Category Archives: Humor

Meat, Muppets and other things to be thankful for

Posted on November 21, 2011 | 5 comments

Well, stuff my arse and call me a turkey. Thanksgiving has finally rolled around again. It seems like only a year ago we were celebrating this holiday and BOOM! Here it is all over again.

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, mainly because it is based around my No. 1 favorite activity of eating and drinking way too much and then napping (and then waking up to eat pie and drink some more). There is none of that pressure to buy gifts, or hand out candy to miniature beggars dressed as Dora the Explorer, or search for eggs hidden by a giant rabbit.

Plus, I’ve always been the kind of person who thinks we don’t give enough thanks in our daily lives, especially for the little things. I mean, have you guys ever had bacon? That little product alone deserves epic poems of praise dedicated to it with every single bite.

And as such, I’ve created a list this year of the little things in my life that I am thankful for this year.

Ahem…

The Muppets are making a comeback.

Leggings are still in style, making fat days for chicks everywhere a little less horrible.

Thanks to her 72-day sham marriage, there is finally a backlash against Kim Kardashian.

Eggnog is socially acceptable to drink for breakfast again.

I am wicked close to convincing my friend who is hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year to serve turducken (chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey).

Angry Birds.

People who use proper grammar and spelling on their Facebook posts and limit their exclamatory statements to only one exclamation point!!!

There exists a product called the Forever Lazy, which is essentially footie pajamas for adults (complete with butt flap).

Discovering the short-lived TV show “Kitchen Confidential” starring Bradley Cooper is on DVD (with nine unaired episodes!).

Speaking of which, Bradley Cooper…just in general.

The fact that my parole is finally up (just kidding…I have three more months).

I live in a world where my dog can have his own Twitter account (@BuffytheMaleDog).

Pauly Shore has stopped making movies.

Hats with ears designed to make you look like a kitty or a bear.

The fact that even though I’m 30, I have no shame and will wear hats with ears designed to make me look like a kitty or a bear.

Reading books that make you laugh out loud in public.

Meat.

Oxygen (the element, not the channel).

Pumpkin-based beer.

My brother still bear hugs me and calls me Sissy even though he’s now 13 and like, kind of totally too cool for that.

People who realize Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information.

This blog has 46 subscribers, three of which I am not immediately related to.

Knowing a person like Joss Whedon exists in the world.

Thanks to the prolific amount of recently released zombie movies and books, the American people are more prepared than ever for the eventual zombie apocalypse.

The fact that when my husband was surfing movies on Zune last night and asked me “What was that one movie with Sean Penn we couldn’t rent but we could buy and it was about grave robbers?” I instantly knew he meant Simon Pegg in “Burke and Hare.”

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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It’s exhausting being a chick…

Posted on November 15, 2011 | 11 comments

This past Sunday, my husband Ryan and I were out with some friends, having a couple beers, a couple of laughs. Naturally, I was being my usual charming, slightly buzzed, self-deprecating self.

But then…THEN I had to go and make a comment about how since I’ve been struggling to find work as a writer, at least it gives me plenty of time to clean the house. HA HA!

We then moved onto other topics (mostly farts and boobs, since it was all guys save for me) but for some reason (beer, and possibly the fact I own a uterus), I got irrationally angry at my husband for not jumping into the earlier conversation and defending me.

Which is ridiculous. Defending me from what? Even my baffled husband, when confronted with my irrational anger, said “I thought you were just doing a schtick.” Technically all he was guilty of was sitting at the bar and having a good time.

And then, because I couldn’t just leave well enough alone, my husband soon after bought me the bracelet and necklace I’d been admiring from a street vendor, to which I also responded with irrational anger.

But what the poor guy didn’t realize, through no fault of his own (since he’s not a nut job crazy 30-year-old woman), is that for months I’ve been dealing with conflicting feelings on going from a full-time, hard-working journalist to being a struggling freelance writer financially dependent on her husband when we moved to Boston. And apparently on Sunday they just boiled over.

So I decided to create some visual aids to give dudes an insight into the mind of a woman. And although these aids are specific to my own neurosis, you will at least get somewhat of an idea of the way a modern woman’s mind works.

