Survival of the Toothless

I got my teeth cleaned this afternoon at my new dentist office, where the Michele Bachmann-look-alike told me I must be more evolved than other humans because wisdom teeth have never taken root in my gob. That's where our race is headed, she claimed.

The following rap immediately ensued:

Yo, yo, yo yo, yo-yo yo
Listen up y'all
This be the tale of a case where being toothless ain't bad
In fact
It means you're all evolved
('n shit)

HIT IT!

I got my mouth bones all ready and clean
'Fraid my dentist would get up in my face 'n be mean
See, I ain't had the very best toothal luck
My last dentite drilled me till I was screaming, "Oh (sh)uck!"

I was a little bit nervous and a lot bit scared
But my girl Michele told me no need to be afeared
My fangs were dense, tha roots nice 'n strong
When'd I get my wisdoms pulled? Had it been long?

I laughed best as I could wif her digits in my mouf
"Gurrl, I ain't never had them! Grumble mumble krawf."
She looked at me as if I was all human ills' solution
And called her assistants to gaze on a product of human evolution

Compared to me, she knew her own mouth had failed
Compared to me, she may as well have a prehensile tail
When it comes time for breedin', my kids might have gills
But one thing's for certain: they'll have killer grills

WHUT?

Movie musings

Remember when I said I could tell you about seeing the most disturbing two movies I have ever seen in my life? Well, I'm going to talk about it on the radio tonight (here: 16 minutes in) so I thought I'd share some of my thoughts with you.

Basically, the big movies this year are unforgivably depressing. Movies that win big in the Oscars are usually kind of downers – last year we had No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, La Vie en Rose, Michael Clayton, etc., but this year, the movies I’ve seen have just left me unable to even express thought, I mean the topics and plots were so dejecting and gruesome that I think we are seriously reaching new highs, or lows, rather, in our Oscar nominees.

Let’s start off with Revolutionary Road. It depicts 1950s American life based on a newly married couple who move to the suburbs to start their family. The movie is based on a novel written by Richard Yates, who described the central theme as “most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy”. The movie is good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s fight after fight after fight and they escalate all the way up to a husband-on-wife screaming death chase through the woods. I won’t tell you how it ends, but let’s just say there is blood involved.

Alright and then we’ve got The Wrestler. The previews led me to believe I was in for a feel-good movie where Mickey Rourke’s character finally gives up wrestling to salvage his relationship with his long lost daughter. After seeing Revolutionary Road the day before, I felt like I deserved a softy. But a softy it…was…not. I should have seen the gory-factor coming since the film is directed by the guy who did Requiem for a Dream. But I have to say the famous “biting the pavement” scene from Requiem hardly was a match for the literal savage beatings the audience witnesses the aging wrestler go to through keep supporting himself. The physical trauma he goes through, however, is barely a match for the way the movie makes you feel about your own life. As we were leaving the theater after seeing it, one of my friends said he felt like there were bugs crawling all over him.

And it doesn’t get much happier. Milk left me enraged for weeks, not only about the injustice of our own history but also the fact that I had never even heard about the events that happened in the movie. Rachel Getting Married, which was one of my favorite movies of the year, stars Anne Hathaway as a recovering crack addict who essentially murdered her little brother and has to awkwardly face her family on the day of her sister’s wedding as she tries not to ruin the entire thing with her loud-mouthed and offensive existence. And of course Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York features a theater director with depression and a failing, dying body trying to make something of himself. You can guess whether he does or not.

Even superhero movies aren’t escaping this trend of shockingly bleak films. We all saw The Dark Knight and it seemed much more psychological thriller than uplifting heroism. Even Batman can’t escape the tragedy of his own ideals and comes off more like a depressed cancer patient than a lovable hero. It seems like this movie, although totally awesome, is a far cry from the downright comedic 1960s television series Batman used to be.

So why? Does sadness sell? Are happy endings trite? I guess if nothing else, we know depression wins awards. So as you’re catching up on the award nominees that you’ve missed over the past year, get ready to strap on your sad face, pop a Prozac, and remember that there is life after movies.

The snowy death I almost died.

Today, on this -5 degree winter Wednesday, I could tell you about a lot of things.

I could tell you about my third tire that I have popped within the past month (I allegedly live next-door to a nail factory).

I could tell you about seeing the most disturbing two movies I have ever seen in my life this week (Revolutionary Road and The Wrestler).

I could tell you about how I recently learned to purl, and thus my knitting possibilities have wildly opened up to the great knitting world of wonder (hats and ribbed scarves here I come!).

But what I really want to tell you about is how I almost died 21 days ago.

