar euphemism for "someone you can put your cock in without wanting to kick her out of bed immediately afterward" -- and it'd be nicer if we could just say what we mean without having to prance around the truth like forest fairies).... Anyway, I don't have the energy or the emotional endurance to search for true love right now.

Which means what I'm truly interested in finding right now is a girl I can bang the shit out of for the short term. A girl with a big ass that I can whale away on. And I mean a gigantic fucking ass. An ass that might swallow me up if I'm not careful. I want to go fucking spelunking into some chick's ass. But meeting the right person for this has got to be even harder than finding someone to fall in love with. Looking for asses to plumb is too outside the norm for me to go walking up to big-bottom girls and asking if they're into starting a purely superficial relationship that entails nothing more than eating, boozing, and fucking. At least on Long Island it is. Maybe in Miami, California, or Brazil, where all our pro-am internet porno comes from, things are different. Long Island is where I'm at, though, and so Long Island norms are what I have to deal with, and in spite of the fact that Long Island is mostly Lutheran (which is code for "loose moraled"), it is not easy to find a nice big ass to bottom out in without also getting into a "relationship" with someone. Which is a damn shame because there really are a lot of lonely giant asses around here and I'd be more than happy to spend some time with them.

There is no reason

that sybchronized treadmilling shouldn't be an olympic sport.

Gazebo blogging

About a week ago, my sister and I finished replacing the gazebo's busted screens. We then swept all the crap out and did a thorough debugging (though we're still gonna get some outdoor bug spray because we suspect there are things nesting inside the gazebo's nooks and crannies). Then, today -- just a few minutes ago, actually -- we got the wireless Internet working out here. So even though it's 94-degrees out, I'm sitting in the gazebo's shade, enjoying the breeze blowing off the harbor, and blogging about it. This is the life.

All that remains for the gazebo project is to get one of them spring-loaded thingamajiggers to keep the door closed, and to put up some lights (of the Xmas and reading varieties). The plan to plant plants in the plant boxes has been scrapped due to wiener dog digging activities (we suspect they are building an underground wiener dog day spa. We also suspect they are gay).

Right now there is a yellow inchworm inching himself behind my shoe. Only a minute ago he was inching himself up my bare leg, but that started to tickle, so I had to relocate him. He was supposed to inch his way to safety, preferably somewhere far away from me, or perhaps under my chair, but he insists on lingering near my shoes and I'm afraid I'm going to step on him. Which would be sad because what if this inchworm is destined to become the world's most beautiful butterfly and I accidentally killed him? How could my conscience -- my soul! -- bear it? I shall deny the world no beauty! Such was the solemn oath I swore.

Little Brother

At long last, the FBI finally gave Big Brothers Big Sisters of Long Island the green light on me not being a psychopath, sex offender, or terrorist, which means all systems are go for me to enter the BBBSLI program. So today, BBBSLI called to tell me about a Little Brother they had in mind for me.

The first words out of my case worker's mouth were, "He's one of our more challenging children," and then she went into a long list of what those challenges are. The kid has been through everything from an alcoholic drop-out "inappropriate" father, to living in a group home because his mother is frequently hospitalized. It was jaw-dropping to hear about his life and all his hardships and troubles and how his main goal is to boost his self-esteem so he can help his mom. And he's only 14. It's crazy that there are real kids like this out there. You hear these stories and think they're made for TV, but here I am getting a call to be a part of this kid's non-TV life.

I think the case worker is expecting me to get scared away and ask for a different Little, and I get until Friday to decide if I want to be this kid's Big, but I think I've already made up my mind that I absolutely want to be matched with him. My heart was already going out to him even before the caseworker went into the list of positive things about him, which are, among other things: he's into reading and science, is super smart (college reading level), and very insightful, and kind of awkward and nerdy (which were originally in the "negatives" column, but I've re-appropriated them).

So I'm going to take the next two days to digest everything. It's all a jumble in my head right now. But I expect to say yes on Friday and then they'll tell the kid they've got a potential Big for him, and if he's interested in me, we'll get to meet and see how it goes from there. I'm totally psyched. Super psyched. Mega psyched.

Ask Dr. Z

Maybe you've seen Daimler-Chrysler's new "Ask Dr. Z" commercials. You can thank me.

