balding angrily

Here’s stuff I done got for mah birfday.

Red-Haired Mom is a wonderful woman if a bit loopy. She sent a big box of stuff to Jen-An and Owen to deliver to me instead of just sending it to me. She wanted me to be presented with stuff, instead of getting a brown box in the mail. Here’s the bag that they shouldered into the restaurant. You can see I started unwrapping stuff before I thought to take the picture:

Here’s all the stuff in the bag. It’s hard to see in this picture, but the Garfield on the far left is wearing a baby hat. I presume that Red-Haired Mom included it in the package assuming that it’s mine. It is just as likely that it belonged to my brother or sister, and she stuffed it into the package with an attitude of, “Meh. He’ll never know the differnence.” She also included in the package a large file of pictures from when I was living with her. I haven’t opened the package yet because I haven’t had much time:

You might recognize the stuff from this picture as I’m getting ready for my senior prom. Though it pains me to admit it, here is photographic proof that a senior in high school had Garfield stuffed animals displayed prominantly in his bedroom. My mom never sat me down and said, “Alex, you’re weird. Please stop being so weird.” I blame her for the way I am now:

My dear sweetness gave me a ring. I lost my wedding ring maybe six months after our wedding. I took it off at the gym while working out, and I left it in the locker when I left. I immediately realized my mistake, but by the time I called the gym and got back there, it was gone. Jerry was diligent and found the exact same ring and got me a replacement. His ring also has a knot motif but is a bit more traditional. We liked the idea of having rings tied in theme if not in aesthetic.

Yargh!!! I’m going to get you with my stubby fingers and hairy knuckles:

Crump done give me a book I asked for. She said she liked the title because her name comes up as “cannoli” when she uses spell-check. Someone please go buy some art from her. She’s the nicest person I’ve never met. Jerry’s sister and brother-in-law gave me this kick-ass DC Comics book. I’m not sure what the 365 pages signify. Am I supposed to read it in a year like one of those bibles? That’s too much pressure, and I’m not going to take life-lessons from this book. Probably:

Finally, Jen-An and Owen gave me “Blackbird” sheet music, a small jewelry jar with the lyrics to “Blackbird” on it, and a small hand-colored piece of art with a web link on it. All of Jen-An’s family are artists. She did this. I haven’t gone to the link yet. I’ll let you. “Blackbird” was one of the songs that was at Jerry and my wedding. It was really the only thing we knew we wanted before we decided on anything else. Funnily we hadn’t really paid attention to the lyrics and were scared that it wouldn’t work. After sitting down one night and listening, we were relieved. What’s not pictured is some more art that Jen-An did to personalize the sheet music. She made the cover a kind of birthday card. Because she and Owen signed it with their real names, I didn’t photograph it even though I really want to show you her awesometude.

Ma and Pa Jerry and Dad and Blonde Mom also got me wonderful things that I will put to nefarious uses, but unfortunately they’re not very photogenic.

Finally, just because I’m not above pandering to get an “Awwww,” here’s a kitty with some kitties (”im on ur cowchez, maken beeleev”):

Yesterday I started listening to John Hodgman’s audiobook while drawing an apartment unit for Miami people; I laughed. I continued on the elliptical trainer at the gym. I further continued bent over the control panel of said elliptical trainer while banging my head on said panel from said laughter. My elliptical neighbor looked on. She was not shaped elliptically; she was shaped normally- well, as normal as a person in nude-colored leggings and over-sized glasses can look. She may have been looking at the television on the other side of me, but it makes me happier to think she was looking at me with bemusement and a little fear.

Please buy this book. And if you’ve already read it, please listen to the audio recording of it. Hodgman’s delivery of his own material is spot-on. He delivers passages like

Perhaps the most famous secret of Yale: that Yale was built by Elihu Yale with his own hands out of mud. The reality: somewhat true. Yale was not built by Elihu Yale, but the institution that would eventually become the university was founded in 1701 as The Friends of Elihu Yale. This was a social club of prominent Southern Connecticutions that was devoted to drinking and the display of friendship to Elihu Yale, a Boston-born merchant living in England whom they had chosen at random. The Friends of Elihu Yale would secretly meet every Thursday evening to plan out lavish new gifts for Elihu Yale: teams of horses, some carved out of gold, chests of tobacco and guns, magic cotton gins, a wise prostitute who would remind Yale of the brevity of life and its beauty, etc., all shipped at great expense to Elihu Yale who did not want them and did not know why he was receiving them.

