One of the side effects of my Vitamin Z that I’m experiencing is these crippling headaches, and NOT the ejaculation problems that are warned against with a shrieking frequency all over the bottle (mayhap it’s because I DON’T HAVE A PENIS. Or do I? Mwahahahaha).

They’re the sort that have left me forgetting even the simplest of things (such as what am I actually writing about now that I have a post halfway written? And what the hell is my middle name again?) and raging against the sunlight that is gleefully reflecting off of the eleventy-hundred pounds of snow on the ground.

As a divine gift from God for someone who is currently struggling with an ugly case of Writer’s Block (hey, better than genital herpes, right?), I was tagged for a meme by my friend KT over at When Did I Become A Grown-Up?. As a rule, I only do them if I like them, but this one happens to be a favorite. I’m going to call it The Seven Odder Things About Me Meme (I’ve done this one before. To make certain I don’t repeat myself, I’ll linky-poo here.)

1. It should come as no shock to anyone who has seen me dress myself that I am actually color blind. I’ll take a moment here to let those of you who have seen my fashion sense (or lack thereof) collect yourself from the gut-busting laughter. Try not to pull a muscle, mmkay?

…

…

…

Done, now?

Fuckers.

See, it’s actually pretty rare for women to be color blind as it’s an X-linked disorder (meaning both of my chromosomes must have it). I’ll avoid going into further details so that you are not forced to gnaw your arm off with boredom.

It has been the cause for many a (stupid) marital dispute over the shade of a particular color. In the end, I’ve learned to rely on Dave’s opinion (smart as that may not be) about certain shades.

My kids are going to have to get used to looking as though hobo’s have dressed them, eh?

2. I have an intense phobia of canned fruits, in spite of my unrequited love of fruits in general. There’s something about canned anything, floating happily in a goo sauce that completely freaks me out. Ditto for Jello molds.

I think this may be a throw back to the dissection craze of my 5th grade teacher, who, in all of her glory, decided to spend a large portion of the year showcasing the various creepy jars full of deceased animals suspended in Formalin (or the famous carcinogenic Formaldehyde, it was the 80’s, after all) to us. Now, I loves me my dissections (seriously), but seeing floating suspended baby chicks in glass jars was enough to give me nightmares.

I think this is where the phobia stems from (that, and my hippie mother would likely rather have eaten her own feces than served us something suspended in SUGAR.), but I can’t seem to shake it, EVEN IF I LIKE THE FRUIT IN QUESTION.

3. When I was in my first semester in college, I took an introductory biology class and one of the tasks that we were required to learn was all of the organ systems of the fetal pig (which are similar to the layout of a human). While half of my class was left gagging into their Bunsen burners, I took to the task like a pig in, well, shit. The instructor insisted that we learn this inside and out (oh pun, pu-pun, pun, PUN), and suggested that we take ours home to study (due to limited laboratory time).

Well, I took it a step further and named mine. It’s the same name as my former heating pad boyfriend: Stu.

To maximize the shock value to my mother (and to ensure that the dogs did NOT have a tasty snack while I wasn’t looking), I decided to casually slip Stu into the meat drawer and then leave the house, knowing full well that she’d discover him in my absence.

She was underwhelmed.

4. Because in the academic realm, I am 110% An Annoying Overachiever, I became a TA for both Inorganic and Organic chemistry as well as a tutor for Anatomy and Physiology I and II.

It was only then that I developed a complete and total appreciation for teachers. Wow. Some of those students were not the brightest bulbs in the sconces.

5. Despite the fact that I blog like it’s going out of style (isn’t it?), I have never in my whole life written for fun. Ever. This includes journaling of any sort. Mainly because, what the fuck would I ever journal about?

In high school, I would occasionally try to write in a journal but it always ended up something like,

“I really like Shawn X. He sat next to me in Brit Lit and I swear he smiled at me. Oh, I don’t know WHAT I’ll do if he doesn’t ask me to Homecoming!”

And then I would look back on it and be embarrassed FOR myself.