For example, chart No. 1, which I like to call “The Cycle of Guilt,” is all about my mixed feelings on being a freelancer writer and occasional photographer and not making much money:

Long before my current employment situation occurred, my husband and I had already discussed the possibility of one of us staying home with our future children if we could afford it, instead of schlepping them to daycare all the time. We agreed, as mature, rational adults, that whoever did stay home would take on the majority of the household chores since they would have more free time. Gender roles be damned.

And so, even though we don’t have kids, I have kept my end of the bargain during my non-9-to-5 lull. But seeing as I’m not really doing anything meaningful, like, oh, I don’t know, raising a human being, it is constantly sending me down what I like to call the “Cleaning Spiral of Shame”:

Of course, being a woman, I let all these feelings fester inside, which leads to the Pie Chart of Reasons for Overeating:

And for a former athlete and one-time size six, all this over-eating makes me worry even MORE and feel bad about my body, which makes me feel even MORE guilt, meaning most of my days are spent in cycles and spirals of these feelings, which leads into the Bar Graph of Time Mis-management:

And what does all of the above equal out to? What I like to call Husband-Oriented Anger Displacement:

Yeah. It’s exhausting being a chick.

Now where are those damn Oreos?

P.S. Ryan, you are a very, very tolerant man. I love you.

P.S.S. Where are the damn Oreos?

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A writer by any other name

Posted on November 7, 2011 | 4 comments

When I was in college, I once got into a fight with a boyfriend because I said if we ever got married, I was keeping my maiden name. To him, apparently this statement meant I was some sort of scary nutjob closeted hippie feminist that ate pieces of the Constitution for breakfast.

But my reasoning was much more simple. My decision was merely motivated by the fact that I’m the last one in my large extended family that still has my biological grandfather’s surname. I just wanted to keep that name going for as long as I could.

Luckily, the man I did marry understood this desire and since he was the last in his family carrying his grandfather’s surname, we ended up coming to a nice compromise, where I would keep my family’s name going in long-forgotten articles and blogs and our future unholy spawn would take his name.

Boom. Done deal.

Except it wasn’t. Not really. When my stepdad bought me a plane ticket out of the goodness of his heart, he put Aprill Huddle, leading to a rather intimate patdown by a TSA agent when they discovered it didn’t jive with my license. When I was maid of honor for my best friend’s wedding, in the program I was listed as Aprill Huddle. The majority of our mail says “Mr. and Mrs. Huddle” and I’m often called Mrs. Huddle in public.

Which, to be honest, I don’t really mind. I’ve been called worse (including some painful years in high school and college where my nickname was “Chunky Bob”).

However, I was surprised a married couple having two different last names, no hyphen within sight, is not quite as common as I would have thought. So it should have come as no surprise to me when I saw that a recent survey found that 50 percent of Americans would support a law requiring a woman to take her husband’s last name.

But it still was.

Fifty percent? Really? I mean, I understand the tradition of taking your husband’s last name and I think it’s a lovely way to symbolize that you are now a family. But making a law requiring it?

Come on, this is America. A country where celebrities can name their children Audio Science (actress Shannyn Sossamon), Pilot Inspektor (actor Jason Lee) and Moroccan (Mariah Carey’s demon seed). Where celebrities themselves can decide to go by one word, like Cher or Madonna, or in the most extreme cases, simply change their name to an unpronounceable symbol, and then change it to The Artist, and then change it back again to the original one word name of Prince. Where a normal kid named Sean Combs can be Puff Daddy and then later P. Diddy and then later still Puff the Magic Diddly or whatever he’s going by now.

On the same note, this is the land of the free and the home of the brave reality TV stars who actually choose to go by ridiculous monikers such as Snooki, The Situation and J-Woww.

This is a nation where spelling is a fluid concept and Paige can be spelled Payj, Rachel can be Raychelle, Max can be Mhaxx, and Kimberly can be Kymberleigh. Where apostrophes know no bounds: De’Shawn’a, Se’Heira, Ce’Qwoia.

This is the melting pot of the world, where little kids with Polish surnames featuring four Z’s, three Y’s and 12 vowels can play alongside little Asian children with the hard-to-pronounce-for-white-people last name of Nguyen in peace and harmony. Where girls named Christi and Sammi and Mari can dot their i’s with stupid, little hearts on legal documents.

