Persiflage

Momentary Hiatus

Apologies for the recent dearth of posting.  I lost someone very dear to me this week and haven't yet quite remembered how to laugh.  It seems that even smiling a real smile- rather than the "no, sure, I'm all right" smiles which have recently become the primary component of the expressional repertoire- might shatter my face, leaving me somehow more exposed and raw than I already am.  I had no idea a non-pregnant human being was capable of riding this precipitous an emotional rollercoaster.

Perhaps by next week, being trying to be funny won't seem so exhausting.  Selfishly, at least a part of me hopes the desire to shower and get out of the sweats returns first.  As, I'm sure, do my co-workers.

Quote O' The Night

"I don't really dislike him.  I just find him thoroughly odious."

Ah, men of the law.  For you, we regularly redefine the subtle boundaries of our species of repulsion

Lexicon

Jurispruser (noun): Deadbeat (alleged) friend who calls or emails only when in need of free legal advice.

Counsellwhore (noun): One so desperate for the company or conversation of someone not his law school section-mate or law firm office-mate that he happily encourages the lukewarm advances of the jurispruser.

"Sam* is such a jurispruser.  Every time he calls "just to chat," it seems like he brings up the subject of a recent traffic ticket or insurance issue three or four minutes into the conversation.  Last week, he'd barely said hello before he asked me how best to deal with the neighbor who'd been nipped by his malicious parakeet.  He's a fool if he thinks I'm sufficiently desperate to deal with this nonsense any longer.  I'm no counsellwhore!"

*As far as I know, I have no friends named Sam.  If that is not, in fact the case: Sam, please be angry with me for having neglected to recall your existence rather than for insinuating that you are a neglectful, insidious user.

Clap If You Love Fairies!

Who's going to be the one to tell Nicole Richie that she's past the stage where the role of Tinkerbell is a viable career option?

I don't think the world is ready for the consequences of setting Nicole up with a whole tribe of Lost Boys.

Love/Hate Relationship

Never, in the history of mankind, has anyone demonstrated such an ironically simultaneous love of, and hatred for, the general public than the misanthropic humanitarian responsible for this.

Can you imagine his inner monologue?  "I hate people.  I want them all to diiiiiie!  But, wait!  If they all die, there will be no one left to suffer from the delicious machinations of my delicate torment!  And then MY life would not be worth living.  How, how, HOW can I find a way to ensure that people continue to live, while still making certain that their lives are filled with agony?"

Pick A Cause, Any Cause

Public opinion, prepared to be swayed!  There was a parade in Ann Arbor yesterday.  They closed down some streets, and people marched around the block, and then after awhile they all came into the bookstore for coffee.  What was the parade's unifying principle?  Its raison d'etre?  Unclear.  Based on the flags, banners, signs, buttons, and miscellaneous paraphernalia sported by participants, some possibilities might be:

1.  Impeach Bush
2.  St. Patrick's Day
3.  Gay Pride
4.  Peace and/or Make Love, Not War and/or Flower Power and/or Withdraw From Iraq
5.  Palestinian Liberation
6.  Re-elect Granholm

I'm sure, this morning, that members of the administration are on the job early, working hard to re-tailor their policies to better satisfy the entirely mainstream Ann Arbor population.  But, the really important thing here is that some people got to dig their Vietnam-era protest gear out of their closets.  And there were drums!  And, apparently, face-painting!  And that is good enough for me.  God, I love this town.

Biting The Hand That Types You

It's understandable that the TypePad spellchecker doesn't accept some of the words that I regularly employ.  "Snark," for example; that one probably hasn't yet cracked the OED.  "Impecunious," on the other hand, is a less excusable omission.

What's really eating away at me, though, is that after four months of devoted, religious attention, my blog still fails to recognize my name as acceptable verbiage, and in fact insists on attempting to replace it with words like "Lairs."  That's right, Persiflage would prefer to believe that I'm writing about the nocturnal habits of bears than acknowledge my existence.

I'm beginning to see my blog as a particularly contrary pet.  You feed it, groom it, and walk it.  You make sure it has a soft, comfortable place to sleep, and if it seems to be feeling a little under the weather, you're the first in line at the vet.  And yet, it still shies from your touch, whines and claws and complains when you try to pick it up, and insists on swooning at the feet of your boyfriend, who ignores it whenever he's not swinging it into backflips from its hind legs.

This cannot be a healthy relationship.

Doctor in the Headlights

There was a melee in the coffee shop, and I was only peripherally involved.

