if songs were graded by their first lyric, this one would do well
my boss was harassing me about my inconsistent use of serial commas, sometimes referred to as oxford commas, to which a student in our suite, overhearing the jocular ribbing, quietly emailed me the following video which stands as one of the most entertaining music videos i recall seeing.
please note there are some naughty words in there so if you're easily put-off by such offenses, i'd suggest this old room-pleaser instead.
if you ever wondered how skittish marty is about letting one get by the goalie allowing for an accidental/unexpected pregnancy, your curiosity would have been well satisfied when alex mistook her birth control patch for a big-ass band-aid* and motioned towards it, offering to take it off for her. the way marty jumped and twisted away you would have thought alex was about to mistakingly pull the pin from a live grenade, which when you consider spending all day, every day keeping anthony alive, a pin-less hand grenade may be an astute and reasonable comparison.
* since the patch is larger than a conventional band-aid and was placed on her ass, calling it a big-ass band-aid was quite perfectly perfect. but please don't mistake this as me saying it was a band-aid on a big-ass which i think would be written as a big ass band-aid. perhaps grammar-police dave can set me straight because if i botch that and people misinterpret my message, the need for birth control in my home could become a moot point.
ENTERTAINMENT, FAMILY, FRIENDS, LIFE, TECHNOLOGY, WEB
2010-04-06
no smoking food or drink!
most guys obsess about fried food, hollywood starlets, first-person shooter games, fast cars and/or fantasy football. i used to work with a guy who obsessed about grammar, or more accurately, broken grammar. for this guy my site and its quickly penned material was like porn of the highest caliber. most correspondence i receive from him contains a bulleted list of errors he's found in my ramblings. that said, the latest message i received from him surprisingly did not contain a litany of my blunders.
I saw something that, for reasons I can't figure out, reminded me of you... or at least struck me as something you'd have liked. It was a SUPERB example of the importance of punctuation, particularly commas (the prime example is "Let's eat Grandma!" vs "Let's eat, Grandma!". It was on a blog (a technical forum, not that it matters). There had been some good-natured back and forth banter and one person had thought the level of ribbing was not up to par, so he posted "C'mon! We can do better guys". And not two minutes later someone else posted "What's wrong with the guys you're doing now?"
first off, he's going to have a hard time convincing me he didn't pen that retort. and secondly, i for the life of me can't imagine why that banter would lead him to me.
alex had some friends over to the house and we were playing ogre and chase and rough-housing. at one point in the mayhem, one of alex's friends stopped his play, turned to the side protectively and said with a serious urgency to one of the other boys:
watch out, you almost hit my tenders.
that is probably the most accurate, heartfelt expression i've ever heard for a guy's junk, like, ever.
when in santa fe on our holiday we stayed with another family. they had four kids. all but one was older than our kids, their oldest months from driving. one day while we were lazing about i asked the kids if there was a rule in their house they didn't like. after about thirty seconds the fifteen year old boy excitedly answered, "yes, the like jar was pretty lame." his sister immediately seconded the thought. i asked what the like jar was and before my sentiment was even complete, their mother groaned and her head sagged and to avoid her children's editorial she confessed the following, "i just couldn't take it anymore. the word like. it was constant. each and every sentence out of anyones mouth was peppered with five or seven or more likes. it was maddening. so i made a rule that every time someone said the word like in conversation and not in meaning they had to pay the like jar." her son then brightly added, "but it happened so often that mom couldn't keep after us about it and it died after, like, a day or two." i smiled at his enthusiasm as well as his slipping a 'like' into his taunt.
i said to the mother she should have promised them each fifty dollars at the end of the month but each time they said like, the month-end booty dropped a buck. with this she eyed the kids and with that they stopped smiling. or stopped smiling so obviously at least.
if marty asks me to do something, there is always a silent "right now" tacked onto the end of her request. conversely, whenever i ask her if there is anything i can do to help, there is always a silent 'within reason' placed at the end. marital life together was more tumultuous before we learned this bit about one another. and, to be fair, marital life can easily get re-tumultuous when when one of us chooses to forget, ignore or blatantly disregard the policy.