My roommate has a friend. This friend has a bunch of college buddies. These buddies were all going on a ski trip to the Lutsen Mountains, located on Lake Superior’s North Shore. They thought it would be nice to have a couple girls along on the trip. I told them I’m not much of a skier, but when they promised me all the equipment needed and they made the arrangements for driving and lodging, I couldn’t resist. As a perpetual trip planner, the prospect of being able to simply tag along with someone else’s perfectly-planned trip sounded to me like a breath of fresh, frosty air.

In a van and a car we drove five of the happiest hours of my life north to our destination. We sang, we ate, we mused, we knitted, we told stories. Was I slightly carsick? Yes, of course I was – I’m me. But a slight tum ache was hardly a match for the giddiness I felt about our trip. It just felt so good to…get out there. Anticipation grew all around me since we had only one night’s sleep standing in our way of hitting the slopes first thing in the morning, and I was only slightly concerned that I was the only one who technically didn’t know how to make my way down a mountain on skis.

Morning arrived. The boys leapt from their beds, raced to the window, and wiggled and jumped around, elated that the night had dropped 15 inches of snow on us, on top of the many inches of snow that had already piled up the previous day. We dressed, loaded on our gear, ensured that rarely a speck of skin was exposed to the -40 below wind chill, and crowded into the cars to head toward the hills.

Two of my friends strapped on my boots and fitted my skis while I stood like a toddler, dutifully placing my feet in the positions in which they instructed me. I breathed a sigh of relief when one of the boys suggested we hit up “Big Bunny”, one of the beginner hills right by the lodge. I clumsily ambled over to the chairlift, and boarded my chair successfully. As the lift neared its exit, I scooted toward the edge of my chair, arranged my poles to the side, and then proceeded to fall flat off the ski lift on my face.

But don’t worry – I got the hang of it. I wiggled out of the way, stood up, and briefly figured out how to ski, with the help of the expert skiers I gone on the trip with. Not to brag, but I pretty much kicked Big Bunny’s ass. If nothing else, I definitely made her my B. Here’s the thing though. We only did Big Bunny once before the boys were ready to move on to bigger and better hills.

A couple green circles, some blue squares, and I was still doing ok. I learned how to turn, and I would fall back on the reliable pizza stance if I ever needed to slow down. Yes, I still have weird knee issues from putting such awkward strain on my knees that weekend, but c’mon. A girl has got to slow down if she needs to. But sometimes, even pizza is no match for the velocity one can find herself in whilst going down certain hills…

Big Bunny was part of a stretch of mountains that is very beginner-friendly. That, of course, is the kind of mountain that I should definitely stay on, but my friends found it very important for us all to stick together. That meant that when they were ready to take a special ski trail over to a stretch of much more difficult mountains, I was coming with. I had heard rumors that there wasn’t really a hill over there that didn’t eventually turn into a black diamond, but they insisted that I would be fine.

The first unforgivably steep hill I approached made me fall instantly. I fell straight down like a little kid when you pick it up but it doesn’t want you to pick it up so it wiggles down to the floor, leaving you dumbfounded as to how a 50-pound thing could outsmart you. I then slid down the rest of the hill slowly, and in perfect control, on my butt, which was totally not a big deal. No pain, I didn’t make a scene, and only one teenage snowboarder yelled at me for being in her way.

But the thing with these hills that get steeper and steeper as you go down them, is that you gain momentum. And when someone who is as bad a skier as I am gains momentum, they start to lose their ability to turn. And if the person is going so fast that they can’t really turn, you can sure as frick bet that “pizza” is a literal impossibility.

What I’m trying to tell you is that one of the black diamond mountains I went on was so steep that I erratically flew straight down it, gaining and gaining speed over what felt like five minutes until I reached the most steep part at the bottom and found myself barreling toward a group of 40 people waiting in line to get on the chair lift. Right before I reached the group, and thus killed everyone in sight by my unpredictable and uncontrollable speed, I gallantly hurled myself into the nearest snow bank, rolled about 20 feet at the speed of light, skidded another 10, and then landed, poles and skiis scattered, body in spread-eagle position, on the bank of the snow at the feet of those 40 skiers, their mouths agape, staring at the spectacle that was me.

I stayed there for a while, maybe two minutes, not moving. I noticed people trying not to notice me. A snowboarder picked up my poles and reverently laid them at my side, not uttering a word.

Ironically, but mostly unbelievably, my only wound from the weekend was a tiny scratch I got from the hotel room table while playing cards.