Where a fourth-grader from Ohio can decide one day to add an extra L to her name on a whim because there were three other girls with her same name and she was tired of being referred to as “April B.”. Not to mention, I could go right now and for a reasonable fee, legally change my name to Scrappy McDoo if I really wanted to.

Like Shakespeare said, what’s in a name?

Well, in America, it’s anything you want.

And in my opinion, we should keep it that way.

Signed,

Aprylll Br’and’on

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And now for a very special Halloween blog…

Posted on October 31, 2011 | 1 comment

It’s been six years, folks.

Six.

Years.

Six years that I have been waiting to once again celebrate Halloween in a climate where autumn is not “hey, it’s only 91 degrees today.” Six years I’ve been waiting to wear a costume without sweat stains. Six years waiting to be able to drink a hot toddy without spontaneously combusting.

And now that I’m in Boston, it’s finally happening. The leaves are changing. The air is crisp. The ground is covered in snow.

Let me write that last part a bit slower, in case you didn’t catch that:

The……………..ground……………….is………………covered…………………………..

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

………………………………………………………in……………………………………………..

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

……….snow.

Yeah. Snow. That white, fluffy crap typically associated with Christmas and Minnesota.

And not just any snow. Oh no. No, Boston had to have a Nor’easter, which is, as far as I can figure out, basically a winter hurricane.

Not that I’m complaining.*

But this does bring up a rather huge dilemma for me. All of my previous Halloween costume ideas are now kind of moot…especially since I am rather attached to most of my major digits and limbs. Which means I now have to scramble to come up with some new ideas for tonight. Luckily, I started drinking early today, so the creative juices are flowing.

So far, I’ve got:

Slutty nurse wearing a parka

Girl wrapped in comforter

The kid from “A Christmas Story” when he’s wearing the giant bunny costume

Slutty cheerleader wearing a parka and long johns

Snuggie representative

Sweatpants enthusiast

Huge sports fan who feels it’s appropriate to wear all their sports gear at once

Slutty Eskimo

Alaska resident

Girl wearing ugly, giant old man sweater but pulling it off because she’s awesome

Slutty slut in a slutty parka

And if all else fails, my last resort is drunk girl who is drinking until she can’t feel anything anymore.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

*Disclaimer: According to the contract my husband forced made me sign, I’m not allowed to complain about the cold or any other kind of weather in Boston since I used up all my wifely “bitching about the weather” tokens in Texas.

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I don’t know how she doesn’t do it

Posted on October 20, 2011 | 1 comment

Once upon a time (2010), in a land far, far away (exotic South Texas), there lived a woman (for lack of a better term) who was an expert at juggling many balls (not as dirty as it sounds). From dawn to dusk, the woman ran around (in a most elegant professional-like style), like a giant chicken with its head cut off (albeit in stylish and really, really painful heels).

And then, suddenly one day, the woman…wait!…let’s go with princess…suddenly one day, the princess…who was wicked pretty and owned two THREE ponies!…found herself moving to a much less humid land far, far away called Boston. It was there where her balls (oh, don’t be so juvenile) significantly dropped in number.

But then an odd phenomenon happened. The less balls she had to deal with (OK, yeah, that does sound pretty dirty), the less she seemed able to get done.

OK, OK, the jig is up. Obviously the woman wicked pretty princess (who also had the lips of Angelina Jolie and the boobs of ScarJo) is me.

During that year, I pumped out anywhere from 10 to 15 articles a week as an entertainment reporter (while still wasting a good 40 percent of my week on Facebook and Twitter), worked a second job, sat on the board of directors for the local CASA organization, planned my wedding, actually exercised on a semi-regular basis, did my 365 Project, showered daily (before noon!), maintained a thriving social life and ate socially acceptable breakfast food for breakfast instead of leftover lasagna and potato chips.

Cut to 2011. Now working as a freelancer, where my only two regular duties (heh) are writing weekly for Boston’s Weekly Dig and bi-weekly for the Victoria Advocate, I have turned into pretty much the opposite of that old adage “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” Because now, if you need something done, dear baby Jesus in the manger, don’t give it to me unless you need it done sometime in 2015. I can’t seem to manage more than one thing a day these days (and that one thing may or may not include showering). Not to mention, today I ate a leftover cheeseburger and Fig Newton’s for breakfast.

