This weekend we had some friends over for a cook out, and we all decided to play some board games.

There is a good side and a bad side to playing board games with people who know you really well. The advantages come in when you are playing a game that requires tremendous mental rapport with your teammates, such as “Pictionary”, so that what to others might appear to be a drawing of some kind of mutant monster spawned from a tragic chemical spill, to you is clearly the visual representation of the verb phrase, “to harvest crops”.

The disadvantage is that occasionally your friends’ intimate knowledge of you can sometimes be used against you, as happened to me this weekend when we were playing “Taboo”.

One person was trying to get their teammates to say the word “Secrets”.

The clue: “This is something that Jenny is not good with.”
Everyone’s immediate response: “Hm, that could be so many things.”

Or, you could end up learning something about someone else that you just really did not need to know, as also happened during this game.

The beginning of the clue: “What you want to do to people…”
My friend’s immediate response: “STAB THEM!”

That’s just a little too much information for me.

The bronze medal goes to the following review of the movie, “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”

“Thinking robots, OK. Light sabers, sure. Space battles, yes. But a talking Jamaican lizard? That’s where the believability stops.”

The silver medal goes to this exchange I witnessed at the graduation party for one of my tutoring students:

My student: (having just one-upped one of his guy friends in some competitive, male way): “Top that, bitch!”
My student: “Oh, hi, mom!” (to his mother, who was clutching at her chest and undergoing multiple heart attacks as she had unfortunately come downstairs at that exact moment to tell us that the food was ready.)

And the gold medal goes to this meeting that my friend had with her boss.

My friend: “He pulled me and this other guy into the conference room. Then he took out a bottle of water. He said, ‘I just blessed this, so now it’s holy water. I’m gonna throw this at you to see which one of you burns.”

My friend: “What?!”

Her boss: “I want to know which one of you is the most evil.”

…so that any potential earphone depredations cannot possibly be traced back to her.

Up until a few years ago I used to go around bragging all the time about how I had a “black thumb”. Unfortunately it was true that I was spectacularly unsuccessful in keeping alive plants, flowers, and a beta fish. But I never realized just how weird it was that basically I was saying, “You know, I just want to tell you how excited I am about this special talent of mine where I am really good at killing living things.”

Looking back now I really don’t know how my husband and I ever had enough confidence in our abilities to take in and nurture living creatures other than ourselves, given the fact that every time he goes out of town on a trip he has to sit me down, look me in the eye, and remind me to continue eating while he is gone. Or the fact that once my husband was in serious stomach pain for like 5 days, and it wasn’t until the day when he could no longer stand up straight and was walking around the house bent over at a 90 degree angle and I could actually physically overpower him and force him into the car that he went to the doctor to get treated. [Read more…]

An unfortunate side effect of my blog gaining more and more visibility is that it is apparently also bringing me to the attention of more and more spammers.

Usually I don’t even look at the spam, preferring instead to spend my time strengthening my spam filters and wishing for a way to somehow attach a tiny but powerful blowgun to all spammers’ computers, so that anytime they even thought about sending out more spam they would instantly be flooded by a multitude of sharp, poisonous darts.

But the other day I received an email that acutally made me stop in my tracks and do a double take and, committed as I am to bringing you the humor in everday life, I can’t not share it here:

“Hi, may i present you freshest hot stuff?

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, (emphasis mine) if medicine prices here are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive ”

Phew! I’m so relieved that enough people were sucked in by your scheme that you have not been forced to commit horrible acts of violence against yourself or your pet!

Yesterday I saw one of my students for their final Spanish tutoring session ever. It’s good for both of us; for him, because he HATES Spanish; for me, because I am no longer responsible for shepherding him through academia now that he has discovered the magical sugary-caffeinated elixer that is a Tall Vanilla Latte.

As he was pacing around my office and working off his coffee high he began closely inspecting everything on my shelves, including my collection of cat figurines.

“Oh, don’t look at those,” I said. “I don’t want you to think that I’m a crazy cat lady.”
“Oh I already know you are,” he replied. “Three’s the magic number!”

He is very lucky that I am not the person in charge of grading his final Spanish exam.

Why we have ever spent any money at all on cat toys.

Yesterday evening as we were driving to pick up dinner my husband turned to me and said, “Good news! I closed another gate to hell yesterday!”

(This “What?!” moment is brought to you by “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” for PC)

…makes me a loaded grenade of snarkiness just waiting for something to come along and pull out my pin.

I am in Chicago at a conference, and after 3 days I must admit that there is really nothing inherently funny about professional conferences. I’ve been forced to find creative ways to throw out phrases like, “totally talking out of my ass” from time to time just to lighten up the tone a bit.

Sure, we do have a conference leader who spends approximately 60% of his time “shush-ing” us from the front of the room, as if we were all 5 years old. But that’s not so much funny as it is unbelievably irritating, to the point where I just want to rush up onto the stage, rip out his tongue, and with it club him into insensibility because please, dear God, the shush-ing, MAKE IT STOP!

And then today we had a speaker who took an extremely interesting approach to group presentations. His talk consisted of verbally abusing us for about an hour and a half (for example, calling us a big bunch of whiners) and then (Important Side Note: I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) if we complained, or questioned his approach, or really even dared to say anything at all, he made us pay him $2. I’m a little fuzzy on all the details of exactly how this is going to work, but apparently the process of our paying him to be really mean to us is going to turn us all into amazingly successful business owners.

Sadly, tub poo is actually starting to seem like a pleasant alternative.

Attention All Guys

You know how you will sometimes be in an extremely public place like, say, standing in front of the arrivals and departures board in the terminal of a very busy airport, and you will blatantly and flagrantly start to rearrange yourself, apparently believing that you are somehow shielded by a special cloak of invisibility?

Well, WE CAN SEE YOU!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.