A hypothetical situation

So let's say you started dating a dude from the former Soviet Union a few years ago. You met this dude at a Jewish singles night embarrassingly called a "Schmoozle," which you went to mostly because it had a funny name and partly because you had recently decided to find a Jewish husband. This dude was one of the only ones there who wasn't tubby and balding and who didn't have stains of his mommy's matzah ball soup down his shirt. You decided to be uncharacteristically bold and give him your number. You then promptly forgot his name and began referring to him as "No Name Steak" in the following days. Steak finally called you a handful of days later and you had a series of uneventful dates for the next two months, at which point you realized you didn't even like him all that much. You definitely weren't going to fall in love with him and get married and have lots of Jewish babylehs. So you called him up and said, "Pants out, dude," and that was that.

Since then you haven't thought all that much about him. Then, totally out of the blue, you get a call on your cell phone from an unknown number. Let's say this was yesterday, while you were at work. You took the call because you're a curious little kitty.

"Um, hi, you don't know me," the female caller says. "This is kind of weird, and you don't have to talk to me if you don't want to. I just recently broke up with [The Soviet] and I want to talk to his other girlfriends about some issues I had with him so I can get some closure."

You're intrigued. Clearly, this girl is psycho. But the part of you that used to write a dating advice column wants to help her through her issues, to throw her any bone that might be of use. You tell her you dated him for a short period of time eons ago, so you didn't know how much you'd remember, but that you'd call her that night when you weren't at work. You ask her where she got your number and she tells you he had all his exes' numbers stored in the same place.

You get home that night and call her as promised. She proceeds to go through his dating history, describing everything she knows about each of his exes. You get a little skeeved, and ask her what, exactly, she knows about you. Little psycho details creep into the conversation, like, "I was going through his texts..." "I still check his voicemail," etc. Then let's say she decides to three-way call him. In your head you know this probably isn't such a good idea, that you really shouldn't be involved in their issues. Later you'll wonder why you didn't just hang up, and that curious little kitty will snarl at you.

The Soviet answers and the girlfriend starts ripping into him about issues too intense for this humble blog. The Soviet gets angry and says this girl has taken to his car with a bat, among other things, and that he's going to call the police for a restraining order. He hangs up. It's just you and the girlfriend on the line again.

"Uhhh.... wow," you stutter, feeling like a prize idiot for calling her back in the first place. You get the feeling you may have made the matter worse for the two of them, rather than helping. You vow never to schmoozle again and go to bed.

Note: This post might be about my friend Teenuh, or maybe my friend Zeenuh, but it's definitely not about me because I don't write about personal details on this blog.

If I was a rich girl...

• I'd get my hairs cut. The last time they had some snip snips was in June, when I visited an onomatopoetic salon owned by a trio of ex-Soviets. It's been seven months. That's gross.
• I'd pay off my student loans. True, $8K isn't all that much to be in debt after obtaining higher education, but it's demoralizing to think my net worth is less than zero.
• I'd contribute obscene amounts to my 401(k) every month. I'd use my new time machine to retire at age 10.
  
• I'd buy a house. It's the best time ever in the history of the world for a first-time buyer to put some roots down. At the very least, I'd move to a fancy pants apartment with its own washer and dryer and a couch longer than four feet.
  
• I'd drink hot apple cider all day, every day. I'd get it imported from the southern hemisphere in the spring/summer. I'd build a greenhouse and fill it with apple trees that produce year-round, and then buy my very own apple press.
  
• I'd buy that Ped Egg once and for all. While I was at it, I'd also get the blanket with sleeves, the sliders press and a Sham-Wow! for each room of my new house.
  
• I'd get the coveted KitchenAid standing mixer with the ice cream attachment and make frozen treats so weird they'd put Iron Chef to shame. Meat ice cream, my friends: a traif dream.
• I'd use the really spendy yarn to knit a coat of many colors.

(I googled "meat ice cream" and all I came up with was this lowsy tub of raw horse meat ice cream.)

Impoverished Portlander attempts thrift, is thwarted by technology

Chief among the obvious "don't"s for those of us whose pockets have been picked clean by these troubling economic times is dining out. For someone who enjoys global cuisine but can only make standard Midwestern fare in her kitchen, these times of woe are quite the blow. I thus jump at any frugal dining opportunity, as previously chronicled here. To aid these endeavors, I started following a blog devoted to cheapskatery in Portland. Today it informed me that the Old Spaghetti Factory was slashing its meal prices like whoa in celebration of their 40th anniversary. We're talking $3 meals. I was all hells to the yes and commanded the gent to ready our chariot.

