The "high" was -9 today.

Nope. Still not shoveling.

Baby it's cold outside.

Last night it snowed an inch or so. Today the high temperature was -3 F, or -19 C for you metric people. A team of horses driven by the city inspector himself could not drag me out there to shovel today. It'll keep till tomorrow. Or the day after. I hear it's going to get to 0!

Just give a little jingle!

I had my once-a-year check with the retinal specialist today to monitor my weirdo eye condition, punctate inner choroidopathy. Everything was fine, so that's cool for another year.

It takes FOREVER to get an appointment with the clinic I go to. When I called in November, I was told I could get this morning's slot (in January), otherwise there was nothing else until April. And once you get there you can literally wait hours to complete your appointment. My record so far is four and a half hours from the time I checked in, on-time, to the time they finally called me back to see the doctor. It's taken so long that Buzz and I were once able to sing the entirety of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. It's taken so long that they've had to dilate my eyes twice, because the first time had worn off.

It wouldn't be so bad, except you spend the vast majority of that time with your eyes dilated, so there's just nothing to do except sit and wait. The place is full of magazines, but I never find out if there's anything good because I can't read. The kids' area has a tv and dvd player, but I can't watch it. And this year they've added a tv in the upper corner that shows CNN, with closed captioning. Closed captioning! What use is that to me? Or to anyone else in the place?

There are a few things that make it tolerable. There's not much to do but use your ears, so I like listening to the old couples talk to each other. It's a specialist clinic, so the place is lousy with old folks--usually 80+. They make lots of comments about the weather and medications and things, but once in a while you'll get something juicy about a granddaughter's shocking tattoo, or their neighbor Ida's annoying little dog that scared their own darling Precious and can you believe the nerve of that woman and shouldn't she be keeping Snookums on a leash?

I like listening to the kids run around too, and ask questions in what they think is a whisper but really carries through the whole waiting area: "Why is that man wearing an eye patch?" "Why is that woman all papery looking?" And once, I swear to God, I heard a little kid walk up to someone and ask, "Is that a wig?"

The winter is the best time for listening entertainment, though, because people have to use the Coat Rack of Jangly Doom. Years of experience has taught me to be wary of the dreaded Coat Rack. It's stocked with these heavy metal hangars that have got to be made out of the same material they make orchestra triangles from, because they are the noisiest damn things I've ever heard. I'm not sure why the clinic hasn't replaced them by now, because they're just ridiculous, but I'm glad they haven't, because listening to people encounter them for the first time is the highlight of my clinic experience.

First there's the loud burst of jangling, chiming noise, and I picture the offender briefly immobilized by the shock of it, as everyone in the clinic turns to find out what's going on. Then there's the panicked scuffling as he tries desperately to hold them still--usually by grabbing them all at once, which just makes a giant CHINGCLANK! sound as they all smash together. By this time the oldest people there have started shushing the poor sap, who has realized that brute force is backfiring and is now trying to silence each individual hangar, which just makes it worse, because they're stacked so close together and swing so freely that touching one just starts a chain reaction all over again. Some of the more inventive people throw their coats at them, hoping to smother the noise that way. It never works: the coats just slide off and the hangars do a renewed dance of CHANGLECHANGLE! and I like to imaging the person standing there, mortified, with his coat on the ground and all the old ladies glaring at him.

I suppose that's schadenfreude, which is, you know, bad, but you take what you can get in there, you know?

"A hard-to-explain reality of being a woman."

Jezebel.com has a good piece today about that subtle unwanted attention that women sometimes get from guys. It's the kind of thing that never crosses over into behavior you could actually confront someone about, but it does make you uncomfortable or edgy, and it will make you change your routines sometimes.

The other day I was talking with a friend who said she had a problem. "Not a big problem, but it's bothering me." She explained that she frequents a 24-hour market near her apartment and that lately the guy who works there has been making her uncomfortable. "I think I was just too friendly," she said. She added that she felt guilty. "He's nice; it's not threatening; I even think he's married - it's just a lot of 'I've missed your pretty smile,' and 'you haven't been in this week' — and I kind of dread going in there!" I knew exactly what she meant.

I've had my share of those. Judging from the comments, so have the Jezebel readers.


