What If

I am not allowed to watch Law and Order: SVU right before bedtime, and have not been permitted to do so ever since I woke up Guy #1 to ask if he would stick by me were I to contract AIDS from a brutal gang rape.

He does not play the What If Game very well at all.

My iTunes shrimp net came up with Dusty Springfield (You Don't Have To Say You Love Me), that insanely popular radio single from Fastball a million years ago (The Way), the fabulous rainy day voice of Billie Holiday (As Time Goes By), a single purchased solely because the band had the name The String Cheese Incident (Take Five), and Darlene Love's Christmas, Baby Please Come Home - because I once performed the role of a doowop girl doing background on this song for a musical my freshman year of college. At the time I wore a Santa hat with a blinking white light in lieu of a puffball. I cannot actually sing. This was less of a problem than you would think.

My inability to sing led directly to me lip-syncing the Dusty number, and turning to my husband with the comment, "I could totally do a drag act."

His raised eyebrow said it all, but he managed to say, "They don't let you do that without a penis."

"If I took testosterone, though, and got deep voiced and hairy, maybe they'd think I was just really good at tucking."

"Snort."

"Well, what if something happened naturally, and my hormones got all wacky, and I ended up hairy and deep voiced anyway?"

"Then you would be raping people in prison because this totally just became an episode of SVU, which you are not allowed to watch before bedtime."

Screw The Feds!

(Background, first IMed to me by Guy #2: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060120/ap_on_hi_te/google_records)

You have a moral duty, my fellow Americans. Go to Google, right now, and type "Fuck you, Alberto Gonzales." The top link you get is a mildly amusing grumble, but the results aren't the point. The point is that when the theocratic fascists finally take over and Google turns over their records after a long and bitter court battle, you want to make that seach as popular as humanly possible.

It's your patriotic duty.

There Are Huge Numbers of Insurgents Here

http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/001555.html

A Window Into My Home, Part 5

I am blind. My glasses are extremely thick, which makes my contact lens prescription a special order. When I take the spectacles off in order to shower, I am usually doing so first thing in the morning. I'm not yet awake enough to stick my finger in my eye to insert a contact lens, but I'm about to get into a small space filled with water drops and steam. In other words, there is a ten minute window of time during the day where I am using no corrective devices for my poor vision.

One other thing to note, for people who are not similarly afflicted: When you can't focus your own eyes, everything appears larger with indistinct borders. An unfocused photo of street lamps at night is a good example. Big round fuzzy balls take the place of small, sharply edged ovals.

When I got into the shower this morning, a brown fuzzy golf ball attacked me. It could have been a tarantula, it could have been a scorpion, it could have been John Ashcroft for all I knew. I levitated out of the tub with a mighty and fearsome squeak. With a pounding heart I slid my glasses onto my snout and peered around the edge of the shower curtain.

There sat a camel cricket. For the breed it was pretty enormous, but we're still talking maybe gumball sized. Maybe. If you count the feelers.

(What happened to black crickets with shiny heads? They're the ones that chirp. They're adorable. Pixar is going to make a movie starring one of them someday. More importantly, they hop straight ahead like reasonable creatures, and you can see them move a little before they jump. They don't just pop into a random direction like BACKWARDS with their nasty spidery legs. They don't walk along walls and ceilings like spiders, but skip along the ground where they can be trapped in jars. I LIKE field crickets. But noooooo, they haven't been the official house bug in two decades. Now it's all horrible ugly nasty non-singing spider cricket hybrids.)

Still feeling the aftereffects of terror, I poked my head out of the bathroom and informed my mate that I had a man task for him. Since he is not deaf, and had heard the squeakthumppause that indicates a bug in the bathtub, he was already coming towards me. Of course, his keen response time meant that I nearly brained him with the door when I opened it to tell him he had a man task.

He has been on bug patrol for so many years now that, as he puts it, he has developed both techniques and strategies for each type of unacceptable home invader. Camel crickets, for example, are too wily to simply whack with a shoe. Also, even if you get a lucky shot, you still have to clean up bug guts.

I stood at a safe distance, while my hero turned on the shower to drench the insect before swooping down with a wad of toilet paper. As he dropped the dazed victim into the toilet, he said with a straight face, "First, you subdue him with the water hoses."