One of Portland's many charms is its atrocious street signage. They are very rarely affixed to stoplights; instead they are strategically placed behind bushes and buildings and only printed on one side in barely reflective type. Google maps are no match for this skullduggery, especially on a murky, rainy night such as tonight. Needless to say, I told Boyf to turn prematurely and we ended up on this highway with no exits that we always seem to get stuck on.

We had no choice but to give ourselves over to the preternaturally cheerful woman who lives in his phone. GPS Lady got us safely across the river, but I accidentally led the boyf to believe we should "bear left" instead of right. That gave GPS Lady a bee in her bonnet and she started repeatedly demanding that we "make a legal U-turn where possible," with what I imagined was growing aggravation in her voice. "We can't turn left here! Give us something we can work with!" I pleaded with her. "Re-routing," she acquiesced.

More confusion followed as her pea brain could only tell us where we'd just been, not where we needed to go. "Re-routing," she promised us, over and over again.

Forty-five minutes later we arrived at our destination, only to find out everyone and their step-uncle's brother-in-law's grandma were there. The hour-and-a-half wait was too much for our growling tums and frazzled nerves. We turned around and instead headed to an Indian restaurant about a mile from our apartment and ordered a $25 meal.

You win, stupid troubled economy.

My mouth stings.

Everyone has New Years resolutions. I recently scribbled down ten myself. At the top of the list, before I could even consider the rest of my resolutions, I wrote "cook more". Included in that resolution is eating more fresh food...as in stuff that will actually go bad over time if you don't eat it. I admit, putting a clock on the food that you eat is a scary, scary notion to me. We all remember Jerry Seinfeld's routine on expired milk and how it's the psychology of drinking milk on the day it expires that makes it intolerable, not the taste or the texture. Well. Listen. To. This.

The lovely Ma W bought me some groceries over Christmas. I estimate the date of purchase to have been roughly 11 days ago. One of the items I bought was a big bag of fresh oranges. This week I started getting nervous about them, but assured myself that if they were bad, they would look bad, perhaps like this. Alas, they looked perfectly ok. Today I took one to work, sliced it up, and it looked juicy and succulent as ever. I ate lunch at my desk, pouring over the latest headlines and catching up on emails, and I wanted to save the orange slices for the last part of my meal (in order to leave a tangy, citrusy taste in my mouth for what surely would be hours to come).

Once I finished my sandwich I delicately slid an orange slice into my mouth, and my mouth.......instantly.......burned!! So many thoughts shot through my head simultaneously. "There is something rotten in my mouth." "My mouth is on fire." "My mouth tastes like the smell of spoil." "There is evil in my mouth." "Get it out now." "Bad. Bad. BAD!" I spit out the thrice chewed orange remnants onto my plate, and realized that the back of my tongue was stinging, as if hot, liquid garbage had just been poured into my mouth.

After spitting multiple times, rubbing my tongue with a Kleenex, and chasing the spoiled orange with two white fudge oreos and 800 ml of water, I feel a little better. But I still have that dull, stinging sensation in the back of my tongue. Which I really do not appreciate. Thanks a lot, "New Years"!

Flying, from the mouths of babes

On our way from Portland to Minneapolis on Christmas Day, we sat one row in front of an 8-year-old boy, his mom and another stray 8-year-old separated from his family. The flight foster child spent much of the air time describing all the electronics he received for Christmas, and then claiming he wasn't spoiled; his infant sister was. He explained to his new friend that Santa squeezes into chimneys using a patented mixture of elf magic, ghost magic and South Pole magic. Halfway through the flight the mom traded places with her husband, who I had overheard quizzing his children hours before on such facts as the square footage of the Portland terminal.

As we began our descent and were a few thousand feet off the ground, the stray proclaimed that we were exactly 200 above ground. He knew this for a fact after palming the window and doing a complex internal computation of the relation of its temperature to proximity to the earth. "I question the precision of your methodology," responded Killjoy Dad. Then one of the boys said he knew definitively that we were 100 feet from touchdown because two canoes could fit under the plane if stacked vertically. Canoes were more like 15 feet long, not 50, Killjoy Dad said. The boy vehemently insisted they were 50 feet long because he had just spent MONTHS studying Indians and they DEFINITELY made 50-foot canoes from all the nearby 50-foot trees.

*****

We landed back in the Rose City at about 11:30 local time last night. At the baggage claim carousel a toddler vocalized my internal feelings in one of those fake-crying-whiny voices that kids do when they're just itching to be put up for adoption.

"Where's our suitcases? Daddy! Where's our suitcases?!?! Where are they?? Where's our SUITCASES???????? Daddy, I don't see them!!!! Where ARE they? Are they lost? WHEERRRRRRREEEEE'S OUUUUUUUUUUUUR SUITCASSSSSSSSSSSES?????"