For instance, it can literally take me the better half of a day just to read the Sunday editions of the New York Times and the Boston Globe now (and that’s usually on a Monday because God forbid I actually even read the newspapers in a timely manner). And just yesterday, the only things I had to do on my “to-do” list were to pay three bills online and return two e-mails. Naturally, this constituted dread and procrastination on my part until 3 p.m. when I finally dredged up the resolve to sit my ass down for a whopping 15 minutes to do it.

It’s like my new non-9-to-5 life has fallen under the rules of some mysterious universal law; much like Murphy’s Law, only named after someone less gooberish-sounding, like Ricardo, where the less you have to do, the less time you have to do it. I can’t tell you how many times my husband has come home from work and asked me “so, what did you do today?” And even though I felt I had a productive day, suddenly I realize I didn’t when I have to respond with “well, I cleaned the kitchen and then wrote half a blog and then…um…put on makeup…and…well…I…reTweeted a bunch a stuff…”

Not, mind you, that I’m complaining. I love having more free time. I just have no idea where that extra free time is going. My theory is that little gnomes are sneaking into the space-time continuum and stealing minutes from my day when I’m not looking.

Because me being lazy and not able to handle an unstructured life sounds just pathetic when you’re 30.

But luckily, I have a plan. Just like I did when I was a productive member of society, I’m going to schedule my day down to the minute and stick to it, no matter what. Which I will do as soon as I find the time.

Stupid gnomes.

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Yogurt that helps you poo and other joys of aging

Posted on October 13, 2011 | 3 comments

A few nights ago, my husband and I had a small dinner party. Just a few friends, a delicious meal comprised of appetizers, ribs, mashed potatoes and cheesecake as well as some bottles of wine. It was a wonderful time and by midnight, we were snug in our bed.

The following morning, we woke up exhausted and suffering from indigestion, a major headache, and sore muscles (from the effort of stirring and standing on our feet for more than half an hour apparently). All of which we remedied by swallowing a ridiculous amount of pills with two gallons of black coffee.

Oh, the joy of growing older.

I’m not quite sure when it happened, but at some point, our bodies stopped functioning on their own. Now that we are in our 30’s, it seems they require aids on almost a daily basis in the form of over-the-counter pills and creams.

For example, over the years, our medicine “cabinet” has slowly turned into a medicine “drawer,” going from a bottle of aspirin and some vitamins that expired in 1998 to the following: Maalox, Pepto, Pepcid AC, Advil, Tylenol, Tylenol PM, Ex-Lax, Ibuprofen, One-A-Day vitamins, B-Complex vitamins, Fish Oil pills, Tums, Metamucil, Midol, Rolaids, DayQuil, NightQuil, Zicam, Caladryl, Icy Hot, L-Lysine pills, four varieties of allergy pills and heating pads (just for good measure).

And that’s not even counting our anti-aging regiments, of which mine is comprised of various expensive anti-wrinkle creams and lotions designed for every inch of my body, from my face to my feet, and pills and powders designed to amp up my metabolism, which decided to screech to a halt sometime around 2008; and my husband’s, which is comprised of Chapstick and a bar of generic soap.

And while we have thus far avoided actual prescriptions from doctors, I realize that day can’t be too far behind judging from the ever-growing pharmacy popping up in my mom’s house and the arsenal the majority of my friends are building against depression and anxiety (or as my friend Michelle recently lamented, “Pills and creams! Pills and creams! That’s all my life is now!”).

Even sleeping can now be a dangerous activity. Ol’ Schnookum Bear and I have not insignificantly injured ourselves more times than I care to remember simply because our neck was tilted two degrees the wrong way on our pillows all night.

It’s official. Our bodies have betrayed us. Or as my husband summed up, “the older you get, the angrier your body gets.”

Oh sure, I realize some of it has to do with lifestyle choices. We still eat like we did in college, exercise is now considered doing laundry (in our defense, we do have to climb stairs to get to the washer) and “oh, I’ll just have one glass of wine” is not in our vocabulary.