Fucking health insurance

I've changed health insurance three times in less than a year. There's no point in going into the details why since it will just give me an ulcer to relive it, but presently I have MDNY, and I was very happy with them, until a few weeks ago when I started getting letters from all the doctors I've seen in the past few months telling me that MDNY has inexplicably been refusing to reimburse them for anything. It's unbelievable. My allergy medicine is apparently "uncoverable" because I'm too old. I'm not even sure what the fuck that means -- too old for allergy medicine? Do they think I'm trying to order something off the fucking Happy Meal menu? At this point, I don't even know why I'm paying for health insurance. When I call them tomorrow, I'll ask them to explain it to me.

I fucking love M&M's so fucking much I could fucking die

Those of you who have my home address should feel free to send me personalized M&M's. Those of you who would like my home address for the purpose of mailing me personalized M&M's should email me.

Dear Delmar,

I got your postcard. The weather is not beautiful, but I still wish you were here or I were there.

Gazebo project

Since my blog will never rule the blogosphere if I don't update it daily with blazing wit and self-depracating introspection, let me tell you about my new gazebo project.

My parents have a gazebo in their backyard. Once upon a time, the gazebo was lovely -- it was screened in, bug free, stained and water-sealed, and just an overall great place to sit with a glass of iced tea and watch the sun set. But my family has a way of not taking care of things, especially if said things are outdoors. Our patio is a graveyard of abandoned lawn furniture. The hammock on the hill is rusted, shredded, and rotted. And the gazebo, until yesterday, was home to three years' worth of seasonal debris -- mountains of leaves, caterpillar husks, creepy crawlies with more legs than I have fingers and toes combined, and, of course, wiener-dog shit.

I'd been spending a lot of time in there regardless because I'm addicted to the outdoors because lately my mood is directly correlated to the weather. When it is sunny outside, I am sunny inside; and when it rains I'm a crying-on-the-inside clown. But after gorging myself at the Chinese food buffet the other night, I realized that my need to be outdoors was merging with my need for beauty, which meant that even while outside, I couldn't enjoy myself in a place that reminded me of The Trash Heap.

So I Shanghaied my little sister (who is 20 and about to graduate from college, but I can still say things to her like, "I'll give you five dollars if you'll let me pick your nose," and she'll still say, "Sure!") and we grabbed some rakes and brooms and garbage bags and the hose and we hit the gazebo like motherfucking Delta Force. Thus, after years of oppression, the gazebo has been liberated from winter's tyranny.

That was yesterday. Today we went to the Home Despot and bought crap to re-screen all the screens and to clean all the wood, which is what we'll do tomorrow (and which we would have done today if it hadn't been half-drizzling all afternoon before I had to go to work -- make up your freakin' mind, weather!).

After that, we're going to plant cactus around the gazebo's perimeter, and then we're going to raid this local statuary place for these totally sweet seahorses they've got there.

We also bought an antenna to boost the house's wireless Internet signal so it will once again work in the gazebo, and, if we've got money left over, I'm going to buy an outdoor fridge. I also want to buy a wiener-dog costume so I can run around the backyard barking at all the joggers and cyclists who pass by, but that'll probably have to wait.

But the best part is, once everything is together, I'm going to throw Gazebo Gras 2006, complete with Christmas lights, fireworks, a slip 'n' slide, BBQ, and booze -- and you're all invited, so get psyched!

An argument in favor of nuclear waste

As the sun plays upon my face like cotton-footed children, and the harbor air, freckled with salt, moseys across my street, my thoughts turn to nuclear waste. "Is it really so bad?" my thoughts wonder. On a scale of one to ten, with one being Christmas and ten being Islamic jihad, does nuclear waste deserve to rate any higher than a six? Surely six is pretty bad, but what about nuclear waste's natural adversary, oil? Shouldn't oil rate somewhere near a ten?

What with global warming, military adventurism, Haliburton, and the high price of gas, I'm ready to take my chances with nuclear waste -- nice, clean, nuclear waste. We can produce nuclear power domestically and then convert all our cars to run on electricity and keep all the pollution contained in barrels and filters and rubber sacks instead of spreading it all over the place, and then we can tell the oil companies to go fuck themselves.

Speaking of which, when we do switch to nice clean nuclear power, we can't just let anybody supply it. It's going to have to be the hippies. Specifically, it should be the Green Party. They're the only ones we can trust to do it right. They'll have to learn from the Navy, which successfully uses nuclear reactors all over the place without turning all their sailors into night lights, so that might be a little rough at first, having all those long-haired pot-smoking weirdoes mingling with our armed forces, but with the age of peace that nuclear power will bestow upon us, it won't matter if all our army men go AWOL to follow whoever is replacing Phish.

