Musinex Frogs and Other Myths

It was recently called to my attention that (dun, dun, dun) there is no Musinex frog. That's right. Commercials for the cough suppressant actually feature a talking ball of phlegm clothed in a wife-beater and suspenders. Lame! I mean, what kind of mascot is that? Flem doesn't talk nor does it wear clothes because a) that is just so unrealistic and b) it would be very messy and sticky.
So this little misunderstanding got me thinking: What other concepts have I mistaken for entirely different concepts (like say, lung-dwelling reptiles) that apparently are strikingly obvious to anyone else.

My childhood dreams ruined sugar cereals. When I was little, I was never allowed to have an unhealthy breakfast. While I was taunted with commercials of smiling little shits stuffing their happy faces with colorful puffs and chocolaty flakes as their obesity-pushing mom's looked on with blissfully ignorant approval (News Flash: Adding a glass of orange juice and a banana to a bowl of sugar does not make it a complete breakfast.) I was forcing the senior citizen special of Grape Nuts and Raisin Bran softened with non-fat milk down my little six-year-old throat. By the way, Honey Smacks - a cereal that, contrary to it's name is not heroine - actually does feature a cartoon talking frog. Yay.

Anyway, I grew up with the impression that I was missing out on these little morning meals of heaven. In my early teens I was finally given the opportunity to try some of these illusive cereals. So. Disappointed. First of all, Lucky Charms does not consist entirely of wonderful, delicious marshmallows. No. I would say the ratio of wonderful, delicious marshmallows to crappy, little cardboard crap-morsels is probably only 1 to 20. And don't get me started on Cookie Crisp. Those aren't cookies! For the first 13 years of my life I envisioned Mini Chips Ahoy floating gloriously in a bowl of milk. But disk-shaped corn flakes with brown spots do not equal chocolate chip cookies.

Now I know I may be going up against a whole movement of sugar cereal lovers everywhere, but look where I'm coming from. Imagine being a kid and thinking Candyland was an actual place. You get a little older and finally venture out there, only to find that Candyland is actually just a bunch cafeteria desserts.

Huey Lewis is not ordering me to hit the B square. When I was younger (again, another childhood misconception - a statistic causing me to believe that perhaps I was a very stupid child), my parents would often play a tape of Huey Lewis and the News on road trips. Ah, dorky white families in the '80s. Being a very stupid child, I would gaze out the window from the backseat with absolutely no intelligent thoughts of my own and let whatever images the lyrics produced play numbly in my head. One might argue that this was not a sign of stupidity, but it is important to note that this is all I did. No matter how long the road trip, no matter how many times I had heard the song before, no new or independent thought ever stemmed from this exercise. What made it worse is that I often had the lyrics wrong.

Lewis's hit It's Hip to Be Square was Hit the B Square in my world. Forget the fact that this statement, or command rather, made absolutely no sense. There I would sit, swinging my dumb little legs, imaging someone hitting a cement square with an engraved B with a stick. And get this. Every time this "B Square" was hit, it would light up like the sidewalk Michael Jackson walks on in Billie Jean. I don't even remember when I realized my mistake, but I don't think I ever told anyone. That is until now, my beloved Internet universe of strangers.

I was going to provide an (embarrassingly long) list of misconceptions, but it's now 2pm and I'm still in my robe and this post is already turning out to be a lot longer than expected. Feel free to save me from drowning in stupidity by outing your own and share a misconception. Please?