But still, it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that I can no longer treat and/or neglect my body horrifically without consequences. Circle of life and junk, I suppose.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run to the store to buy some more Aleve and that old people yogurt that helps you poo.

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Occupying the Occupation

Posted on October 11, 2011 | 4 comments

Well, for those of you who picked Oct. 11 at 1:30 p.m. as the moment I would officially become the cliché of the unemployed writer typing pretentiously away at my keyboard as I sip a triple mocha latte in a Boston coffeehouse, congratulations.

You won the office pool.

(Added financial bonus to those of you who also picked that I’d be the douchebag taking up the entire couch in the corner with my backpack, camera and pretentious copy of “The Best American Nonrequired Reading”).

Yes, today I opted to finally climb out of my beloved sweatpants and put on my other “big girl” pants (sans the elastic waist), hike it ALL the way to the subway and finally interact with other human beings. So far, I got two out of three (unless you count the homeless guy who thought we would make a beautiful baby together).

But it wasn’t just on a whim that I decided to exert all this effort. Oh no. Momma does not actually brush her hair and slap on some lipstick on a “whim.” I left my comfortable hermit digs on a mission. After following the Occupy Boston movement in the news and on the Twitter, I decided to go check it out for myself. Not necessarily to join…yet. I don’t know that much about it to put my incredibly questionable reputation behind it. But to simply go, hang out, talk to some people (or in other words, as my friend Billy put it, to occupy the occupation).

I mean, for a small town girl, the fact that I’m in close proximity to something like this is…well, I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t go check it out (because honestly, no one wants to someday answer their grandchildrens’ question of “Where were you when the Occupy movement was happening?” with “On the couch, eating Cheetos…but I did reTweet a bunch of other people’s experiences.”).

I mean, this is a MONUMENTAL moment in our history! People are taking it to the streets! Damn the man! Save the Empire! ATTICA! ATTICA!

Except…that’s not really what I saw. Well, not at first anyway. When I got there, it seemed to me more of a “Dude, corporate America sucks! Let’s, like, make signs and junk!” kind of deal. This was not, in fact, helped by the fact I encountered no less than four college-aged hipsters walking around downtown Boston in barefeet within the first three minutes. Granted, this is my own prejudice. I love me some odd characters but I draw the line at anyone who takes their shoes off in a situation that does not call for it. (And for you barefoot hipsters reading this, that is most situations).

Luckily, I stuck around. And talked to people who felt shoes were pretty much a necessity as well. And just observed.

And somewhere down the line, between reading the signs and overhearing conversations, I swelled with a feeling of…well, as close to patriotism as a jaded writer and journalist can get.  

Because that’s when it hit me. The most important part of this protest in Boston and other cities, is that it is happening at all. It’s the process itself that’s making the point. People are PISSED. At their government. At corporate greed. At the government and corporate greed being in bed together and having crazy monkey sex.

Say what you will about their message or their methods but you know what? No revolution or major change ever happened because a bunch of white guys/college kids/soccer moms/post-op trannies sat around a bar bitching.

And in my opinion, they are making some pretty good points. You (and by “you” I mean the “guvmint”) can’t keep telling the younger generations they have to go to college if they ever want to have a semblance of a decent life only to have them emerge deeply in debt and without a job prospect to be found. You can’t keep thinking those same generations (and most of their parents) are going to be OK with you pouring billions of dollars we’ll have to pay back for wars the government keeps bungling. You can’t expect them to be all right with the fact that by the time they reach retirement, there will be no social security. And seriously, you can’t honestly believe no one would notice that the top one percent keep getting bonus checks bigger than what most of us will make in our entire lifetimes when they really, truly suck at their jobs.

Will the Occupy movements change anything? Probably not. At least not right away. But what it is doing is getting people off their complacent asses.

And that, in my book, is already a victory.

And the best part is, if you don’t like it –to steal from William F. Buckley’s famous line “cancel your own goddamn subscription” he wrote in response to an angry reader –then start your own goddamn movement.

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Bridesmaid Revisited

Posted on October 1, 2011 | 3 comments

They say nine times a bridesmaid…hmm. Well, I guess they don’t really say anything about that. Probably because there are only a very, very select few women who are crazy enough to agree to be in nine weddings.

Readers, meet Crazy.