the good news is we've got alex to stop calling people poop-head. the bad news is he's simply replaced the term with poop-things which is kinda even worse because previously the insult was quite specific. now he waves a hand in your direction and says 'you are poop-things dad. a lot of poop-things'. now it's not just my head but all of me and and not only am i just a turd on a pair of shoulders but all sorts of defacatory-related things as well. not a good place to be for a guy like me.
i fear we brought this upgrade on because of how we tried to defend 'poop-head' by saying that all 'poop-related things' belonged in the bathroom. it's actually quite keen of him to discern that there are more than just poop-heads in this big and great and mysterious world.
I never tried to hurry anything all summer. Not in the porch swing, or in the pine woods, or on the float at night when we swam out, or in the roadster. Everything that happened came to happen as simply and as naturally and as gradually as a season coming on or a plant unrolling a leaf or a kitten waking up. And there was a kind of luxuriousness in not rushing things, in not driving toward the hot grip and awkward tussle and the leer for the boys back in the dormitory when you got in, a new sensuality in waiting for the massive current to take you where you belonged and would go in the end. She was young — she seemed younger to me then than she did later on looking back for that summer I was so sure that I was old and jaded — and she was timid and sensitive and shy, but it wasn't any squealing, squawking, pullet-squawking, teasing, twitching, oh-that's-not-nice-and-I-never-let-anyone-do-that-before-oh kind of shyness. Perhaps shyness is the wrong word for it, after all. Certainly it is wrong if back behind that word there is any implication or color of shame or fear or desire to be "nice." For in one way, she seemed to be detached from her very slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered body, as though it were an elaborate and cunning mechanism in which she and I shared ownership, which had suddenly dropped to us out of the blue, and which, in our ignorance, we had to study with the greatest patience and most reverent attention lest we miss some minute, scholarly detail without knowledge of which everything would be wasted. So it was a period of the most delicate discrimination and subtle investigations, with her seriousness mixed with a graceful gaiety, ... a gaiety to which the words didn't mean much but the tune meant everything, a tune which seemed to come from the very air as though it were full of invisible strings and she simply reached out at random in the dark to pluck them with an idle familiar finger.
...
We went quite a long way, that summer, and there were times when I was perfectly sure I could have gone farther. When I could have gone the limit. For that fine, slender, compactly made, tight-muscled, soft-fleshed, golden-shouldered mechanism which fascinated Anne Stanton and me, which had dropped to us out of the blue, was a very sensitive and beautifully tuned-up contraption. But maybe I was wrong in that surmise, and maybe I could not have hurried the massive deliberation of that current in which we were caught and suspended, or hurried Anne Stanton's pensive and scholarly assimilation of each minute variation which had to be slowly absorbed into the body of our experience before another could be permitted. It was as though she was aware of a rhythm, a tune, a compulsion, outside of herself, and devoutly followed it in its subtle and winding progression. But wrong or not, I did not put my surmise to the test, for if I myself was not truly aware of that rhythm and compulsion which bemused her, I was aware of her devotion to it, and could find every moment with her full enough. Paradoxically enough, it was when I was away from her, when I was withdrawn from her context, back in my room at night or in the hot early afternoon, after lunch, that I was savagely impatient of the delays and discriminations. This would be especially true at those times when she wouldn't see me for a day, the times which seemed to mark, I came to understand, some stage, some milepost, we had passed. She would simply withdraw herself from me, as she had done that night after we first kissed, and leave me, at first, confused and guilty, but later, as I came to grasp the pattern of things, merely impatient for the next day when she would appear at the court, swinging her racket, her face so smooth, young, healthy and apparently disinterested, though comradely, that I could not equate it with the face I remembered with the eyelids drooping and the damp, starlight-or-moonlight-glistening lips parted for the quick, shallow breath or the unashamed sigh.
excerpt from robert penn warren's All the King's Men
