Saturday, July 28, 2007

you wanna see my id?

As if to prove a point, my friend and I were at Cafe Express last week, and ordered a bottle of wine. The check out girl, who I admit was a few olives short of a salad bar, actually asked us both for ID. We are 42 and 40.

Ta da!

passover seder in a bottle

Among other things I collect, I have a bathroom cabinet filled with aromatherapy shower gels. I can't help myself. I like how they smell, and I like using them in the shower. If I walk into a Bath and Body Works sale, I willfully suspend my critical consumer thinking and will buy 5 for $25 without calculating that "on sale" still means that 10oz of what is mostly water and sodium laurel sulfate is costing me $5.

What's worse is that when I go on these consumer splurges, in an addled frenzy I will sometimes buy smells I know nothing about simply because of attractive packaging, or a nice sounding name. I have not yet learned that olfactory products should not be purchased based on visual or aural clues.

So, last night I cracked open a new bottle of "lemon grass sage" shower gel. I guess I bought it because I like lemon, but was aware that without smelling it in the store, I could be in for a completely kitcheny experience. I was hoping more for "Joy" than "thai food", but I was definitely prepared for something that didn't belong in the bathroom.

It smelled like neither end of that spectrum. It had no recognizable lemon scent at all, and the scent it did have was just dancing around the edges of my cortex, teasing me into trying to place it.

It didn't smell bath-y and it didn't smell kitchen-y. It smelled fresh. It smelled green. It smelled... fresh and green. Like lawn, only not really. That was the best I could do. And on top of the elusive smell, it triggered an elusive memory. It was an old memory, and it compelled an action, though I wasn't quite sure what that was, either.

I spent an extra 10 minutes dawdling in the shower trying to figure it out. As I was rinsing out my conditioner it finally hit me. Parsley. It smelled like parsley. And what I was wanting to do was dip something in salt water and sing Dayanu...

Next time I'll pick up the complementary Matzoh and Charoses bath beads.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

the sky is falling

Speaking of fear...

I see this ad on late night TV and it makes me want to scream. Can someone introduce statistics to the American people?

I'm going to hermetically seal my teenager. Much safer.

Friday, July 13, 2007

addendum

Executive Privilege
"Balanced" news
18 months of presidential campaign
Really stupid people (although these guys were entertaining)
Credit industry
Mosquitoes
Not having a ceiling fan in my bedroom
That in the last 30 years the Internet has been invented, cell phones, cable modems, wireless internet, ipods, iphones, TVs are wide screen and hi def, and yet somehow "good car mileage" still is in the 30 mpg range, which, if I recall, is about the same as it was, oh, 30 years ago. I realize combustion is limited by a fairly strict set of laws and efficiencies, but... c'mon guys. Even the hybrids aren't that impressive.
Oil dependence (or did I just say that?)
My post-40 deteriorating eye-sight

maybe next time a quick post on the things i like...

Thursday, July 12, 2007

angry

I have always tried to make these posts more than just a daily journal of my life, although it's always been a little bent that way. I prefer my writing to be entertaining and to make people laugh, if not be downright laughable. But I find that everything I want to write about, everything that I think about lately, just really pisses me off, and when I start writing it takes about a paragraph until I'm patently unfunny and deep in a rant.

So, today I will embrace my anger and see if that helps...

Things that make me angry - an abbreviated list:

Bush
Cheney
War in Iraq
The administration's treatment of the men and women serving in our armed forces
Guantanamo
Any kind of Czar
Plame-gate
The fact that we can't stop calling things "xxx-gate", as if "Watergate" were some sort of controversy about reservoir tampering, and not the name of a hotel.
The disintegration of the 4th estate
The dismantling of democracy by the corporate oligarchy
Big Dick Cheney
Congress
Big Oil
Big Pharma
Agribusiness
AT&T
Big Religion
Lack of national health care
Cost of a college education (HOLY SHIT!! How is it possible that it costs more than I make a year to send a child to school?)
The fact that as a society we have divested ourselves of the responsibility of protecting education, health care, and the media from market forces and keeping them as part of the public trust
Have I mentioned "You don't know Dick" Cheney?
Alberto Gonzales
Rudy Guiliani
The concept of "God Bless America" - I have never had a need to postulate a god, but if there were one, I'm pretty damn sure his globe wouldn't show big pink and blue and green blobs of political entities.
Global warming deniers
The death of accountability
The language of non-accountability
Bill O'Reilly
Greed
People who "pray" for financial success
Technical support
Voice menus
Abstinence-only sex education
Intolerance
Gay bashing
Reality TV
The "it's cool to be mean" culture of American Idol
Whipped news media
Fear-based politics
Integration of Church and State
Comcast advertising
The remake of The Producers

I know that some of this is redundant, but it probably reflects only a small fraction of the things I think about that I'm never more than hair's breadth away from launching into a rant about.

So, there it is. I'm angry at, oh, everything. I can probably still be funny, but I needed to get this off my chest.