I Heart Mucus

So I've been sick with what my mother is now convinced to be the whooping cough for the last three weeks. It's not the whooping cough because it's not 1906 and my mother thinks everything is a disease you get when playing Oregon Trail. But that didn't stop her from handing me a grocery bag of half-full prescription bottles for anything that cured coughs, sore throats, sinus infections, ear infections, labored breathing, and/or hiccups when I visited her this last weekend. Most people need a Michael Jackson-type doctor (sorry, too soon?) or know somebody that knows somebody to get all the shit I got, but I just need good ol' Mom. Never mind that half of it is expired or in Ziplock baggies so who knows what the hell they are or what they do.
Anyway, my mom is not a drug dealer (in case you were wondering) or a pill-popper, just your average mom with a case of care-too-much and thinks calling you every hour to ask what color your flem is will eventually cure the sick right out of you.
Maybe she's right, but in the meantime I'm keeping my phone on silent and having fun with my mucus. Yeah, you heard me.
Mucus can be fun, and here's why:

1. If you're not a good spitter, you entertain yourself in the learning process. For example, say you're sitting at a traffic light next to a cute guy. You eye each other, a red light romance. Then, just as he's snuck a third or fourth glance over at you, you feel a flem ball lodge itself in your throat. You try and swallow it, but the fucker grabs onto your tonsils and won't let go. So you make a choking noise that sounds like a cross between a dying chicken and a weed wacker. You are so disgusted with yourself that you stare in wide-eyed horror at your admirer with your mouth trapped at a four inch radius. You attempt to eject the offending mucus out the window (no sense in saving face now) but instead it loses momentum at your tongue and oozes down your chin and drips down onto your open window, leaving a shinning spit connector between your mouth and the car. Cute guy reevaluates his traffic crush and speeds off. Not that this happened.
2. You get to take Musinex. If a cough suppressant is going to feature a cartoon frog in its commercials, one would think that same frog would be featured on the cough suppressant box. But it doesn't. Instead it looks like all the other cough suppressant boxes with just stupid stripes of blue or green and no reptiles of any kind. That's how I ended up standing in Walgreens for 20 minutes with a fever staring at rows of medications in white boxes. No frog. But when one finally locates the Musinex (with no frog on the box I might add) it's a trip. For real. Now I've never smoked crack, but I imagine it feels like a Musinex-induced stupor. First, my neck decided it had been tired of holding my head up for the last 28 years and just sort of checked out. My eyelids gained about 15 pounds, but because of the caffeine wouldn't close. So I just ended up walking around with my head leaned all the way back so I could see forward. When my roommate came home, I tried to tell her about something that happened earlier that day but somehow ended up telling her my favorite burrito recipe. I also had to pack because I was leaving for San Diego later that night. For some reason a pair of shorts I tossed into my bag struck me as hilarious and I began to laugh uncontrollably. This lead to more flem balls which I attempted to spit into the toilet, but missed and spit onto the toilet. Every time. When I finally came down, I decided that a) I needed to re-pack and b) I will not be taking Musinex again unless my only responsibility for the next eight hours is to lay on the couch and watch TV.
3. You get to drink cognac. And whiskey. And rum. And brandy. It's good for the throat, the Internet said so. There's this drink called a Hot Toddy, which I refuse to order at a bar by name because it makes me feel like a hobbit (already being short, I don't think this will bode well for me), and it's hot water, lemon, honey, and ALCOHOL! I get ridiculously delighted at the thought of being able to use being sick as an excuse for drinking because nobody can say shit to you. It's medicine, mother fuckers! And my theory is that if you do away with the hot water, lemon, and honey (those all are just middle-man components) you get your medicine in a more concentrated form. A throat you can't feel is a throat that isn't sore.

So here's to your health, but here's to your sickness too. Because mucus can be fun, and I encourage you to count the blessings in your mucus.

Ask Me About My Awesomeness

Let me explain a little something about awesomeness. When someone that's awesome thinks you are awesome, your own awesomeness is hence formally validated. Which leads me to Patrick Tillett. He is awesome all on his own for a number of reasons. I would list them all, but I am lazy so I'll tell you just a couple.

1. His blog is like an ongoing reading of Running With Scissors.
2. His blog is based on his life so that makes it even cooler, or more awesome if you will.
3. Despite the first two reasons, he is still an awesome (and very kind-hearted and intelligent) person and writer...instead of the potential crack monster he could have been based on his childhood.
4. He also blogs beautiful pictures from Japan that make me want to go there even more.
5. He gave me this award:
   

patricktillett.blogspot.com

Aaaand the award's only rule is that I include a link to his (awesome) blog and pass it along to another awesome blogger.