*****

Then we had to take a shuttle to the hotel where the boyf's car has been parked this past week-and-change. At this point it was midnight Portland time, 2 a.m. Minnesota time. Once again, an infant managed to vocalize my exact feelings.
"WWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!"

*****

This is unrelated.

I think I'm going insane. Here's my proof:


A pen exploded in my pocket last Thursday. Every time I put my hand in said pocket, it emerges stained blue as Babe. And every time, every stinking time, I'm surprised. Baffled might be a better word.

In sum, I am doing the same thing repeatedly expecting different results. According to Ben Franklin/Albert Einstein/an old Chinese proverb, that makes me a prime candidate for the loony bin.

Prenatal hilarity.

A poem about the best thing that happened to me on New Years Day.

I never realized so happy and free
Prenatal yoga would make me be
Above all else, the very best part:
When my brother-in-law put one hand on his heart
With the other on his “growing tum”
I realized that not ever, no one
Could make me laugh nearly as loud
As him attempting kegels to make my sis proud

Odd person #7: Snooty Schields employee.

The setting: Schields sporting goods. The objective: Purchasing my pregnant sister a swimming suit. The context: A conversation.

Anna: Excuse me.

Schields employee: Yes how may I help you?

Anna: Do you have pregnant lady swim suits?

Schields employee: If you're talking about maternity swim wear, the answer is no, we do not carry it.

Anna: I was, in fact. Thank you.

At least I know I'm alive.

Coming back from breakfast with a friend this morning, I walked up the stairs to my house and entered the first door. As I was fishing my keys out of my purse which would ultimately allow me to enter the second door, and thus the building, I was terrified when I heard a slight shuffling of feet coming from someone standing directly next to me in the doorway.

Anna: *gasps!

Gangly fellow: Hahaha, I wasn't sure if I should open the door for you or not. So then I just stood here, not sure if you would notice me, but I guess you heard me breathing. Hahaha.

Anna: Um. Yeah. Who are you?

Gangly fellow: I'm Stephanie's friend Jacob. She lives on the second floor.

Anna: What are you doing standing in the entryway?

Jacob: Waiting for my car to heat up. What apartment are you in?

Anna: Um, that one (*points). Ok, well good luck with your car. *enters second door

Jacob: I actually think I'll wait in here. *shoves into the second door behind me

Anna: Oh. Um. Bye. *incoherent stammering, fumbling with apartment door lock

Jacob: Well, hey, at least you know you're alive, right? Hahahaha!

Anna: *hurries into apartment, closes and locks door, stays on other side of door listening for him to leave.

Jacob: *exits house 15 seconds later

I've got a new way to snack

I've been back in the Great Frozen Tundra (Minnesota) for the past week, and a few days ago I made the hop, skip and jump from my extra-frigid hometown to the sort-of frigid metropolis. My former roommate, who is so great we call each other our star-crossed roommates, was kind enough to not only let me stay in her rich and famous uncle's sprawling mansion whilst she was house-sitting, but she threw me a party.

The setting was very F. Scott Fitzgerald-y, with nine known bathrooms and multiple chandeliers. We needed some snackie-poos that would hold their own against such gilded splendor. My go-to pear and goat cheese crostini appetizers were an obvious if somewhat boring choice (recipe below). I considered making a delish "parmesan cheese fan" recipe my ma unearthed from one of her falling-apart cookbooks or stuffed mushrooms, but ultimately gave both the no-go. Not quite schmancy enough.

We settled on an appetizer I had first sampled at a fellow Portlander's Christmas Eve party: turkey bacon-wrapped scallops (recipe below). They were, as one of our guests said, pure ambrosia. A little surf, a little turf. A little squishy, a little crunchy. Food of the gods.

Pear and Goat Cheese Crostini:
Preheat your oven to 350. Cut a baguette into 3/4 inch rounds and arrange on a baking sheet. Schmear with goat cheese, top with a thin slice of Bosc pear and another schmear. Pop them in the oven for about 10 minutes, or until the cheesee is melty and the bread is toasty.

Turkey Bacon-Wrapped Scallops:
Preheat your oven to 325. Cook the bacon in a skillet, but don't over-cook (it's going in the oven later and you don't want it super-crispy). Coat another skillet with some olive oil and turn the burner on medium-high. Add two cloves minced garlic and the juice of one lemon. Put the scallops in and cook until they're solidly white. Wrap the scallops in a bit of bacon and spear with a toothpick. Arrance on a baking sheet. Cook for about 15 minutes or until you can't stand not eating them anymore.