6. One of the things I hate most about being a grown-up is that the older we get, the more PC we have to become. As someone who has never NOT laughed at a dick-n-fart joke, and whose all time favorite word is fuck (I actually gave it up for Lent one year DESPITE the fact that I am not Catholic. Maybe it’s better that I’m not Catholic, because I didn’t do a very good job of it.), I hate having to be all conscious of what I say in public and to other people.

I hate having to worry about offending people if I tell them what I think, and I hate offending people even when I’m not trying to. I use certain words to be humorous, not to be offensive (because I promise The Internet that if I am actively trying to offend someone, I will do so), and I hate having to censor myself in order to maintain the peace.

7. I genuinely believe that everything tastes better with bacon.

Now, here’s the catch: see, I’m supposed to tag a couple of people to do this meme, but I’m pretty sure everyone who has a blog has done it and is probably not as full of weird things to do it over and over again.

So I am tagging anyone (this means YOU! LURKER!) who reads this to give me a weird fact about themselves in the comments (use a fake name if you must). Because seriously, the comments are high-freaking-larious and might just help with poor, OH POOR Aunt Becky’s blinding headache.

Laughter IS the best medicine, after all (or so Reader’s Digest tells me, AND WHY WOULD THEY LIE TO ME?).

I stole this from Niobe, who stole it from here.

The goal? Six words, your life story.

Very famously started by Ernest Hemmingway while telling the saddest story ever written, “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.”

Your turn.

(I admit, I’m phoning it in today.)

The first snow around here is always a magical time in my head. It reminds me of childhood excitement (maybe, just MAYBE school will be cancelled tomorrow!) and of the holidays and it makes even the homeless people look pretty.

That said, the older I get, the more winter seems to drag the fuck on.

If it’s not butt-assed cold, it’s icy, if it’s not icy, it’s snowing, if it’s not snowing, then the yellow snow and grime are making the world look to be an ugly place. And the boogies STILL freeze in your nose when you pop outside (and even clad in Burberry’s finest, how dignified can you look with a nose full of frozen boogers?).

Mr. Yucks.

The Weather Man is calling for another 12 inches today (but we all know how wrong HE can be), and as far as I’m concerned, he can kiss my flabby white butt. Winter sucks.

So what’s winter like where YOU live?

I say “Screw all those freaking feel-good meme’s out there” and in that vein, I am completing one that allows me to complain about things (more than usual), which I was mass tagged for by my friend Sara.

In no particular order, I present to you my current shit list.

1. The Month Of January. Is it just me or does this month suck? The only holiday (holidays tend to be what can make or break a month for me, because I am 12.) I can think of is New Years Day, which I believe Hugh Hefner referred to as “ameteur night” and I agree with him. I’ve never had much good come out of this month aside from surviving it which does not a glowing recommendation make.

2. My Thyroid Gland. Although I have been undergoing testing and dosage increases (since October), it is still underactive and my hair is still falling out with alarming frequency. If this doesn’t get resolved soon, I am going to have to invest in some wigs. Which sounds a lot cooler than it is.

3. Morning People. Although I have hoped, wished, and possibly even prayed that I would somehow turn into this morning person that people claimed I could become, I have yet to see any results. My internal clock is set to be a night owl, and although the world doesn’t function on my time table, I have learned to cope. Until some asshole cheerful morning person gets all high and mighty on my ass, and then I want to regulate.

4. Election Year. Although I’m as happy as a pig in shit that GW will soon be out of office, I am really damn sick and tired of having to field phone calls/watch commercials/get mail all telling me that I should vote for XYZ Candidate. Just stop talking about WHO I should vote for, please?

5. People Who Live In My House But Shall Remain Nameless Who Are Unable To Reload The Toilet Paper. I mean, it’s not rocket science, and yet, I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO MANAGES TO DO IT.

6. Drivers Who Tailgate Through A Heavily Patrolled Neighborhood When I Am Going Slightly Over The Speed Limit. I mean, COME ON. I know you want to get wherever you are going, but I assure you that I do, too. But I want to do this WITHOUT paying a $75 ticket.