"When the nice guy down the street makes you uncomfortable."

For a good time, go to Sexy People

Check out Sexy People (a celebration of the perfect portrait) for pages and pages of fall-over-laughing awfulness. Some of them are hilarious because they're a product of their time (think lacquered beehives and enormous glasses) while others redefine the concept of "doesn't take a good picture."

Guaranteed, you will feel better about your high school yearbook photo.

Amen.

I love this. Seems a group in Britain has paid for advertisements (should be said Englishly: ad-VERT-is-ments) on some 800 buses that read:

"There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

I think it's brilliant. The Christians buy up all sorts of ad space over here, and sometimes I think if I see one more *#^%& billboard with a picture of a cute little cuddly baby on it that says, "I'm a blessing!" I'm going to snap. The image of that cute little cuddly baby is such a distortion of reality that it makes me grind my teeth. As if "choosing life" would automatically give you a life with a cute little cuddly baby like that and everything would be perfect. And you wouldn't have to worry about not having enough money for food, or being homeless, or losing your job due to its lack of maternity leave, or living with your abusive partner, or staying mentally healthy when you can't take your meds while pregnant, or being addicted to meth, or paying for medical care without insurance, or any other of the thousand reasons why women have to terminate their pregnancies. Nope. Just "choose life," and everything will be fantastic from now.

Gag me.

So this group makes me feel a little better. It's kind of a cheery message, actually. And it's way better than pictures of those goddamn cute little cuddly babies.

Advice to authors

When your editor tells you not to do any special formatting in the manuscript, she really, really means it. No boxes, no columns, no lines or rules, no shading, no colors, no graphics, no tables, no images from the web, no special formatting. It is Times New Roman, 12 point, double-spaced, and that's IT.

You know why?

It's because we do not print a book directly from the Microsoft Word document you give us. A book is printed from a program like Quark or InDesign, which are special book-design programs that are expressly built to deal with things like images and rules and columns and lines and shading and tables and even page numbers. They are much better than Microsoft Word. They blow Microsoft Word out the water. Microsoft Word is a program designed for at-home word processing by people who want to write college papers or family newsletters. Quark and InDesign are professional-grade programs designed for the book industry.

And you know what your editor has to do if you turn in a heavily formatted Word document?

She has to remove all the heavy formatting.

And sometimes it's impossible to tell how the formatting got created in the first place, or how to get rid of this box without losing that text. That mysterious line underneath the third paragraph? Can't get rid of it. Those section breaks you inserted to separate columns? Removing those makes the entire document spontaneously change to landscape. The changes you made in the margins are throwing off the text flow, and God knows why, but the image you yanked from the internet refuses to budge, and every time I try to erase it I get an error message that says it can't find the original image file.

Can you tell I've just spent the last three days stripping out Word formatting?

Please, do your poor editor a favor and don't try to get all fancy with the Word doc. We have professionals for that sort of thing.

Free to a good owner.

My left-hand neighbor walked away from her home this summer, after living there for what was probably thirty years or more. I can only assume that she got talked into a refinance or home equity loan or something at some point, because otherwise she would own it outright by now.

The other neighbors and I finally figured out what had happened on the 4th of July, when we were all outside looking at the neighborhood fireworks (which always rival the official displays in intensity and inventiveness, and are way more fun to watch because of the very real potential for grave bodily harm) and we started comparing notes on the lack of activity at Barb's house. I called the city the next day to ask them to check it out, and sure enough, a For Sale sign appeared a week or two later.

It's been on the market ever since.

I watch the price go down month by month. It started out at $79,900 in July. By September it was at $55,000. As of today, it's at $49,900.

Don't suppose anyone would want it? 2 bedroom, 1 bath. Good neighborhood, nice backyard. There's no garage, but there's a nice toolshed. True, from what I can tell through the front windows it's been thoroughly smacked with the ugly stick, and according to the online listing the lone bathroom is in the basement, but hey--at $49,900, you can do a heck of a lot of remodeling.

Someone? Anyone? Please buy it before someone breaks in, sets up a covert meth lab, and accidentally blows it up. Our houses are awfully close together.

