I've Attacked Your Ring, And Now I'm Going After Your Purse

At some point, I'm convinced that my social generalizations regarding women's accessories will end. At the very least, I will exhaust the list of potentially generalizable accessories available wherever the hell it is you buy these useless things. Until then, though, I will keep on informing you female readers what I (and by "I" I mean all men) think of your bodily ornaments. And for you male readers, I'm reassuring you that, no, you're not crazy, you're just thoughtful and concerned about your ability to perceive that which lures you and how to best act upon that probably ill-discovered perception.

As Jason Stackhouse (yeah, the guy from True Blood) said when he became enraged at his girlfriend for convincing him to kidnap a vampire to keep in their basement and slowly bleed for personal pleasure, "I should've known that something wasn't right the second you walked into my life carrying that big bag of crazy."

The myth of Pandora and her box is centuries old, yet it still holds a bit of truth in these days of Coach, Prada, Patagonia. Rather than sealed ceramic jars, the women of today carry with them purses, satchels if you will, full of their potions, elixirs, trinkets, and general mischief. In general, the bigger the purse, the bigger the crazy. These women carry over their shoulders or hold tight under their arms pharmacies worth of medical and hygienic equipment; entire Victorian wings of libraries; shelves of mystical Latin American hot sauces. These walking Y2K disaster kits are prepared for any situation they or their companion may run into.

Being prepared like this is useful......if you're a mother of 18 hyperallergic kids with ADHD, diabetes, hemophilia, swine flu, and shingles. If, however, you are not said mother, I just don't get it. I like to think that I encounter just as many hairy situations as a woman with equal amounts of good and bad luck. Why is it that I am somehow able to deal with these daily events of peril with my wallet, cellphone, Vicks Nasal Inhalant, keys, and occasional wadded up receipt while you need David the Gnome's infinitely deep hip-pack to get through the day?

The bag is slowing you down. It's ruining your posture. It's begging you to become reliant on it, leaving you completely vulnerable when it isn't at your side to deal with the most basic of confrontations. My experience with these massive purse wielders (other than my mother of course) have been solidly in line with Stackhouse's observation. Within the abyss of your massive purses brood the evils, ills, diseases, burdensome labor, and general chaos passed down through generations of similar bag handlers from Pandora herself.

Every time you spend 25 minutes looking for your bus pass, every time you waste 10 minutes of my time in the grocery store looking for coupons, every time you pull out the "S" portion of the Encyclopedia Britannica, every time you discover a moldy $5 footlong, every time you surprise me by pulling out a 200 gig Ipod rather than a nano, mini, or shuffle, when you reach into your bag for a cigarette and pull out a middle aged Cuban man who proceeds to role you an illegally procured Cuban Cigar you are reigniting the memory of Pandora, and you are freaking me out.

Tiny purse owners aren't out of the woods either. I'm sick of carrying your keys, lipsticks, lotions, candies, etc. My pockets have my things in them, and whatever you give me to hold for you is going to be forced in my back left pocket. Most of what you want me to hold you do not want in my back left pocket as I will inevitably sit on it. Your things will melt or irritate me during their journey in my pants. Get a bigger purse.

Now, does this mean when a woman with a ginormous purse, or a woman with a tiny bag and a handful of pocket-bound items shows interest in me I run for hills of Olympus to ask the gods for mercy? No, I don't think I'm in a position to hold such strict rules, but rest assured, I'll be much better prepared for what you've got in store for me once I've sized up that bag.

Je veux du jus aux raisins

I would also like to learn French, like really really badly.

My goal, I think, for the summer is to figure out the words to this song. I'm nearly certain I will be unable to experience an emotional status below 5 (on a 10 point scale where 10 is equal to the elation experienced when eating a bread pudding made with unicorn milk and dragon eggs while staring at a newly cleaned kitchen and a 1 is akin to the misery of barefooting a dog turd after watching My Girl) thanks solely to the torrential cheerfulness of this tune. Be prepared to have your internal noise machine play on repeat for days and days and days, or should I say, jours et jours et jours et jours.

Baking and Calculus

I like to think I enjoy cooking. It started with sandwiches a few years ago when a friend introduced me to some amazing possibilities. Pear? Brie? Avocado? Hummus? All of these things were alien to me at the time, but planted inside me a seed which rather than springing from my stomach and attacking all of those around, grew into a curiosity of the basic foods I grew up with. I have ventured into loafs, cupcakes, jell-oes (is that the plural? maybe jell-i). Today I tackled the bundt cake.