7. People Who Take Everything Personally. I have a friend who does this (no, not any of you.) and is convinced that I hate her if I haven’t called her back immediately, like I am somehow sitting at home and plotting AGAINST returning her call. While I appreciate that she gives me this much credit for being so scheming, it’s just not that complicated. I haven’t called her back because I have forgotten. Period.

(and trust me, if you read something on my blog, ever, that makes you think I am somehow knocking YOU personally, I’d like to remind you to reconsider. I assure you I am neither that smart or that cunning.)

8. Spandex Leggings. I know that the 80’s is making a comeback (Hello, American Gladiators!) and I’m pretty much okay with that, save for part of the fashion. The part that convinces women to wear spandex leggings underneath their dresses/oversized shirts. Why? BECAUSE IT LOOKS FUCKING STUPID. It did then, and it does now.

9. PPD. It’s not enough for women who have just had babies to be overtired, ridiculously hormonal, and disgusted that their asses got pregnant, too, but now we get to add depression into the mix. I mean, how fun is it to finally get something you’ve wanted for a long, long time and then find yourself weeping into the couch cushions BECAUSE THE PATERNITY RESULTS ON MAURY WEREN’T ON TODAY.

10. Blackberry’s. Now, I like to be as connected as the next person, and maybe it’s because I have no real need to be as connected as someone with a paid job (oooh! A comment for me to moderate!QUICK! MODERATE IT!), but I just can’t get behind a piece of technology that has made it socially acceptable to interrupt a conversation with a real, live person sitting in front of you to read an email. Color it any way you’d like, but it’s fucking rude and it’s tacky. There is nothing that cannot wait 30 seconds until the real live conversation is done. And if it’s genuinely so bloody important, the phone will ring.

Amazingly enough, this took me a long time to complete. I guess I’m not as angry as I thought that I was.

So tell your Aunt Becky, who is on YOUR current shit list? Who (or what) peed in YOUR cheerios today?

When I was in early high school, I once had a song stuck in my head for about 3 weeks straight. It was Rancid’s “Ruby SoHo” and what added insult to injury is that I didn’t even like the song in the first place.

Eventually, either after heavy drug use OR listening to it on repeat (flooding, anyone?), it got out, and I would be lying if I told you that I didn’t involuntarily shudder when I typed it. My aversion is that strong.

I’m relatively new to the world of insomnia, and if you’d told me three years ago (when I was “studying” to get my Master’s degree in sleep. Shit, I know my stronger points.) that I would ever struggle with it, I would have promptly laughed at you. And then laid down for a nap.

Some people use movies or drinking for escapeism. I used sleep. Having a bad day? Take a nap. Stressed about something? Study the back of my eyelids until I felt better.

And it worked better than any drug or hilarious romantic comedy starring some wacky British man ever did.

When I was diagnosed (and subsequently treated) for my hypothyroidism, I lost this ability to sleep well or nap at all, and I am telling you that I miss it terribly.

One hideously annoying side effect of this insomnia is that when I trundle off to bed each night, the moment my head makes contact with the pillow, it’s like some annoying song floodgate is opened, and the chorus’s from each and every commercial jingle floods my brain.

Just fucking try to sleep while your mind loops “Free Credit Report DOT Com!” over and over ad infinitium, ad nauseum. It succeeds in making me want to stick sharp pointy objects into my ear drums in hopes that it might hit the part of the brain responsible for annoyingly repetitious songs and/or phrases and kill it permanently off (who needs to remember every irritating commercials jingle, besides ad agencies? No one. It serves no purpose), but sleep, oh glorious sleep eludes me.

Eventually I do fall asleep and my internal loop of songs is silenced until Alex (or my bladder) rouses me, and I’ll get through part of my nocturnal rituals, start patting myself on the back for successfully getting that song out of my head, and just as I’m being all self-congratulatory, “Do-do-do-do, Do a Dollop Of Daisy” starts ringing through my head. And I begin contemplating lobotomies.

Again.

Oddly enough, when I wake up in the morning, yet another song is going through my head, but typically not a commercial jingle. It’s usually a fraction of some song that I do actually like and listen to, but it’s only a small snippet of this song. Like a phrase or two.

