Teamwork is Scary and Effective

I laugh, but I'm going to have nightmares about that face. I did see one of the joint fundraising ads for the Democratic Party with both of them on it, though, and my heart grew three sizes.

A Couple of Observations

Some thoughts:
1. I'll admit that my mom doesn't look half bad in a skort. And I hesitate to say this, but my mom has impressive legs.
2. HOWEVER, my grandma appears to be wearing a fanny pack, which means that we are going to have to have an old-fashioned family sit-down over Christmas that will quickly turn into an intervention hosted by yours truly and the cast of What Not to Wear. That, or I'm just going to save my hard-earned sterling and burn everyone's clothes. You're welcome, family!
3. Grandma can't crop a photo to save her life.
4. My mom just ran a half marathon, and she's a rockstar. (Let's hope that that's genetic, because I feel cheated if all I inherited was her swanlike shoulders and questionable taste.)

This is Where Some Type of Batsignal Would Come in Handy

I just got off the phone with my mom, who's running her first half-marathon tomorrow. First of all, I'm very proud of her. Second of all, I told her she's going to have to run next year, because she just told me that she bought a skort for the occasion. And when I went, "um... a skort?" she enthusiastically said, "it's half-skirt, half-shorts!" as though I was the one with the problem. I had to tell her that I knew what a skort was, but that I couldn't let her wear one in public in good conscience. (I wasn't mean about it, though. I said that she could wear it, but only if she was being picked up by Christopher Lloyd and taken back to the 1980s in a flying car.)

Seriously, a skort!? It's moments like these that a gay son viscerally feels every one of the thousands of miles between himself and his mother. If she starts running in LA Lights and Zubaz, I'm buying a ticket to Fargo.

Grab a Screwdriver, You Tool

I just started writing a frantic email to Apple asking what you're supposed to do if you spill Evian on your MacBook, and then I realized that they'd probably just write back that you deserve it. And they would be right.

A Change Would Do You Good

In the past 48 hours, I was asked if I wanted to shack up with three of my friends next year, took a look at the flat where they're living, thought it over for an afternoon, and said yes. I think this falls in the good decision camp, except that my bedroom is tiny and I may or may not fit in the bed. Whatevs, I sleep in a ball anyway. The important thing is that we have a garden and we're in a neighborhood that's heavily serviced by diasporic supermarkets, and these are criteria I look for in a commune.

Sing It, Edith

I realized today that I reach a point where I'm so stressed that the gloves come off and I make questionable decisions for the sake of making decisions. One of the better ones was picking a lecturer for my course, who's supposed to be charismatic and lectures about a topic (the evolution of radio in Britain) that I know approximately nothing about and will gladly outsource to someone else. In contrast, one of my bad decisions was trying to book flights to Manila all day, being snapped at by a woman who insisted I wouldn't find a better price than the one she was offering over the phone, and then buying a ticket that was $40 more expensive from Expedia out of pure, unadulterated spite. I definitely spent about $400 more than I intended (which I'll probably regret at some point), but it's worth it to have the dates I wanted, a single layover in Abu Dhabi, arrival and departure times that aren't around 2am, and actual plans instead of a giant question mark on my to do list. Deciding to break for coffee and multigrain toast with strawberry jam was a good choice; taking an hour off to read the Guardian was probably a bad choice. You get the idea.

I was especially hellbent on making progress today because I have my meeting with the Warden tomorrow at 9am, and last time, I tried to explain to him why I thought it would be a good idea to teach myself Spanish via podcast instead of listening to Alanis Morissette all the time. I don't think I made my point forcefully enough, because he seemed unconvinced. So tomorrow, it'll be nice to have concrete plans, even if they were partially formed out of malice for someone I've never met and ended up costing a small fortune. I'm going to keep that to myself.

Stress, As Usual

If anyone wants to make my life easier, they could:

a) find cheap tickets to Manila from late July to late September,
b) tell me everything I need to know about structuralism,
c) find a guest lecturer for my course this summer, and
d) throw a birthday party so I have an excuse to eat ice cream.

Luckily, Ginger just turned 25 and made D. happen, and I spent part of the evening at G&Ds drowning my stress in Dime Bar ice cream and a cake from the Covered Market with a well-proportioned mermaid on the top. (It turns out that the mermaid was appropriate, since Ginger casually mentioned that she's swimming the Strait of Gibraltar this summer. She says things like this in roughly the same tone of voice I use to say that I'm breaking in a new pair of shoelaces.) And now, someone's camera has a video of me being handed a piece of mermaid's torso, tossing it into my mouth, and offhandedly commenting that breasts are soft and taste like marzipan. When this leaks onto the internet and destroys my career, I hope someone has the decency to edit in a shooting star and the "The More You Know" theme.