So here you go A Mainland Streel. If Martha Stewart had a personality and didn't trade illegal stock tips, it would be this little Canadian bad ass. She is awesome as well.

P.S. I was kindly informed by my friend M that my links "never fucking work" so I apologize in advance if they don't . I, myself, am still excited about the fact that I correctly copied and pasted Pat's award. Awesome.

Bet You Never Had Pho Like This

First of all, I just want to apologize for completely sucking lately with posts. In my own defense, I have about a dozen half-finished entries in my que waiting to be finished - an argument that cannot be proven with evidence as that would break my process as an arteest. Yes, stop laughing, an inability to complete anything and procrastination contribute almost entirely to my status as an unemployed writer. That and dumb ass George Bush. But let's not get political. ANYWAY, hello. I've missed you. I would say I promise to write posts everyday and be a good little blogger, but a promise is only comfort to a fool (a wise man once told me that) and I'm kinda flaky (my own mother told me that).

Since writer's block is thwarting any attempt for me to finish any of the posts I so eagerly started and then so haphazardly abandoned, I give you this: A lunchtime observation....

And people say Oakland is scary. Yesterday, a couple friends and I were in San Francisco and decided to go get pho at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. As we were in Union Square, the closest authentic restaurant was in the Tenderloin. Now if you're not familiar with San Francisco, the Tenderloin is not where you would take your grandma site-seeing. Hell, it's not even where you would take your half-cousin Thor site-seeing. Not unless Grandma or Thor has a penchant for men who wear blankets on their heads and argue with an invisible leprechaun about who gets to pee on the wall outside of Slippery Hand Massage. I think it's called the Tenderloin because a long time ago, it used to be the where all the meat factories were located. Now it's just sort of an African safari with junkies and angry prostitutes instead of zebras and gazelles. But good pho is good pho and we're all martial artists so into the Tenderloin we went. Fah-la-la-la-la!

Everything was actually pretty uneventful until the end of our meal when some live performers came out to entertain. And by that I mean, the crackheads in the building across the street started leaning out their windows and screaming down to the people in the street below. First, a lovely young toothless woman in a button-down did a jazzy little spread-eagle number sans pants OR underwear while balancing precariously on her sill about four stories up. She would lean back and cackle, kicking her legs up in the air and then swing them separately in circles, intermittently pausing to screech obscenities down to anyone who was watching, looking like one of the drunken pirates on the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. Then her boyfriend (or pimp or inbred brother) came and yanked her back into the room, slamming the window shut.

There was a slight intermission in which we had time to pick our jaws back up from the floor and exchange wide-eyed looks over our nearly empty bowls of soup before the next entertainer appeared. This performer was wearing underwear, but only underwear and they were the kind of pink that you only get from accidentally washing your whites with a red sock and looked like they might have been from Goodwill or picked out of a gutter. She did a little routine of thrashing with the blinds as if they were attacking her and then leaning, almost to the point of falling, out the window to yell and spit at the Asian man pushing the shopping cart on the corner.

And that was lunch. You would think that any sane human beings would rush to pay their bill and get back to an area of the city with a little less needles and vomit on the sidewalk. No. Instead we sat for awhile longer, waiting to see if there would be an Act III. When it seemed all the lunatics from the building across the street had settled in for a long, nap of God-knows-what induced unconsciousness, we wandered outside to continue our adventure. Think Crocodile Hunter goes urban. Anyway we got in another hour or so of thrills and near-brushes with scabies until we were approached and asked if we were holding. When we said no, our hopeful, unrelenting consumer offered his own services in exchange for, well, it wasn't cupcakes.

And that was curtains for me.