‘Unknown gentlemen,’ he wrote in 1718, ‘Whither it is your aim to display great charity or great malice cannot be clear, but I urge you to please stop. I have already married the prostitute, and I cannot by law take another chest of nutmeg.’ He instead urged them to accept money to establish ’such a school that shall be useful to the local youths of quality, to teach them the principles of Godliness and secret world government.’ And thus Yale was born.

One possible explanation of the rumor stated above is the fact that while Yale was not made of mud, the entire campus was indeed buried under the earth for ten years to make it appear older.

like a straight-man playing off his own material, as if his own words were Jerry Lewis, and Dean Martin somehow spoke Lewis into being. Scratch that. Lewis wasn’t half as funny as Hodgman’s words, and Lewis never had a fascination with the surprisingly complicated hierarchy of hobo society. When Hodgman has to narrate a graphic from the book he asks a friend to help him out. These skits turn the disadvantage of not being able to see the image to the advantage of hearing their riffing.

I never understood the Justin Long-haters that praise Hodgman at the expense of Long in the Mac v. PC ads because I’m a Justin Long fan. After hearing only half of this book, I get it.

“That’s Candace,” said Lisa.

Griffin wanted to hit himself on the head to adjust the picture. You see actresses you love, movie stars, powerfully talented, panicked by the injustice of the punishment for age lines, who go to the wrong plastic surgeon and destroy their careers more completely than death by making themselves look like female impersonators of who they used to be, their lips puffed as though attacked by swarms of bees from an organic hive, eyelids stapled deep into the sockets, beach-ball bosoms, and forehead frozen with Botox into an emotional unintelligibility useful for the championship of the World Series of Power. No, what happened to Candace Netter Ginsberg, or what she had chosen to have happen, this was way, way On Beyond Zebra, this was supermarket tabloid-cover kidnappers from outer space meet Egyptian cat god, an Egyptian goddess made in their own image by the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the squared chin and high cheeks and broad nose of a cat, with the tilted ovoid eye sockets an enlarged forehead of a true believer’s idea of wise beings from ancient galaxies. The reconstruction had severed every nerve in her face, so that nothing moved, or even twitched, except her eyes and her jaw. She spoke as though her teeth were wired shut. This was everything that’s wrong with everything. But…but…but…this creature was Candace Netter Ginsberg, and Griffin knew her and loved her from her book. She suffered and the stunning, clear, and forgiving eyes of a dying sacrificial victim whose endurance of suffering would bring her torturers to repentance, if torturers have souls.

[Griffin] wanted to tell her that her freakishness challenged all who looked at-well, upon, yes, who looked upon her-who looked upon her to see, instead of punished vanity and its scars, yes, to see within the lifted horrifying face an icon of the risen Christ, even if it was a little like the face of crucified Christ on a Mexican-restaurant bleeding-Jesus-crown-of-thorns hologram, with the three dimensional eyes that follow you around the room.

David Rakoff is a frequent contributor to This American Life. I read Don’t Get Too Comfortable a couple of months ago, and my reaction to it was mixed. I love how he puts together a sentence. If ever I can put together a sentence half as well as he can, I will be happy. The downside is that sometimes his bitterness stops being funny and starts getting unpleasant. This may be his intention or it may not be. He is like I am a card-carrying liberal, and God bless him for it. However, his rants are sometimes too vehement for even my tastes. Because I want the last sentence of this mini-review to be a positive one, this book had me in stitches more than once.

I wanted to share the best sentence in the whole book, and possibly the best sentence I’ve ever read in my life. In this excerpt David is covering the couture collections in Paris. I’m not sure if it is the fashion week, and I’m too lazy to re-read the whole chapter to find out. Just assume it is.

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, “What can you write that hasn’t been written already?”

He’s absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with at that moment is that Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t.

And here it is.

Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, and seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin overrisen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L?

The price I paid for the book was worth it just for being able to read that sentence. If it inspires you to buy the book, please do. My partner has another couple of favorite phrases or sentences, but this is mine.