Baking, I should say, is as simple as assembling IKEA furniture. Follow the instructions exactly as represented by the androgynous characters in the wordless manual and you're set. Stray from these, though, and you are doomed to failure. Your bed will fall apart from under you, your cornbread will look like white pizza vomit, your room will catch on fire.

The recipe was simple enough. A peach ginger bundt. It has peaches, ginger, and a bunch of other things that typically go into desserts: flour, sugar, baking powder, blah blah blah. I preheated the oven, I made my badder, and I greased my pan. Thing is, the recipe called for a 10 inch bundt pan, I had a tray with 6 mini-bundts. I thought I could do a bit of relatively simple calculus to get my proportions about right. Turns out, I suck at calculus. I like to think that this problem was beyond calculus. Newton himself would have given up math to pursue his passion for balsa wood jewelry box making had he been posed with a similar task. In the end, I simply had too much badder, not enough bundt pan. Within minutes of being sent off into the oven for baking, my mini-bundts exploded past the rims of their tiny containers like love handles over a pair of tight jeans.

They taste fine, but they look ridiculous. Like muffins with intricately decorated round bottoms leaving them vulnerable to tipping over onto their sides where the sticky frosting will inevitably pick up whatever debris is on the surface below. Or like buoys, rocking back and forth like an opossum trying to eat my trash, blinded by the afternoon sun.

Is there a lesson in here somewhere? Probably, but I now have 4 bundts left in the kitchen, 2 jogging through my digestive tract, and a sugar rush that probably won't let me sleep till after the ShamWow commercials come on in full force.

Mac and cheese, you're next!

Ohhhh, The Hilarity of Advertising Mistakes.

During the same hour of television watching, I'm about 95% sure I saw the same commercial actress pretend to have ADHD for an ADHD medicine commercial only to be followed by an amazing performance demonstrating her appreciation of the pill that hid her Herpes.

One has to wonder if she had only addressed her ADHD earlier, would she still have needed to address her herpes flare up? Curiosity may have killed the cat, but an inability to concentrate on tasks and a tendency toward boredome gave that kitty an unfortunate life full of giving bad news.

Ponderous Bonderous

So, thanks to the USA network and an otherwise uneventful evening (I say uneventful despite the fact that I just painted some sick-ass yellow stripes on my wall and cleaned up the dog poop from the yard) I have had the opportunity to experience my first James Bond movie. In other words, I have just wasted 3 hours of my life that I could have spent smoking my own ribs, baking cupcakes, or making 30 soft boiled eggs (one at a time, of course).

Despite the miserably heinous plot, I still don't really get what the point of Casino Royale was. It seems as though this Bond character had the delicate duty of killing everyone around him

(OH SHIT!!!!!! THE FUNDS WERE TRANSFERRED TO THE VENICE BRANCH!!!!!).

You caught me, I'm in the process of watching the last few minutes of this still terrible film.

Despite this burst of surprise during what I thought was an elongated denouement, I hold firm to my belief that these movies are absolutely terrible. They force the exact same cliches (I'm assuming as, again, this is the first one I've nearly watched all the way through) of all spy/assassin movies. The realist in me - which is all of me - doesn't appreciate Bond's apparent inability to be killed.

If I got in a car crash like that, I'd be shredded. One strike to the balls with that rope thing and I would've hurt to death. I mean, I can barely survive a vodka martini let alone drink several and still maneuver like a Romanian gymnast. Add to that the stifling dialogue and you have one of the most poorly conceived excuses for a cinematic series ever created. Furthermore, I can't bring myself to believe this guy's luck with women. She says she feels like there's still blood on her hands, so he awkwardly puts them in his mouth and says, "that's better, yeah"? WHAT?! If I thought I had blood on my hands from a traumatic experience, the last thing I'd need is for them to be put in the mouth of the person that just killed the people whose blood I thought was on them in the first place (run on?).

Regardless, I've obviously just finished my last beer of the night, and an archaic nail gun has been added to the plot. Goodnight and good luck.

On a side note, upon initiating spellcheck, the only misspelled word was Royale. EAT THAT!