The Importance of The and A Blog Award

If Obama came up to me and said, "Hey Lindsay, I'll give you a million dollars and let you ride with me to Hawaii on Air Force One and buy you a puppy if you stop reading Kate's I Am The Worst Blogger everyday, I'd be like, "No, thanks, Mr. President. Kate's the shit and now she's even more the shit because she gave me an award." Then I'd be like, "Blam!" and show him this

Thanks, Kate! By the way, I just realized the importance of the word "the". Take, for instance, me calling Kate "the shit". To refer to someone as "the shit" implies their coolness, their ability to rock in the figurative sense, and/or their general all-around superiority. However, omitting the "the" redefines the subject as simply "shit", or excrement. So, Kate is definitely THE shit (Obabma still is too) and now I present you with 10 Things That Make Me Happy....

1. Money Pants. Money Pants are a pair of pants you put on that you haven't worn in a long time, only to find there is money in the pocket. You might also find a note reminding yourself to do your laundry which explains the smell coming from the pants.


2. The Taco Truck. The Taco Truck is a magical, Cinderella-esque place. When the clock strikes 2am and alcohol has been absorbed into the bloodstream, cuisine from this mobile miracle becomes delectable. I don't care if the carne asada is actually corned cow ass, just wrap it up in a burrito and I will happily stumble on my way.


3. Making People Fall Down. You know, when an old lady is trying to cross the street and you act like you're going to help her, but then you push her into traffic and yell, "Gotcha, Grams!" Kidding. KIDDING. But really. I train a martial art, Capoeira, and there is no better feeling than taking someone down. Which leads me to one of the 10 Things That Specifically Do Not Make Me Happy: being taken down.
   
4. Q-Tips. You and I both know that there is no better feeling than shoving those pointy little cotton sticks into your ear right after a shower, swirling it around, and observing the yellow residue it collects. And if I'm a guest at your house and I use the bathroom, I am not above taking advantage of any Q-tips in plain sight...or in the medicine cabinet or in that little drawer by the toilet.


5. Re-Heated Pizza. Pizza the first time around - right out of the oven, out of the box, whatever - is great. Pizza re-heated in a microwave to the point where all the cheese and toppings goup together in gooey, nuked matrimony is greater.


6. Dramatic Reading of a Real Break-Up Letter. I have to credit Allie from Hyperbolie and A Half for this one. She used to have the link on her page. It goes to something different now, but you can still find it on youtube. Ah, young love - school dances and touching someone's hands for stupid reasons. Read it. You'll see what I mean.


7. The Snooze Button. In your face inventor of the alarm clock! Ten minutes of sleep (and another and another) is never quite as appreciated under any other circumstance
   
8. Sporks. Generally, I prefer spoons over forks. Spoons allow for maximum volume of food consumption per utensil lift and are not bothered with those nasty little slits found in forks that permit sauce/grains/crumbs/cheese slivers to escape. However the fork is much more adept at the initial food contact, ensuring a secure grasp by piercing said food and maintaining hold until the desired location (i.e. your mouth) is reached. And so - the spork. Ta-fucking-da.


9. Head Massagers. These things look like a cross between a giant whisk and an electric chair helmet (pretty sure that's not the correct term.) But they feel AMAZING. Funny that it took humans so long to invent this when dogs have been getting their heads scratched for years.


10. Friends and Family. Yeah, had to say it. I am truly blessed to have so many people in my life that are each wonderful and amazing in their own way...and are all crazy enough to love and care about me back. Aww.

So, ahem, had something in my eye. Anyway, now I shall pass this award on to 10 more worthy bloggers. (Weird. For some reason, I just heard James Earl Jones' voice saying that as I typed it. Try it, makes it sound really important.)

• Elizabeth Shibboleth
• Fourth Grade Nothing
• A Rainey Day...with a chance of Sunshine
• MicaelChadwick.com
• patricktillett.blogspot.com
• The unforgiving minute
• That's Not How You Do It
• Tony's Diet Log
• Ramblings of an Insomniac's Mind
• Quilting In My Pyjamas

The above are all some more people who are THE shit, not to be mistaken with shit.