Plus we can count on the Green Party to quickly get us away from nuclear power and onto the next newest cleanest power source. And think of what would happen to politics if the Green Party suddenly had as much money, power, and influence as the oil cos. do now?

Seriously, this is win-win for everybody (except the oil cos and dick cheney, who we hate anyway).

A politics post in which a food metaphor goes too far

I used to follow politics pretty closely, but paying attention has gotten harder and harder as the country continues to show that it prefers to keep its head up its ass. Today's case in point is Busby's loss to Bilbray in California. The Daily Kos post-game is all about how Busby's strategy lost her the race, but I'm beyond blaming Democrats at this point. I'm sure there are a million things to attract voters that Democrats can do better. However, there comes a point when then light shined on an issue is so bright that Democrats should be able to get a can of Beefaroni elected without spending a dime campaigning, and the CA-50 special election to replace Duke Cunningham should have been one of those points.

Cunningham was the beacon of Republican corruption. Rather than a loan fuckup threatening to taint the rest of his party, he was the spot of mold on your slice of bread that causes you to check the rest of the loaf only to discover that it's time to toss the whole thing into the trash. The fact that a majority of voters in the CA-50 chose to keep making shit sandwiches with their moldy bread is sickening. Worse is that many democrats apparently chose not to vote at all.

What the fuck, people? When the Republican rot smells as bad as it did in Cunningham's district, it is no longer the Democrats' job to entice their base to the polls, nor is it their job to convince moderate Republicans that it's time to change cleaning services. No, it's up to the voters to accept responsibility for cleaning out their own refrigerator. And if they can't be bothered to do it, then I don't want them living in my neighborhood anymore, lest the smell start to creep into my house.

All of which brings me back to my recurring desire to dissolve the union. Let's divide the country between the shit-sandwiches and the cans of Beefaroni. Let the maniacs have their lunch and eat it too, just as long as they do it in a place where the rest of us don't have to smell it.

BBBS

On June 15th I meet with the kind folks at Big Brothers Big Sisters to have an interview for becoming a Big Brother. I originally started thinking of joining BBBS almost a year ago because it would look good on my resume when I apply for teaching jobs, but I wasn't truly motivated to do it until my success as a tutor showed me that, gosh darn it, kids love me. So now I'm psyched about the prospect of getting to spend a minimum of two to four days a month hanging out with a kid in need just because I think it's going to be a blast.

The challenge is going to be finding ways to entertain a 7- to 16-year-old on Long Island (aka: Dullsville). At the risk of getting ahead of myself, I've started planning stuff to do. At the top of the list is dressing up like super heros and hanging out in parks or at the mall looking for villains to fight and people to rescue. Or we'll play skee ball or check out the aquarium. If I'm paired with an older kid, we'll go drag racing.

And if you've got any activity suggestions, send them my way.

The Da Vinci Irony

Well, it wasn't complete crap. Had I not read the book, I think I would have enjoyed the movie since the visuals add a lot of what the book is lacking; but the characters were still flat and there isn't anything beyond the puzzle to keep one involved. And since pretty much everybody knows how it ends...

The irony, though, is in the fact that the story revolves around the power, importance, and significance of women, but the movie turns Sophie into a know-nothing-girl who's just along for the ride, and every other female from the book is either diminished or deleted. This phenomenon goes so far that an important scene in the book where Langdon and Sophie get help from a reference librarian is replaced by a scene on a bus where they instead get help from some dude with a cellphone. The changes seem so pointless that one has to wonder if it's not in fact a deliberate commentary on what Hollywood thinks of the book's whole "sacred feminine" idea.

Brett Ratner's mutant power

is the ability to suck the life out of a perfectly good movie franchise.

X-Men 3 sucked. It sucked bad. There are so many structural flaws in the story, it would fail Screenwriting 101. I won't go into detail here since doing so would require lots of spoilers, but I will say that if you do see it, be prepared to endure pointless scenes, a pointless plot, empty characters, and lame action sequences. I want my hour and 45 minutes back. And I want to beat the crap out of Brett Ratner. And I wish there were some way to punish Hollywood for making movies that they must know are crap. Unfortunately, you don't know if a movie is any good until after you've seen it, and by then Hollywood already has your money. I'm going to write a letter demanding my money back.

The Candy Man can!

This post over at This Modern World is priceless. Go give love.