And You and Me Are Free to Be . . . You and Me

My friend Buzz's middle child turned 3 a few weeks ago, and she's crazy about music. She was introduced to a guitar this summer, and within an hour was accompanying herself to a song she had created, which contained the following lyrics:

Curtains curtains curtains . . .
Ice cream ice cream ice cream . . .
Juice box juice box juice box . . .

Clearly, she is destined to be the Mozart of our time.

So of course for her birthday I had to get her something musical. It had to be something stimulating, something fun to listen to, but also something that would instill good feminist, humanist, and democratic principles.

What else would that be, but "Free to Be . . . You and Me"?

I spent hours and hours listening to that record in the basement of our neighbor Sasha's house. Sasha and I weren't friends, exactly. She was a bit younger, and kind of bratty, but she was the only other kid in the neighborhood, and once you added my little brother into the equation to sort of bridge the age distance, we all just sort of made the best of it and played together. Besides, she had cool stuff like the Easy-Bake Oven and and those invisible-ink coloring pads, and ate Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, and got strawberry-scented erasers for her birthday (which were my first and only venture into petty theft. Sorry, Sasha--if it helps, I still feel kind of guilty).

And of course, she had the best album ever, "Free to Be . . . You and Me," with its hot pink cover and the cartoon people playing on the title letters, and the cool songs and stories and poems and jokes. I loved it. I knew every word. And listening to it over and over probably had some influence on my attitude toward girl stuff and boy stuff. I mean, of course It's All Right to Cry, and a Doll is a great thing for William to have, and being a spoiled, prissy, obnoxious little twit who always insists on Ladies First usually just means being first to be eaten by a pack of tigers.

And it still holds up, because I got myself a copy and I've been listening to it, and it's still awesome. I will admit, the title song is pretty weak. I mean:

Take my hand--come with me
Lend your voice to my song
Come along--take my hand
Sing a song . . .

Complex, it ain't.

But the rest of it is gold. It features all sort of people that I didn't have a clue about when I was 8, but who are pretty impressive to me now: Carol Channing, Shirley Jones, Mel Brooks, Tom Smothers, Dick Cavett, Diana Ross, Harry Belafonte . . . an all-star cast of the 70s, for sure. Carol Channing's "Housework" is a masterpiece of timing as she rushes faster and faster through

"And her soap, or detergent or cleanser or cleaner or powder or paste or wax or bleach,
Is the best kind of soap, or detergent or cleanser or cleaner or powder or paste or wax or bleach,
That there is in the whole . . . wide . . . world."

Alan Alda and Marlo Thomas do a retelling of the story of Atalanta that I just love, where the race ends in a tie, and then she and "young John" (I assume they decided "Hippomenes" was too much of a mouthful) become very good friends, and he sets off to sail the seas, and she sets off to visit great cities, and "perhaps someday they'll be married, and perhaps they will not. In any case, it is certain they are both living happily ever after."

And Mel Brooks and Marlo Thomas doing the "Boy Meets Girl" routine is fantastic, especially in the way it slowly leads into all the assumptions about what makes a girl a girl and a boy a boy.

And I'm just going to reproduce the whole darn thing here, because it's just that good. I dare you not to laugh.

---
Mel Brooks: Hi!

Marlo Thomas: Hi!

I'm a baby!

Well what do you think I am, a loaf of bread?

You could be, what do I know, I'm just born, I'm a baby, I don't even know if I'm under a tree or in a hospital or what, I'm just so glad to be here.

Well, I'm a baby too.

Have it your own way, I don't want to fight about it.

What, are you scared?

Yes, I am, I'm a little scared. I'll tell you why. You see, I don't know if I'm a boy or a girl yet.

What's that got to do with it?

Well, if you're a boy and I'm a girl you can beat me up! You think I want to lose a tooth my first day alive?

What's a tooth?

Search me, I'm just born, I'm a baby, I don't know nothing yet!

You think you're a girl?

I don't know, I might be. I think I am. I 've never been anything before. Let me see, let me take a little look around. Hmm... cute feet, small, dainty, yup, yup, I'm a girl, that's it, girl time.

Well, what do you think I am?

You, that's easy, you're a boy.

You sure?

