Throughout my life dozens of people have told me that I would eventually pay for my past misdeeds against them. In fact, many have actually wished for specific punishments to be implemented that would undoubtedly be long and tortuous.
Out of all of those threats though, one of them stood out from the rest: “You will some day have a child that is just like you”.
Well, it has happened. Somehow I have brought forth a male child into this world. Karma has finally come to get me. On the bright side, the assurances I had from friends and enemies alike that the world would end should I ever reproduce turned out not to bear fruit… at least not in the literal ‘world ceasing to exist’ sense.
In the mean time I have an infant to care for, and for some reason no responsible party has come to take it away from me. I weep for the world.
Full disclosure: My google history includes the search term:“How do I train my dog to change a diaper without eating it?”
Speaking of responsible parties: I recently asked my sister to watch my son overnight so that I could try to reacquaint myself with my wife. I believe my sister to be a responsible person, because whenever she would ask me to house-sit for her she would let me know in advance that my five-year-old niece would still be in the house and required fresh food and water at least twice a day. Its difficult to find someone with that kind of honesty these days, and that is just the type of influence I need to expose my own child to.
While my sister was watching my son, apparently my niece kept trying to interrupt feeding or diaper changing sessions to try and play. After several hours of this, my sister sent my niece to work on her spelling words and insisted that she get help for them from her father so that she could try to get the baby to sleep.
At first that appeared to work flawlessly. She threw herself into the spelling homework, only occasionally leaving the table to ask her father how to spell a particular word that wasn’t in her vocabulary. After about an hour she finished her homework and showed everyone a side project she had engaged in… A large sheet of paper that said:
I’M CUTE ENOUGH
UNTIL MY COUSIN
COMES OVER.
Who knew a five year old could master passive-aggressiveness? I guess at some point Karma came for my sister as well.
I walk into a room to see my wife sitting on the couch, fuming about something. With some apprehension, I approach her and ask “What’s up?”
“I can’t believe the unrealistic demands that people make!” she replied. “Every single day it gets worse.”
I sit down next to her and place my hand on hers.
“Wait, are you talking about work, or something else?”
“Its just… How can they afford a $600,000 house and not know that you can fix the color of a wall by painting it??”
Ah. She was talking about House Hunters. This was bad… she was in a worse funk than the time she spent 5 hours straight watching My Fair wedding. Obviously it was time to break out the tough love.
“They’re people, sweetie. I know it hurts the first few times, but the sooner you accept that people are stupid and there is nothing you can do about it the healthier you’ll be. It goes double for people on TV”.
Thank God she hadn’t been watching 16 and Pregnant.
Its not exactly a secret that I spend a lot of time on Tumblr.
I don’t exactly have an account. I don’t participate with comments or sharing. In fact, I only have three Tumblr sites that I regularly follow… but I don’t spend most of my time on those sites. I spend most of my time on the Tumblr porn.
So, like many people I was a little concerned when I heard that Yahoo(!) was purchasing Tumblr. Of course, I was concerned a lot later than everyone else because I was too busy consuming the porn to keep up on the current events. So of course I’m also at least a week late on the news that Yahoo(!) has addressed this issue already…
The current Yahoo(!) CEO has assured people that the porn can stay. Why? Because Tumblr already had a separate advertising plan for the porn. Its so nice to see capitalism working for the common good for once! Slate’s article on the Tumblr porn.
However I doubt even Yahoo(!) could make the Tumblr pages load consistently across all browsers. That would just be too controversial.
Last weekend I took my dog out to a dog park despite some recently wet weather. Other than the smell of wet dog, the trip was a success and a good time was had by all. However, when I stopped for gas on the way home I didn’t count on the dog leaving its normal blanket-covered seat in the back and curling up in the drivers seat. Suddenly my seat was covered in a wet puddle that smelled like a lovely combination of swamp and wet dog. Thankfully my drive home was relatively short, and after I got home I promptly gave the dog a bath and changed my clothes.
The problem didn’t come until Monday morning.
See, I had forgotten that my car smelled strongly of wet dog and swamp mud, and (as usual) I was leaving my house with almost no time to spare). So without a second thought I grabbed a bottle of Febreeze and sprayed the hell out of the driver seat, giving a good misting to the rest of the car for good measure.
I didn’t smell wet dog or swamp during my drive in to work, so I thought I did good. However, about an hour into my day when the office manager walked into my work room and complimented me on my new cologne. I was very confused, since I had not put on any cologne that morning. I started to say that I wasn’t wearing cologne when I realized what the smell was and promptly tried to change the topic.