(Although, I guess it could be nine times a bridesmaid, three times never a bride…or never a bride times three…or a bride cubed…I don’t know, math was never my strong suit).

Yes, today I will be walking down an aisle in an unnaturally poufy dress that I can’t breathe in because I refuse to accept I am no longer a size six for the ninth time (which actually would have been 11 but I had to turn two down due to one overlapping another wedding and the fact that the other was in Montana, where, like, legit wild animals live).

To be honest, I’m not quite sure how it got to this point. It’s not like I set out to be in nine weddings. Most little girls don’t grow up dreaming about the days they prevent a hyperventilating friend and/or family member from murdering their mother-in-law and then spend the majority of the reception lifting up 40 pounds of tulle so the bride can pee.

And it’s not even as though I’m that popular or even that good of a friend. It just seemed to happen that women in my life got married right at the moment we were at the height of our friendship. Or, in my friend Ben’s case, I was simply the token chick groomsman because I bested three out of five groomsmen in a burping contest.

So why do I do it? Well, for one, the open bar. That may not seem like good fiscal sense, considering the cost of the dress, shoes, airfare, gifts and brown paper bags (bought in bulk for all the bride’s freak out needs) far outweigh what you save by not paying for your hooch for an evening. But hey, free beer is still free beer.

Two, I happen to look really, really good in colors not found in nature, such as teal and neon electric pink.

And three, and possibly most importantly, I LOVE acting superior and sneering my nose down at all the “regular” wedding guests who were not important enough to be asked to button up 417 individual buttons on the back of the bride’s dress.

But Misty’s wedding today should be the last one. All my good friends and cousins are now hitched and any new friends I make are instantly told “Hi, I’m Aprill. Please don’t ever ask me to be in your wedding. What’s your name?”

With this being the last wedding, however, it is a bittersweet moment for me. On one hand, I think I’ll miss all the pomp and circumstance and excitement that surrounds these weddings.

On the other, I will never, ever have to help a fully functioning adult pee ever again.

That is, of course, until 50 percent of these couples start divorcing and remarrying.

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The first three letters in care is car

Posted on September 15, 2011 | 3 comments

I call her the Boop-mobile. She’s small, has a sassy red chassis and one heck of a pair of ample headlights (although she has also gone by Please Baby Girl Please in my more desperate moments and Susan for that one week in 2006 when I felt she needed a more dignified name).

She’s my 2004 Hyundai and for eight years, she has put up with me and my shenanigans. The countless coffee spills, the oopsie curbside hits, the grinding of gears that has made my clutch suicidal; all of it she bore with a grace that speaks volumes of her species.

So when I decided last Friday to take an impromptu 13-hour road trip from Boston to my Ohio hometown to surprise my best friend Misty for her bachelorette party, I was a bit surprised when she started acting up. As soon as we hit the open road, she began shaking once I hit 55 miles per hour. By the time I hit 65, she was downright convulsing. And there was this weird whee-duuum-eeeeee-grrrrrrrr-hi-wheeeeee sound emanating from somewhere.

So naturally, I did what any woman who thinks a dipstick is something you call someone who is acting stupid.

I ignored it and kept driving.

See, in general, the relationship a woman has with her car is very different from the one a man has with his. Most of the men I know look at their cars as almost extensions of themselves. As such, they tend to actually do things like replace the battery instead of jump starting it for a year and not ignore things like a whee-duuum-eeeeee-grrrrrrrr-hi-wheeeeee sound. Whereas I assume my car will just keep running forever without any intervention from me.

Luckily, I have a husband, who also happens to be a man, and it was he who suggested I get the car looked at before I began my trek home.

Now, I have always dreaded going to auto shops. It’s akin to walking into a foreign country where you don’t know the language or customs, let alone their currency exchange rate. A mechanic could tell me my dinglehopper needs a new kerfluffen ring and I have no choice but to believe him and fork over $400 because my car needs a kerfluffen ring that has to be special ordered.

But more importantly, I hate it because I’m also pretty sure the mechanics are silently judging me. They know the extent to which I’ve neglected my poor, defenseless car. They’ll ask me things like “when’s the last time you changed your oil?” and then give me an extremely judgmental look when I tell them I can’t remember because the little sticker in the corner of the windshield fell off about a month before I graduated high school.

