Better Than Chocolates?

I am still stunned by something I saw this evening at the Smiley-Faced Big Box Store. It was a giant display of K-Y Jelly with signs all over it proclaming, "Great Valentine's Day Gift!" Wow, what a thoughtful and romantic gesture for that special lady in your life. Why not be extra-suave and throw in a few Summer's Eve douches or a box of Stayfree maxi-pads?e

Maximus Gluteus

I read somewhere that six out of ten office workers are overweight. This is news? I thought it was common knowledge that if you sit at a desk all day, your ass will eventually expand to the width of your chair. And my boss just bought me a new, much larger chair, so I am really in trouble.

There's more to it than a simple lack of exercise, though. Office workers are bored. What do bored people talk about? In my experience, sex and food. Harassment laws being what they are, most people decide food is the safer topic. They talk about what they had for breakfast. They talk about where they are going for lunch. They talk about what they are making for dinner. They swap recipes and tips, discuss cooking shows and surf for new meal ideas on the internet. Who wouldn't be ravenous after listening to that all day?

Of course, everyone's favorite way to alleviate the boredom is to check out the snacks some of the more thoughtful employees bring to share. Nothing is tastier than free office food! I went for years without eating a single doughnut, until a former boss started bringing them in once a week. Then I couldn't shovel them in fast enough. My fruit and yogurt just didn't look as good in comparison. I'm not made of stone!o

Yikes!

A long-repressed memory surfaced this evening while watching TV. I saw a commercial for a re-made version of "When A Stranger Calls." I immediately got the chills, recalling how much the original freaked me out when I was a kid. To this day, if someone ever wanted to knock me off all they would have to do is call me and whisper, "Have you checked the children?" I would drop dead immediately. Gah! Why did they decide to wig out a new generation with this film? They should send it back to hell where it belongs!

Misnomer

Friday evening I went out to dinner with a small group of people. One of them complained loudly about absolutely everything. "The tables are too close together." "It's too hot in here." "So-and-so over there is such a snob; she'll walk right past you and not even say hello." "Those kids need to sit down and be quiet." "Who's that guy? He looks like a weirdo." "The pizza isn't cut right." "The ice cream is too soft."

This woman's name, by the way? Joy!t

Four Star Reviews

Someone told me he had eaten at this new restaurant last week. I had been wanting to try it myself, so I asked about his experience. His reply? "The ventilation was good."

Later, in a separate conversation, someone else mentioned trying another new place. I asked him what the food was like and he said, "Well, I didn't get sick!"

So if you're looking to have a mediocre time dining out, I have a couple of recommendations for you!

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

When you live in the close quarters of an apartment building, you can become pretty intimately acquainted with your neighbors. But like the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. These are a few people with whom I've become too familiar over the years:

• The Vacuuming At 7:30 On A Saturday Morning neighbor
• The Screaming Obscenities At Each Other for 45 Minutes Straight neighbors
• The Skinheads Who Party 'Til 4 A.M. neighbors
• The Having Noisy Sex In The Bathtub neighbors
• The Let's Give All The Kids Whistles! neighbor
• The Running An Illegal Tattoo Parlor Out Of His Apartment neighbor
• The Shitting In The Laundry Room Dryer neighbor
• The Killed Her Ex-Husband neighbor

To be fair, that last one was actually a very sweet lady and she claimed it was in self-defense. Although her second husband died suddenly and unexpectedly, and she moved out shortly thereafter . . . hmmmmm . . . .

Trés Klassé

I like to cook from scratch, but I didn't think of myself as a kitchen adventurer until I had a conversation with a couple of people who had never:

• Used a spice other than garlic powder;
• Tasted Dijon mustard;
• Cooked a fresh vegetable; or
• Made pancakes without the aid of Bisquick.

If you hid all the Stove-Top Stuffing, Shake'n Bake and Campbell's cream soups in the world, those two would starve to death.

I thought of them the other day when I saw a recipe for "Fast Onion Chicken." I assumed it was the ol' "bread a chicken with dried onion soup mix" routine. But no, this had a unique twist. You were supposed to take perfectly lovely chicken breasts and coat them with crushed FRENCH-FRIED ONIONS. Yes, the same thing you use to top your green bean casserole. Just reading about it made my gallbladder do the mambo. I assume the "fast" in the title of the recipe refers to the speed at which I would be admitted to the emergency room after eating it.o

Can't Sleep, Clown Will Eat Me

Speaking of childhood traumas, I never completely got over my fear of clowns. One of my earliest memories is of running out of the room in terror when Bozo's Circus came on. That giant red hairdo scared me to death. In time I grew to love Bozo, but that was easy because he was safely ensconced on the TV screen. He wasn't in my face twisting up weird balloon animals like the clowns who were allowed to roam freely at carnivals and fairs.

To further fuel my fears, John Wayne Gacy was a hot news topic when I was a kid. How was I to know whether a clown was simply providing some innocent amusement or trying to lure me into his basement of death? And clowns always have the most bizarre names. I think the worst one I ever heard was Wetsie. Wetsie the Clown. That just brings to mind all sorts of disturbing imagery.

To this day, the sight of a bright red nose and big shoes gives me chills. I fear I will never be free.l

Little House of Horrors

Not long ago I realized that most of my childhood neuroses could be traced to my habit of watching "Little House on the Prairie." That program was an hour of sheer terror disguised as wholesome family entertainment. Every week someone died in a fire, went blind, got mauled by a bear or crashed over the side of a cliff in a stagecoach. Sylvia was raped by a mime, for cripes' sake! Mary, my favorite character back then, suffered an especially heavy load: blindness, loss of her school, dead baby, wimpy husband. No wonder I always expected disaster to be around every corner.

Now that I think about it, I watched a lot of trauma-inducing stuff back then. On TV, the movie of the week was usually some all-star disaster flick like "The Towering Inferno," "Airport '77," "The Poseidon Adventure" or "The Beasts Are In the Streets." At school we watched filmstrips where teen girls would fly through windshields courtesy of their drunken prom dates, or wind up dead at the bottom of swimming pools after popping pills at parties. And don't forget the bloodbath known as the Driver's Ed Accident Footage Festival.

Then I would go home to watch an "ABC After-School Special," where you were guaranteed to see at least one of the following per episode: incest, drowning, assault, suicide or Helen Hunt jumping out of a window while tripping on acid.

If anyone cares to do a study on post-traumatic stress disorder caused by viewing '70s and '80s TV, I will gladly volunteer to be your first subject. I promise you will get plenty of material for your research.e

Don't Get It Twisted

Now that the new year is well underway, I will present my selections for the Top Three Malaprops I Overheard In Casual Conversation During 2005:

1. "I can't afford that! I wasn't born on a silver platter."

2. "She can't see very well when driving because she has immaculate degeneration."

3. "We stayed home all day and foxed the foyer."

In case you don't get the last one, he meant to say "faux," as in, "We stayed home all day and applied a faux paint treatment to the walls of the foyer."t

Caving In

I always thought that blogs were for self-involved, navel-gazing nerds with far too much time on their hands. Then I realized that describes me perfectly, so here I am. But this is as far as I go. If anyone catches me writing fanfic, you may shoot me with tranquilizer darts and snatch the keyboard from my hands.