The office manager would not let up though… she saw through my ruse and insisted on knowing what type of cologne I was wearing.
I thought about lying, and just giving the name of the cologne I occasionally wear. I thought about making something up that would be unverifiable. But in the end I decided to just spit out the truth. “Uh… its Febreeze, actually”.
She looked horrified and began to back out of the room. In retrospect I’m not completely sure what she was thinking, but I think she took my comment to mean that I was using Febreeze in place of proper laundering.
Her reaction made me panic, and I started to blurt out the story about the wet dog. But after about 30 seconds of blubbering I finally just said “Look, the story doesn’t matter, just know that I coated my car seat in Febreeze this morning”.
But apparently the story did matter. Because I think she went from thinking that I didn’t do any laundry to suspecting that I recreated a Febreeze commercial by keeping my car full of disgusting trash that needed to have its odor masked. I gave up at that point and just ushered her out of my work room and tried to get on with my day.
By strange coincidence though, the office supply closet did have a couple bottles of Febreeze in it on Friday. I put some on just for good measure.
When I was a young child my mother seemed to have a theory about disease: Feed a cold, force-feed a flu.
As a result, I can remember many times where she would send me to bed, but put a paper bag (double-bagged) next to the bed for me to throw-up in in the likely occurrence that I couldn’t make it down the stairs and across the house to the bathroom. (Plus one of the other members of the house was likely to be in there when a sick person needed to puke anyway). This went on until I was 12 and we moved into a house with more than one bathroom.
However, I can also remember one day when I was nine when I overheard my mother on the kitchen phone complaining about how my little sister being sick was really stressful and she hated it. As a result, when my sisters contagion hit me a day later I decided that I would set up the bags myself rather than burden my mother. Despite a mild fever and frequent nausea I just pretended that I was well and apparently no one was the wiser.
Well, it seemed that my plan worked… when I had a sudden episode of puking later that evening I couldn’t make it to the bathroom and used the conveniently placed bags. However, I also didn’t know what to do with the puke-filled sack so I just left it next to my bed.
All was good for about two days. At that point the smell of two-day-old puke actually began to make me feel sick again, so I took the bags to the kitchen and threw them in the household trash. My mother saw me, and said (I quote): “I was wondering when you were going to throw that disgusting smelling shit away.”
I forget what the point of this story was.
I think I was going to attempt to draw some parallels between a 9 year old puking and the sequester… but when I think about it the sequester is more like the 9 year old waiting until the smell of the puke made him ill again before cleaning up his mess. Either way, I think I’m going to be sick.
In some parts of the world (particularly Catalonia) placing figurines discreetly shitting in the nativity is a tradition going back centuries. Its been happening for so long that most of the explanations for its origins are lost to history.
But that isn’t the only tradition that Catalonia has with Christmas defecation! Take this amusing tidbit about the “Shit log of Christmas” or Tió de Nadal.
Tronca (“log”) popularly called Caga tió (“shitting log”), is a character in Catalan mythology relating to a Christmas tradition widespread in Catalonia. Beginning with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8), one gives the tió a little bit to “eat” every night and usually covers him with a little blanket so that he will not be cold at night.
On Christmas day or, depending on the particular household, on Christmas Eve, one puts the tió partly into the fireplace and orders it to “shit”. To make him “shit”, one beats him with sticks, while singing various songs of Tió de Nadal.
My favorite thing about the Christmas shit log are the traditional songs:
Shit log,
shit nougats,
hazelnuts and cottage cheese,
if you don’t shit well,
I’ll hit you with a stick,
shit log!
Shit log,
log of Christmas,
don’t shit herrings,
which are too salty,
shit nougats,
which are much better!
I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked. After all, some of the original American and British fairy tales were really fucked up prior to being sanitized over the last 100 years or so. But I cant remember any that deal with shit quite in the way that Catalonian tradition does!
Moving away from Christmas for a moment, I wanted to give honorable mention to the story of Patufet. Much like the Tom Thumb stories some of us may be familiar with, Patufet is abnormally small. In fact, he is the size of a grain of rice and wears a smurf hat.
In one story, Patufet is eaten by an ox. While inside of the ox he consoles his parents with the following verse:
I’m in the ox’s tummy
Where it doesn’t snow or rain.
When the ox farts
Patufet will get out
That is some good shit right there, and on that note I must take my leave. If you need me I’ll be playing games on my iPad while in the bathroom. As the Catalans say: Eat well, shit a good deal and don’t be afraid of death!