Not long after Jen and I settled in, the blandly blond future yacht club member- the sort who likely calls his friends "old chap" after he's had a few- studying at the table to my left was joined by a swarthier and less pleasingly symmetrical cohort.  In a conspicuously pompous status display of which male lawyers can only dream, both Swarthy and Blondie were wearing scrub shirts.  In Starbucks.

(It amazes me that male lawyers haven't utilized their familiarity with collective action to band together to petition the bar to develop a similarly distinctive lawyer uniform that would facilitate trophy wife pickups.  It would almost certainly incorporate the bonding of a Crackberry to one's palm by means of industrial-strength epoxy.)

In a truly epic display of suavity, Swarthy, only minutes after his arrival, accidentally poured almost the entirety of a steaming hot milky coffee beverage with unidentifiable creamy lumps across the table, into eddys around Blondie's computer, through his notes, and into a waterfall culminating in a pool on his lap.  I could hardly believe that someone had done that, and that that someone, was, somehow, not I.  A moment later my erratic and misguided sense of sympathy kicked in, and I got up to relieve the condiment bar of a year's worth of rainforest undergrowth in napkins to clumsily assist in the mopping process.

To diffuse embarrassment, Jen and I turned our attention away from Blondie's crotch and back to the business at hand.  Prior to the deluge, we had been discussing a friend who has had, for several years, a chronic (as opposed to acute) crush on me, with attendant ebbs and flows in the extent of his Laris appreciation.

"In the end," I said, "I think he's too nice for me.  That sounds horrible.  But...all the snarking would be one-sided.  And he would never stand up to me.  And I don't think I'm attracted to him, so I'd be dating him just because he's so nice.  And we all know what happens when I date nice guys just because they're nice."

At that, I felt a hand on my shoulder.  As I looked up to find Blondie standing over me, Jen, not noticing the intrusion, leapt to the plate with the (admittedly correct) response to my presumedly rhetorical question.

"Well, sure.  You crush their souls."

It's been quite awhile since someone has, quite literally, run away from me.

 

John, Tom, Katie, & Mom

As a child, I always suspected that my mother was a secret devotee of a Christian Science-like cultish religious organization.  It wasn't so much an aversion to medication or to physicians, but more of a denial of the existence of illness itself, or a refusal to acknowledge that not feeling well might rationally have any observable impact on the execution of one's daily duties.  In grade school, I was the only child in Academy history to five-peat the perfect attendance award, but did so at the cost of being that bane of janitorial existence, the kid who annually pukes in a corridor.  By high school, bronchitis was my weakness of choice, and I suspect that the nuns in the front office kept penguin-adapted orange Hazmat suits in the lost-and-found closet, since I would regularly be removed from class and entrusted to their care for coughing phlegmily to the extent that my teachers claimed that the noise, paired with the visual stimulation of my lungs ricocheting off the walls, distracted others from their learning.  It always took Mom awhile to work off enough anger at my alleged malingering to come to pick me up.

I'd assumed- God alone knows why- that she'd extricated herself from the cult in recent years.  I was wrong.

Mom: I don't feel so well.  I'm getting a headache.  A bad, bad headache.

Me: Oooh.  Ouch.  Take some Advil now; maybe you can stave it off.

Mom: Nah.

Me: So it can turn into a migraine, because you'll also refuse to sit down, and in fact will insist upon, like, deep-cleaning all the shutters on the house?

Mom: Good idea!  They're disgusting.  I think I might have the flu...

Me: ...and you can use it as an excuse for snarking at us all day and eventually working your way up to a full-scale shrieking tantrum, since you're so exhausted from trying to be a Molly Maid while you're under the weather?

Mom: Pretty much.

Still not at the top of her game, she left at 5 AM this morning to set out on the ten-hour drive to visit her family.  Good luck, Grandma!

It's A Trap, All Right

People!  Why have you been bamboozled by the plastic "Bare Trap" clogs?  These androgynous atrocities remind me of something Devo would wear.  And Devo, in case you were wondering, is not an acceptable style muse.  When it is not Halloween.  Or, I guess, San Francisco.

  Do you think these are quirky and whimsical?  Because, newsflash, they are more like something that dangerous mental patients are forced to wear in the interest of easy identification and limitation of flight risk.  They look like the modernist interpretation of a passionate and tragic love affair between Legos and Swiss cheese.

I would not be at all surprised if the deity of your choice had sent these as a scourge to plague humanity.  Particularly since said deity apparently set the celestial weather dial to "deluge" and borrowed Spinal Tap's amplifier for the thunder peals.  These have to be End of Days commencement exercises, right?

We are all, as global citizens, less stylish for the existence of this shoe.