Needless to say, if there was a Car Protective Services, I’d never be allowed within 500 feet of any car lot and then be forced to stick a sign in my yard that says “Car Offender.” And then bicycles would probably come out of the woodwork with charges of the abuse they also suffered at my hands.

And this particular visit was perhaps the most embarrassing of all. As it turns out, three of my four tires were so bald, they were technically illegal. The guy threw out a bunch of numbers at me, but to sum up, they were basically the Mr. Clean of tires. And let me tell you, the mechanic was not amused when I responded to this claim with “Wow, I didn’t even know tires could be illegally bald.” Nor did he seem happy when I said “So, I guess them there factory tires don’t last forever, eh?”

But the punishment fit the crime. I ended up with a $250 bill and a stern talking to about the urgent need to take my car to a chiropractor or some junk as soon as possible for an alignment.

On the plus side, those four new tires made the Boop-mobile like new again, getting rid of the shaking and weird banshee-esque sounds. And having a car that didn’t act like it was going to implode once it went over 50 mph gave me plenty of time to ponder other things on the way home, like why the state of Pennsylvania has a law that insists you turn on your headlights while driving through work zones, even if it’s broad daylight. Or why every single road in Ohio is currently under construction. Or how after 13 hours of driving, even I will start doing a “Boston left,” which is a quaint little tradition where you rapidly switch lanes or turn onto a road without any warning whatsoever, leaving those in your wake scrambling for their lives.

*UPDATE: You can read even MORE fun adventures of my road trip here.

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Me, Myself and Irene

Posted on August 29, 2011 | 3 comments

All right, everyone. Enough is enough. It’s time we all come together as a nation and finally fix the biggest problem currently plaguing the U.S.

Our meteorologists are out of control.

But before I go any farther, let me first address your probable shock at even seeing me write this. Yes…yes, I am still alive. Somehow I managed to survive the cataclysmic Hurricane Irene, in all it’s barely category two glory, as it swept across the eastern seaboard. Granted, some of my patio furniture did get knocked over. But don’t worry.

We will rebuild.

And although I was one of the lucky few whose power did not go out, my heartfelt prayers go out to the millions of others who had to suffer for hours in the 70 degree temperatures with no TV or Internet connection (and especially to the ones who got so desperate, they actually read a book).

Barbaric, I tell you.

But at least I survived and will now be able to tell my children all about the storm of the century, where I spent the day watching Anderson Cooper on CNN pretend that the wind was strong enough to knock him over (or, as my born-and-raised Mid-western husband referred to the 70 mph wind gusts, “In Kansas, we call that Tuesday”).

Of course, for all my mocking, there’s no denying that Irene was massive and that in the aftermath of the storm, there was some pretty severe property damage, major flooding, and two dozen deaths attributed to it. That is definitely not something to take lightly.

But what IS to be taken lightly is the hype with which this storm was built up, before, during and after it made landfall, especially in light of the actual devastating natural disasters that have happened this century, from the earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to tornadoes that have leveled entire towns. We need to view this storm with some perspective in mind. Considering the sheer scope of it, things could have been much, much worse.

It’s one thing to be prepared and for meteorologists and city officials to preach caution. Prepared is good. Caution is good. But it’s another to blow up a category two hurricane to “God is going to smite the east coast with his bare hands” proportions.

And if the hysteria was just surrounding this particular hurricane, I could probably let this one slide. But I also managed to survive the “massive” eastern earthquake that was felt from Virginia to Canada a few weeks ago. Which, quite frankly, is amazing, considering it was so big I was unable to actually feel it. No wonder those dirty hippies on the West Coast were practically peeing their pants with laughter at our over-reaction. They eat earthquakes that small for breakfast (and then smoke some medical marijuana for dessert).

There are only so many times you can call “wolf,” or in this case, “worst storm you have ever seen ever in your ever-loving lifetime” before you condition people to become complacent about storm warnings. There is already enough sensationalizing in the media. Let’s at least leave it out of the weather reports.

Otherwise, I fear the next “sunny and breezy” forecast will become “skin cancer and wind burn,” and the next thunderstorm will be accompanied by a news segment on how you too can build an ark like Noah’s.

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