Fuck You, Barney

I hate sharing. I'll do it - because I know I'm supposed to - I just hate it. And the worst part is that I think this character flaw actually only set in in my adult life.
When I was little, I never had a problem sharing my toys or taking turns.
"Want some of my graham crackers? Sure! No problem."
"Of course you can play with my dolls. Which one do you want?"
"What's that? You want to push marbles up my nose now? Go right ahead!"
But that was in the Golden Age of No Responsibility or Paying for Stuff. That's why I don't feel all warm and fuzzy inside when I give a homeless person my leftovers from a restaurant. Instead of taking comfort in the fact that one less person on the street will have to go to bed hungry that night, I selfishly mourn the loss of my little box of Tai Chicken Curry. When my neighbor asks to borrow a DVD, I find myself acutely aware of my sudden desire to watch that specific movie every night until it is returned. And when my friend wants to switch and put marbles up my nose for a change...just kidding.
But you get my point, right? I still share, but I hate doing it. And it's that stupid dinosaur Barney's fault. As a kid growing up, I had things like Mr. Rogers and kindergarten teachers and goldfish death threats from my older brother to instill this virtue in me. But kids are stupid, and they'll do anything you tell them to without thinking. I was told to share, so I shared.
But as I grew older, these mentors began to fade into the background. My teachers became more concerned with educating me on multiplication and Columbus (so not a sharer). My brother became entirely disinterested in me and the death of my goldfish (which by this time had long ago died anyway) because he was a super cool teenager and I was, well, related. (Love you, J! Yes, fully-grown and I still possess the power to embarrass you.) And television icons that sang songs about days of the week and talked about crap like the importance of being a good person had really lost their moment in the spotlight.
Then along came Barney's fat-ass. "Hey kids, it's good to share!" Shut up! Stupid, purple reptile. Your mouth doesn't even move when you talk, just gapes open waiting for one of those overly-paid little actor kids to sucker punch you in the teeth.
Barney re-introduced sharing. He brought it back. But by this time, it didn't seem as cool. I was paying for my own graham crackers and maybe I didn't want to share them with Susy and who cares that she's in a wheelchair and her mom's on Welfare. But because of Barney, I had to or I'd look like an asshole.
So yes, I will share my shit with you and take turns and all that stuff. But it's not because I want to. It's because a big, purple dinosaur told me to.

Hey! This blog is about dinosaurs!

Behind the Scenes in Greece: Ass Snipers

Last summer, my friend M and I went to Greece. It was beautiful and amazing, but a good deal of it was spent scouting out ass with our cameras. Yes, while most respectable tourists take pictures of the Acropolis and other historic ruins, the two of us ran around like perverts snapping shots of the derrieres of unsuspecting natives.

This wasn't entirely my fault. A gentleman friend of mine who is particularly fond of the female backside requested that, as a souvenir, I take photographic documentation of the Greek women and their gluteus maximi. And like the loyal friend that I am, I complied. Hence, the Ass Snipers.

For said gentleman friend, our crowning moment was on a volcano tour in Santorini. M and I were on the top deck of our tour boat admiring, aka staring unabashedly at with dropped jaws, the physique of two Greek demigods. Suddenly demigod #1's girlfriend's dress flew up in the wind as she leaned over the railing. M, with reflexes like a pubescent ninja, captured the Kodass moment in its full exposure. Never the subtle types, we immediately huddled together to review the digital shot, giggling like perverted morons.

But our moment of glory happened on the island of Paros. We were walking back to our hotel when we saw this:

I really think this photo captures the serenity of the island. Notice how you can almost hear the gentle rippling of the...water. Yeah, yeah. I also took pictures of the statues and the churches and blah, blah, blah. But this. This is a rare vision of Greece that few have beheld. Your welcome.