Most Awesome Craigslist Post
Posted by: ssjane | September 29, 2007 | 9:43 pm
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Lifetime Television for (Really Weird) Women
Lately I’ve been watching reruns of Frasier. These air on the Lifetime channel, which I vaguely recall from my past as being promoted as the “channel for women.” Now that I’ve watched just over 200 episodes of Frasier, I can tell you what this means.
As judged by the ads that air between the Frasier episodes, women are apparently interested in death, affairs with some very bad men, and mistaken identities.
I have never watched a Lifetime Original (or otherwise) Movie, but the ads have proven to be an eye-opening experience, albeit a very shortened one. None of the ads are ever the same, and watching a new ad is like watching the latest installment of a long-running, serialized show populated with semi-familiar actors and conflicts that will undoubtedly require a lot of talking to resolve.
An early “episode” starred Jennifer Love Hewitt, who played a doctor or nurse or physician’s assistant who suddenly learned the value of life from an old patient who was dying.
Another one featured a teenager who got married to her high school sweetheart (no, she wasn’t pregnant) and surprisingly, found out married life was not that nice when her husband finally realized he was 18 and there were many, many other women in the world.
Oh, and one recent show had Peter Gallagher (was this post-O.C.? Did he just feel like making some easy money?) in some odd quasi-horror/chick flick in which his loved one is not who he thought and he refused to rest until he figured out what’s going on. During the less than 10 seconds of this ad, I was unable to determine whether his loved one was A) having an affair, B) possessed by a Stephen King-type monster, C) had another life/name/amnesia, or D) was dying, very slowly.
But the worst Lifetime ad I have ever seen was today, in the middle of a Frasier episode in which Niles and Daphne get married twice. It is possible that they would have gotten married even more times before the episode ended, but I had to turn off the TV after watching this ad.
Today’s installment of “Crazy Ladies or Crazy Sensitive Men Who Are Dead, Dying, Or Someone Else Entirely” starred Amber Tamblyn. She was playing a high school kid who hangs out with a bunch of other high school kids and they all get together and … have orgies.
My high school was just like that, wasn’t yours?
The ad showed 4 couples, all dressed, but all making out and lying down in the same room. I mean, no one was having sex with more than one person at a time, but the ad was pretty clear that the actual partners did not matter and that the high schoolers swapped partners all the time.
The twist in the story, though, is that Amber Tamblyn wants to date one guy. Just ONE guy…and no more orgies. Naturally, she is perceived as a Freak.
I had so many questions. The guy she had decided was the Chosen One spoke ominously, just before the ad ended. “If you were the last girl on earth and I was the last guy…” How would his sentence end? How would this be resolved? Would she be forced to make group love forever? And how many more crazy plots would Lifetime come up with? I had two more seasons of Frasier to find out.
Posted by: ssjane | September 27, 2007 | 2:48 pm
Posted in: Entertainment/News | Comments Off
Why There Will Be No Babies In Our Household
Yesterday Chris came up to me while I was working on the computer and told me his friend’s wife had their baby on Saturday. He said, “23 hours of labor.”
I said, “That’s about what my boss had, I think.”
“TWENTY-THREE HOURS OF LABOR!” he shouted. “I do not want to see you go through that!”
“I wouldn’t!” I said. “I’d get a c-section. If Britney Spears got through a c-section fine, I can, too!”
“I DON’T WANT TO SEE MY WIFE SUFFER!!!” and then he went downstairs, moaning and randomly shouting NO and NOT MY WIFE and TWENTY-THREE HOURS.
Posted by: ssjane | September 18, 2007 | 9:02 pm
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Meeting Strangers Can Be Fun
Chris and I were on the road to his parents’ house when his cell phone rang.
“Must be your parents,” I said. Without exception, his parents call us every time we’re driving to their house, as if they secretly suspect we’ve found a more exciting place to visit along the way. This has never happened, but mostly because there are no exciting places on these particular roads.
Chris glanced quickly at the phone. “No, it’s a 617 area code.”
“Hello?” he said into the phone.
He paused.
“One minute,” he said, and handed the phone to me.
I didn’t know who would be calling me on his cell, and I could tell Chris was wondering if I’d given out his number instead of mine as a contact number for something strange I had signed up for. Because I do that, and quite frequently.
“Hello?” I said.
“Jane, it’s John Shumacher and I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you,” a man’s voice said.
“Who are you?” I asked. This may have been a bit impolite, but I do not like talking on the phone and I wanted to make this conversation as brief as possible.
“I’m sorry, it’s just been crazy here lately,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”
“No,” I said firmly. By now I’d had a chance to think about the past couple of weeks, and whether I’d left messages for anyone, and I had come to the conclusion that I did not know a John Shumacher.