Were I about 10 or 12 years younger, I would attribute this particular part of the song to something infinitely more deep and meaningful than it warranted, and assume that this was some sort of message (ah, teenage melodramatic magical thinking), and subsequently analyze and overanalyze the hell out of it.

Blissfully, though, I am now older and have learned that sometimes a phrase stuck in your head is nothing more than that, and that it’s unimportant to attach meaning where there likely is none.

But it doesn’t answer the question of why, why now, while I am the most sleep deprived and addled I have ever been, why do these songs keep getting stuck in my head so annoyingly?

And what the hell can I do about it?

Today is the Superbowl (if you’ve been living under a rock or something), and although I don’t give a flying fuck about the game itself, but it’s annual celebration marks a sort-of anniversary of sorts.

After you’ve been together long enough, there are all sorts of stupid dates to remember (birthdays, wedding dates, children’s birthdays, and the infamous Day We Decided To Buy A New Fridge), and I don’t usually recall most of them until they’ve passed.

But because Superbowl reminders have been vomited every which way, I can’t help but think back to the day that The Daver sweetly invited me to a party thrown by his buddies, auspiciously for the Superbowl, but really more about the foodstuff.

It was when we’d first started dating, and everything was all new and weird and exciting and we didn’t know each other’s bathroom habits or middle names or weird hangups. I was strangely flattered by the request, as we’d just spent our first weekend together (and I had been stuck in Boyville without a hairbrush to tame my mangled mess of hair) and I had figured that my unbrushed teeth would have frightened him away, but no, not The Daver.

The first part of his invitation was sweet,

“Would you like to come to my friend’s Superbowl party? Here, I’ll print you some directions.”

And had he left well enough alone, I might have considered attending.

But as men are wont to do, he continued with,

“Man, if you come, my friend Rob is going to laugh. Every time he sees me I am with a new woman.”

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Gee, sweetheart, thanks.

Thanks, but no thanks.

It was the first in a long relationship riddled with Foot In Mouth-Itits (a tragic disease so far without a cure), and miraculously, I still married him.

(And possibly even stranger, after learning of my obsession with all things pink and heart-shaped (BUT NOT DIAMONDS. NEVER DIAMONDS) and the fact that I use an insane amount of toilet paper, he still married me.)

So dish, what’s your favorite open-mouth-insert-foot story?

Primarily because I am a freak-a-leak, I like to sleep in arctic temperatures, which is great, because I live in Illinois, where winters stretch on for what I am sure is actually several years at a stretch. It’s probably a good thing we don’t move to more temperate climates, as I am fairly certain I would never get a night’s sleep again (with or without Alex’s ministrations of doom), and I would probably become one of those people who wakes drenched in sweat and looking like they had just stepped out of the shower.

Let’s all chime in with a collective “Ew.”

But thankfully for my husband AND my sheets, my bedroom at night tends to get pretty frigid, so much so that occasionally I will snuggle a heating pad (As he is my boyfriend, I have christened him “Stu”) until my body adjusts to the extreme cold.

Several weeks ago, I was doing my standard lay on the heating pad (Stu) routine as I read my book before bed, when I noticed two things almost simultaneously: my back was becoming uncomfortably warm AND there was a noxious smell coming from..well, SOMEWHERE (I have 3 cats, a dog, a baby, a rabbit, a hedgehog, and some leftovers in my fridge that have probably grown teeth by now. There’s no shortage of odd smells emanating from anywhere in my home).

Rather than investigate (read: I’m lazy and tired), I shut Stu off and promptly fell asleep.

Several days later, as I shuffled into my bedroom I noticed that there appeared to be foodstuffs on my sheets. Because I was then overtaken my desire to have a little snack, I went over and investigated further.

Nope, not food, and not even blood.

Burns.

I had actually succeeded in burning my sheets.

Rather than spend the next several days playing the What If game, and envisioning myself engulfed by flames (not of the burning love variety, either) while I slumbered in my Green Death Nyquil Haze, I chose to have a good laugh at my own expense.

