I Don’t Want a Stupid Title

I have memories of these two saturday morning commercials that would really choke me up when I was about five.

1) This kid (later to star in the hit NBC sitcom, “The Hogan Family”) gets out of bed in the morning.  He slumps into the kitchen, and opens up all the cupboards.  They are all empty.  He’s pretty disappointed.  Then, in the last cupboard, in the very back corner, he finds one small single serving size box of Corn Pops.  Hot dog!  He chipperly snacks as he walks outside where he finishes his banquet on the front stoop of his house.  Just as he finishes, a couple of girls walk by, leisurely licking ice cream cones.  He watches them, and is suddenly crestfallen.  He takes the empty Corn Pops box and crushes it in his hand (I also vaguely remember a similar commerical about an old lady eating cat food….my question is, why cat food, when Ramen is like eleven cents?). 

Kind of sounds ridiculous now, but that one always used to make me weep.  Not like the end of Benji weep, but you know, a couple of tears would form and brim over my lower lids, rolling gently down my face, until I wipe them quickly away as to avoid the happenstance beating my sister may administer if I somehow set her off. 

2) A picture of a group of kids fills in…each kid a puzzle piece.  A kid in the wheelchair….then, a kid with those arm braces on…then, a kid with a goofy smile.  This haunting song plays in the background (you may hear me hum it to myself sometimes when I feel melancholy) “Won’t anyone out there dare to love me?”  It’s a commercial for handicapped kids who need to be adopted.  Oh cruel world!  I’ll adopt you, but I only have the one little box of Corn Pops…

Does anyone else remember these commercials?  What about the cartoon “Shirt Tails.”  What the hell was that about?!  A panda bear who wears a shirt?  What a concept!

After all was said and done, you were just another girl who got gizzed on.

Got gizzed on vs. Immaculate conception.  Hmm….

I guess it’s an honest mistake.  I’ve believed some really dumb stuff. 

Like, when I was four I put a green balloon on my toe and showed it to my mom, who screamed and said “What happened to your toe?!”  I just realized a few years ago she knew it was a balloon all along. 

I also recently made a startling revelation: that Barbie Doll arm that disappeared when I was about three probably didn’t fall into a worm hole.  Like anything else, the most simple conclusion is probably the correct one.  In fact,  I bet one of our dog’s ate it.  Maybe even a more outlandish conclusion would explain it…like my sister stuck it up her ass and was too ashamed to admit it.  Or she stuck it too far up there to reach.  Anything is possible…

Except, by the way, immaculate conception.  Even assuming there is a God, I just don’t think getting pregnant without some form of sperm finding its way into the birth canal is possible.  Am I a cynic?  Yeah, but I really don’t see what that has to do with anyway.

Can you see this ad campaign:

A guy rolls out of bed wearing one shoe, and a pair of soiled briefs.  He slams onto floor, clutches his forehead and tries fruitlessly to separate himself from the sea of empty beer cans he’s sinking in.  Cut to…

The guy desperately scrambles into the bathroom, and throws the door shut behind him.  The sound of retching peals like a bell (but by a bell, I mean a bell that sounds more like dry heaves really than anything else).  Cut to…

A toilet flushes as the guy pulls his throbbing head out of the toilet.  He reaches a trembling meathook toward the medicine cabinet, wincing in pain as he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. 

He opens the cabinet and grabs some Tylenol, rubbing his temple with one hand.  Cut to…

Close up of the guy struggling to open the fucking stupid child-proof bottle.  “Mother F - ” he shouts and spikes the bottle into the bile filled throne.

Fade to a close up of a guy easily opening a non-child proof bottle of “Tylenol Drunk.”  The voice over says “Tylenol Drunk:  Because I don’t have kids (that I know of).”

Does this product exist?  It should.  Although my Tylenol PM bottle isn’t child-proof (the only one I’ve ever seen), and Gus got into it, and I kind of understood for about four seconds why they make them child-proof.  Luckilly, I came back to my senses after I counted the pills, realized he didn’t eat any (he enjoys “sucking dye,” probably because he’s heard his old mom saying she wants to do some “sucking dry” and was confused). 

Luckily, the little tike wasn’t trying to take his own life.  To be safe though, we’re now enrolled in family counseling two times a week to work out our problems.  I found out he has abandoment issues stemming from when he was barely four weeks old, and he was ripped from his mother’s teet and sold into a puppy mill.  I’m like, God Gus, if you’re bitching to me about being sold into slavery, you’re barking up the wrong damn tree. 