“I’m Matt’s middle school math teacher,” I thought I heard him say.
The only thing I could think to say was, “We don’t have any children.”
He said again, “I’m John Shumacher?” as if that would change anything.
I said again, “But we don’t have kids.” Then it hit me. This was a wrong number! Thank god, because I was beginning to suspect that I’d had an illegitimate child and actually forgotten about it.
“I think you have the wrong number,” I told him.
“Is this – “ and he rattled off Chris’s cell phone number.
“Yes,” I said.
“So I assume you’re not the Murphys?”
“DEFINITELY not,” I said quickly. I wondered if I should spell my last name for him, just for emphasis, but opted against it.
He apologized and hung up. I hung up, having never been more relieved to receive a wrong number.
Posted by: ssjane | September 15, 2007 | 1:59 pm
Posted in: This Life | Comments Off
Highway Freaks
Spotted today on the Mass Pike, a handwritten sign covering the entire back windshield of a van:
Real Americans Don’t Protest.
We support our troops.
I guess the guy driving the van is still pretty pissed about how we don’t have slaves anymore, women can vote, and we’re not still in Vietnam.
Posted by: ssjane | September 15, 2007 | 1:58 pm
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You Know the Dog Is Hungry When…
..she gobbles down the liver treat that she usually ignores because it’s too hard, and even eats another treat, and then refuses to come when you call to her to partake of your oatmeal cookie so you go upstairs to look for her, only to find her busily eating what remains of some dog’s/her own vomit.
Posted by: ssjane | September 13, 2007 | 4:48 pm
Posted in: Dogs | Comments (0)
“It Must Be Bunnies (Or Maybe Midgets)”
When we moved into the suburbs, I assumed that Halloween would be the most negative part of living in a child-friendly area. And indeed, one year we were inundated with so many trick-or-treaters that we ran out of candy and a mob of determined children began to form on our lawn. The mob was placated only after my husband made an emergency run to the supermarket and returned with another 100 pieces of candy.
Now that I’ve been in this neighborhood for nearly four years, the weeks leading up to Halloween still strike fear in my heart. But I have learned that something more horrifying, more dangerous, lurks in the suburbs.
Rabbits.
Some of you may remember that a few months ago, Stanley inadvertently killed a nest of baby rabbits. (Even now, I still can’t help but to refer to the shovel as the “dead bunny scooper.”) So I had begun to suspect rabbits were becoming a problem, but rabbits did not surge to the top of my suburbia hatred list until a few weeks ago.
We had just finished a nice walk around the neighborhood with our dogs. As we came back to our house, we took off the dog leashes as usual. Mina likes to conduct a quick surveillance of the house after walks, paying particular attention to the gutters because she once heard a chipmunk in a gutter and has remained suspicious of noises near the gutters since then, even if she has to make the noises herself.
Today, though, Mina decided she wanted to look at the holly bushes in front of our house. She trotted into the bushes and I was yelling at her to come out and into the house, when something leaped out of the bushes, bounced heavily off my shin, and raced away.
I am not ashamed to admit that I screamed.
Chris was in the garage already, taking the harnesses off Paco and Stanley, and he yelled, “What happened? Are you okay?”
I was staring into the distance where a rabbit had rounded the corner of the garage, leaving behind only a flash of the white underside of its tail.
“A rabbit just bounced off me,” I said. “And I can’t get Mina out.” My old fears resurfaced. “What if she’s eating some rabbit babies!?!!”
“Nah, I think it’s too late in the season for babies,” Chris said, in a tone of voice which suggested that no matter what he found, he was going to tell me there were no dead babies in the bushes. Because sometimes a man has to sneak out of the house and quickly dispose of dead things if that means he’ll be able to sleep through the night without his wife waking him up every half hour to ask if bunnies go to heaven.
By now, all we could see of Mina was a faint rustling of the holly branches closest to the ground. Chris walked around the bushes, calling for her. When she ignored him, he pushed his way through the branches and felt around the ground.
After a few minutes, he emerged holding Mina. Mina had a tiny spider hanging off one of her whiskers, and dirt on her back. She also looked startled to have been interrupted in her rabbit-hunting.
We brushed her off and took her inside. She spent the rest of the day perched in the windowsill, alertly surveying the lawn. Maybe it had taken the humans four years to figure out the true dangers of living in the suburbs, but she had known all along about the rabbits.
And also, the squirrels.
Posted by: ssjane | September 9, 2007 | 11:43 pm
Posted in: Dogs | This Life | Comments (0)