Of course I'm sure. I'm alive already four, five minutes, right? I haven't been wrong yet.

Gee, I don't feel like a boy.

That's because you can't see yourself.

Why, what do I look like?

Bald. You're bald, fellah. Bald, bald, bald, you're bald as a ping-pong ball, are you bald.

So?

So, boys are bald and girls have hair.

Are you sure?

Of course I'm sure. Who's bald, your mother or your father?

My father.

I rest my case.

Hmm. You're bald too.

You're kidding!

No, I'm not.

Don't look!

Why?

Ugghhh. A bald girl. Yuck. Disgusting.

Maybe you're a boy and I'm a girl.

There you go again. I told you, I'm a girl. I know it, I know it, I'm a girl, and you're a boy.

I think you're wrong.

I am never wrong! What about shaving?

What about it?

You just shaved, right?

Wrong.

Exactly! And you know why? Because everyone's born with a clean shave. It's just that girls keep theirs, and boys don't.

So what does that prove?

Tomorrow morning, the one that needs a shave, he's a boy.

Well I can't wait until tomorrow morning.

See, that proves it! Girls are patient, boys are impatient.

Yeah, what else?

Can you keep a secret?

Absolutely.

There you go! Boys keep secrets, girls don't.

Hmm.. Go on.

Are you afraid of mice?

No.

I am, I'm terrified of them! I hate them! Squeak, squeak, squeak! What do you want to be when you grow up?

A fireman.

What did I tell ya?

How 'bout you?

A cocktail waitress! Does that prove anything to you?

Hmm... You must be right.

I told you, I'm always right. You're a boy, and I'm the girl.

I guess so. Ooh! Wait, here comes the nurse to change our diapers.

About time, too, I've never been so uncomfortable in my life.

Hey, look at that!

What?

You see that? I'm a girl, and you're a boy!

Hey, it sure looks like it.

What do you think of that?

I can't understand it.

Well, it sure goes to show ya.

What?

You can't judge a book by its cover.

Ha, ha, ha. What does that mean?

How should I know? I'm only a baby.

So am I. Goo.

Goo.

And you were there, and you were there...

Tiercel to me the other day:

"Wait. Is Hillary Clinton going to be Secretary of State? Or did I dream that?"

Font is a four-letter word

Maybe you have to be someone who designs book layouts, or type, or graphics (i.e., specialized, insular, and geeky) to fully appreciate how absolutely hilarious this is, but I'm sharing it anyway.

"Flamingo" is on the move...

The Secret Service just announced the new codenames for the Obama family. Barack and Michelle Obama are "Renegade" and "Renaissance," which is apt and awesome, but Malia and Sasha win the contest for most adorable. Malia is "Radiance" and Sasha will be "Rosebud."

Say it with me now: Awwwwwwwww.

True Stories from Planned Parenthood

This one happened last year.

It was sometime in November, which is why I'm reminded of it, and it was a cold, gray day. There was a whole phalanx of female protesters outside, all dressed in various styles of head-to-toe puffy coats, their clearly-unsullied-by-the-devil's-haircare-products hair winging out in all directions from underneath their hats, feet encased in sturdy moon boots. I don't know how or why all the protesters wear outfits like these, but they do. Is it some sort of Christian uniform? Is it a declaration of their immunity to sinful fashion? Is it actually a fashion sense of sorts--one that's culturally specific to their religious subgroup? I can't tell. All I know is, you can spot a protester several blocks away just from the earflaps on her pea-green knitted cap.

Anyway, we're all standing outside in November, and three African American women walk up to the clinic door. All the protesters go wild, each trying to outdo the others in the volume and righteous zeal of her comments. You can't actually tell what they're saying, they're so busy "spreading the Word" in their own ways--until, just as the clinic door is closing and the others have given up, one woman's voice carries loudly in the sudden silence: "You know, they invented abortion to kill all the Negroes!"

I swear, sometimes they do my job for me.

It finally hit me . . .

It was hard to sort of take it all in, and get what it really truly meant--until I realized: there is no longer the slightest possibility that Sarah Palin will become president if McCain kicks the bucket. Now I'll be able to sleep again.

Public Service Announcement

Vote.

Remember: If you don't vote, you don't get to bitch.