And besides, he should know there’s no barking in the house. 

1) I am the sole owner of a sound mop and a thickly bristled broom.

2) That horrible feeling one has when he/she has the stomach flu is merely a memory to me (so long as this stabbing pain in my lower back isn’t the onslaught of a vicious kidney stone ripping its way through my urethra). 

3) I have a warm lap filled with a sleeping puppy who is incapable of making neither mess nor sound.

4) I am 194/200 months finished with an otherwise pointless education.

5) The fact that the supposed existence of a state of non-existence seems quite promising.

6) The sinking feeling that the opposite also seems quite promising.

7) Knowing, and without trying to get a big head about it, that I photograph marginally well somewhere around 35%f the time (check out that acceptable looking lass to the left).

Knowing that I’ll most likely never be fat, and according to what most women supposedly think, I therefore have no real problems, and besides, lots of men other than Popeye might find that plank-like “Olive Oyl” look sexy.

9) I feel better when I feel bad.  To me, it feels like a home that’s not in the blustery nether-regions of the economic-wasteland that is upstate New York.  I take comfort in crap.

10) There’s no shortage of crap in the world. 

I guess things are looking up for our hero. 

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“Life’s a big stupid crap fest.”

I can’t f-ing sleep.  probably because i’ve had a series of the world’s worst jobs for the past three years that have turned me into a vampire minus all that fun blood sucking and neck biting.

this, mixed with a lot of stress about an income tax paper due on tuesday that I can’t bring myself to write, as well as a sure to be inauspicious 25th birthday on Friday, you get one stressed out, only mildly pleased to be alive, Rachel.

but enough about me, what about my dog??  God, he’s f-ing fantastic.

But enough about my dog.

I think it’s that time of night where I give into the reality that sleep will not come naturally, and take refuge into the doped up embrace of a sedative and beer induced slumber.

f-ing fantastic.

A friend of mine lamented to me in high school about a boy she liked.

He was in eleventh grade and we were in tenth.  He was dating a girl in ninth grade but was apparently still in love with the senior he had just broken up with.  At a high school dance, he asked my friend to dance.  Afterwards, she found me crawling around under the bleachers searching for quarters and said, tears filling her eyes:

“What kills me about the whole situation is that I’m not even number two.  He’s dating Aimee and he’s still in love with Cheryl.  I’m third.  Third.“

I wanted to slap her.

“You mean you’re standing on the podium, medal around your neck, singing along with the Star Spangled Banner, and you have the audacity to piss and moan about it to the girl who’s spent the last four hours crawling around under the bleachers looking for loose change?!?”

Anyway, a few weeks later he asked her to prom and they ended up dating for the next three years.  My point is this:

1) I don’t understand people with self-esteem and a sense that they are owed and therefore expect good things to happen to them.

2) I equally don’t understand people who want something so bad, and it actually happens for them.   It makes me wonder if my second conclusion is somehow dependant on the first.  Oh well, I can’t be expected to solve the great mysteries of life.

and finally

3) If a boy, girl, or half-boy-half-girl ever told me he/she/he-she liked me third best, I’d throw a party and call it the “Someone likes me almost as much as he likes someone else almost as much as he likes someone else - party.”  There’d be chips and dip, a dog/cat petting zoo, and maybe a dance-off.  I’ve always wanted to have a dance-off.

This was me Monday night around three am and I think it stands as a metaphor for my life:

Imagine.  I’m bent over the toilet, plunging like my life depends on it.  Wearing a cape and saying “you will not prevail!” over and over again, toilet water splashing on my face. 

It was a beautiful scene.  I think now I know what kind of superhero I’m destined to be.  I’m on a mountain top somewhere holding my golden plunger to the sky as a lightning bolt strikes the earth somewhere behind me.

There are two morals to this story:

1) Kitty litter turns cement-like when mixed with cat-end-product and is the figurative vinegar to the otherwise well oiled machine that is our toilet 

and more importantly:

2) When me and my friend went into our first job interview, they took one look at her, put her in a girlish frock, and placed her in front of the hostess stand.  they took one look at me, handed me a steel wool scrubber, a squeegee, and thrust my hands armpit deep into a vat of molten hot animal fat.

I washed dishes, because that’s who I am:  destined to walk the walk no one else cares to.

(Rachel: 1, Toilet: 0)