I mean, they put those warnings on heating pads (and electric blankets) for a reason (no, not the “do not submerge in water” ones. Even I know better than that. Mostly.) and yet I chose to ignore them and do precisely what they warn against.

And I suppose this means yet another trip to Target (read: Mecca) for a fresh set of sheets and possibly a vow to my husband that I never, ever, under any circumstances, should operate anything remotely electric.

What makes me saddest is that I am going to have to say a heartfelt good bye to my warm boyfriend Stu, as I toss him unceremoniously into the garbage can. Turns out he was one of those toxic relationships after all.

Last month (was it really a month ago?), I mentioned that maybe, just maybe I had once had a completely inappropriate crush on Vincent D’Onofrio for a spell, and that I had subsequently moved on to more snarky pastures (i.e. Anthony Bourdain).

But even in my wildest fantasies, I didn’t imply that I would have wanted to have hot monkey love with the guy. Either of ’em. I’d have preferred that we sit around reading poetry to each other while occasionally discussing the virtues of Manet vs. Monet. And then mocking people mercilessly. (I’ll let you figure out who I would do what with).

So today I will present to you the one celebrity with whom I would love to have a night of (hot) gross, dirty sexin’: Tommy Lee.

Yes, you heard it here first: Tommy Lee. I want to have The Sex with Tommy Lee. And then never speak to him again.

I mean, shit, we know he’s packin’.

Your turn. Who would you like to get ridin’ DURRTY with?

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A couple of weeks ago, one of my wonderful blog friends gave me an award (and no, I didn’t even pay her) that made my ickle heart smile. I haven’t mentioned it before for two reasons: one, I have no idea how to put the icon on my blog (I had been contemplating glue and scissors, but it didn’t work, and WHOO BOY did it make a MESS) and two, I had to choose some recipients for ME to award it to.

All right, even Niobe and all of her tech-y goodness couldn’t make it work. Dumb blog not doing what I want it to do.

This is not an easy task.

In spite of my tendency toward bitchiness, I am not very good at singling people out. Maybe it’s the mother in me, but I can’t help but want everyone to win and no one to feel sad (this may be the only nice part of my personality, so deal, people.).

The award is called Daily Dose, and it started over here. It’s supposed to be given to people whose blogs you cannot seem to live without. But if you’re blog is over on my blog roll, I probably at least check in with you once a day (not clever enough to use Google Reader, and I tried bloglines but it confused me, so yeah, I just click on your link here. I’m very high-tech, I know), so that’s not a good means to determine who I give an award to.

So I needed another qualifier and I’m using the word “Daily.” I will give you this award only if you post daily (some of my favorite blogs of all time do not have daily posts, mainly because other people tend to have actual lives, whereas I do not.).

Without further adieu, I present to you my recipients:

My darling Cali, who is going through a not-so-fun time in her life, and yet, remains cheerful and optimistic, which I love about her. Plus, we’re currently in a fight over who gets to be president of the Vincent D’Onofrio fan club, and maybe this will kill her with kindness until she allows me to reign over this important fan club job.

I will also give this award to my girl-crush Niobe , over at Dead Baby Jokes. She always posts something interesting or thought provoking and usually provides a snazzy picture or two that make me green with envy over her talent.

Miss Cricket has voluntarily agreed to post every day for the whole year, a feat that although I wish I could join her in, I am not brave enough. Plus, she just adopted a new kitty-cat, and I loves me my cats, so go check her out.

And lastly, I award this to Karen, who not only posts daily, but was my first (non-paid) Internet Person, whom I had never actually met (and yet, was not a spammer). I was shocked and thrilled that someone WHO I DIDN’T KNOW was reading my blog. Plus, she just got a new job, and how cool is that?

If I missed you and you post something most days, which I probably did, as this post has taken me a ridiculous amount of time to complete, give me a holler in the comments and I’ll include you up here.

Thanks again, Miss Em, for deciding that I was worthy of an award. I’ll admit, that maybe I blushed a wee bit when I saw that for once in my life, I’ve finally won something. For reals and for true.