The Only One That Could Ever Reach Me

Yesterday I asked Brianna how she likes Nash school. She's very excited about first grade. She told me her teacher is reading the book Because of Winn-Dixie to the class. They're only about ten pages in, but she gave me a summary of what's happened so far.

"The girl has no mother and her father is a creature, but she's just a person."
Her father's a creature? I know virtually nothing about the book, except there's a girl and a dog, and that it was made into a movie earlier this year, but I'm pretty sure that didn't sound right. Then again, maybe her father died and came back as the dog. Didn't that happen in some book? Or am I thinking of that movie where Michael Keaton is reincarnated into a snowman?

"Wait. Her father is a creature?" I asked.

"Yeah. Her dad's a creature and he goes to church."

Ah. There we go.

"Preacher. Her dad is a preacher."

"Preacher? What's that?"

"It's like a priest. You know, they guy that goes up and talks on Sundays."

"Oh. Well, her mom didn't like being a creature's wife."

"Preacher!"

"Oh yeah...preacher...Why didn't she like being a preacher's wife?"

"I don't know. Because a preacher is always at the church and doesn't get to spend much time with his family."

"Oh. Like your dad. Is he a preacher?"

"Not really. But...yeah, sort of, I guess."

This entire conversation took place while she was taking a bath, and since I'm still not really comfortable seeing little naked people, I spend most of the time staring at the towels stacked in the closet.

I hope she'll still be interested in the story when the teacher picks up where she left off today. For ten pages, she thought it was about a girl whose mother left because her father was a creature. That's kind of a tough act to follow. I can only imagine what was going through her head...



Alright, since I haven't been able to post much lately, and because Scott's comment reminded me of it, here's a bonus Brianna story, you lucky bastards:

One day Audioslave's Doesn't Remind Me was playing in the car and I heard this little voice singing along in the background. It was the cutest thing ever. Later, she sang Dragula, which was a little less cute.

That weekend, we were in my mom's car. This time, Queen's We Will Rock You / We Are the Champions was on.

"Hey, I know this song! They play good songs at night!" Brianna said, and she started singing along. My mom was impressed.

"She always does that. You should have been there the other day when she was singing Rob Zombie."

Sensing we were talking about her, Brianna's ears perked up. I swear, whenever that girl hears her name, she turns into Barth from You Can't Do That on Television.



"I heard that!"

"I wasn't saying anything bad. I was just saying you were singing a Rob Zombie song the other day. You probably don't even know what song that was."

"Yeah I do! It's the one about burning through the witches."

Fantasy Football Update: Week 1
The Dingleberries are 1-0, ranked third with 185 points. Not bad, considering I had the fewest "projected" points going in. Not to mention I lost Javon Walker for the rest of the season. Lousy Green Bay.

Oh, and Jose's fifth-ranked MI6 are 0-1.

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Hang In There

There's nothing like 96 hours of disaster relief coverage to make your own problems seem like minor inconveniences. I saw a guy on TV the other day that was desperately trying to find his wife and three grandchildren, and suddenly having to sleep on my parents' couch didn't seem so bad.

Slightly less depressing (okay, a lot less depressing) then all the heartbreaking news stories was the commercial I saw for the Toy Story 10th Anniversary Edition. How could that movie have come out ten years ago?! How did that happen?! I feel old now.

Well, on the bright side, football season starts on Thursday. Last year, Nick and Jose were part of a fantasy football league with some guys from Best Buy. I'd been hearing more and more about fantasy leauges over the past few years, but I never really understood what they were. It sounded like something that involved twenty-sided die.


As the weeks went on, it started to make a bit more sense, even though I still don't really understand how the points work. They seemed to be having fun, though, and I wanted to try it for myself. So this year I'm giving it a shot. We had our live draft two weeks ago. If you're unfamiliar with the whole process, basically you take turns picking who you want on your team from a list of available players. Kind of like how we used to pick teams for kickball in fourth grade. Everyone picks two quarterbacks, three wide recievers, two running backs, two tight ends, two kickers, two guys that can be either wide recievers or running backs, and two teams' defenses. It's only a six team leaugue, so no one really got saddled with bottom of the barrel type guys, but I was still in the middle of packing up the apartment when we had the draft, so some of my choices were a bit hurried. So ever since then I've been adding and dropping players like crazy, trying to fill out my roster with the best players available. So long, Jim Kleinsasser. Hello, Jeb Putzier.

In the battle of players with silly names, I dumped Plaxico Burress in favor of Peerless Price, while Price was still in limbo. I figured he'd have to land somewhere before the season started, and I was a little weary of Plexiglass only because he'll be catching throws from Eli Manning. Who knows, maybe Eli will do better this year, but it sure looks like he's the Billy Carter of the Manning family. Jose added Burress to his roster a few days later, and with my luck, the guy's going to have a career season.

Anyway, I named my team the Dingleberries. Why Dingleberries? Well, I don't expect to be at the top of the standings every week, but hopefully I'll be able to hang on long enough to get into the playoffs. I wanted to use a customized logo, but Yahoo only lets you use one of their generic football helmets, or some kind of creepy winking Backstreet Boy. That stinks, because I wanted to draw up a liitle graphic of a berry in a football helmet, or at least put up the team's motto:



So there you go. I'll keep you updated on how my team is doing each week. And as long as he's doing worse than me, I'll keep you updated on Jose's team, too. We're going head-to-head week 4.

Now...about the Disgusting Girl blog. From what I saw on this site, DG found out about the blog and Madman, the guy who wrote it, was fired. How did she find out, you ask? Madman had his blog set up to send him an email every time some one leaves a comment. I have mine set up the same way, but he had it go his work email rather than a private one. So when he went on vacation a few weeks ago, he had his auto-reply message on, and everyone (including me) that commented on his blog during that time got an auto-reply email with his name, the name of the company he worked for, the address and the phone number. I'm sure he wasn't thinking about his blog when he set up the auto-reply, but it was a HUGE mistake on his part to have an his comments go to his work email. So basically, I'm guessing someone got an auto-reply and decided to be a dick and called the company.

Every trace of Madman is gone, even his other blog that was just a list of other people's blogs. According to Cassy, someone called the number from the email and was informed that he was terminated. Someone else said that he posted a comment on her blog saying he was almost fired and that she was to remove the comment as soon as she read it. I hope he didn't really get fired over this. But either way, it doesn't look like he'll be writing about DG anymore. So many questions were left unanswered. Will DG and Tiny get married? What's going to happen with her lawsuit? And what about poor little Pope? I can understand that DG is upset, and she has every right to be. But she can't just leave us all hanging, we were there for her whole pregnancy, for crying out loud! And possibly even the conception. She could at least start her own blog and pick up where Madman left off.

Well, I think we all learned a thing or two from this. I just hope Ted, the annoying guy I work with, never finds my site. You know, Ted?

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Home

The kitchen floor needed to be replaced. There was no electrical outlet in the bathroom. None of the smoke detectors worked. But none of that matters. The fact is that I still really miss my apartment.

I miss my bedroom. I miss the veiw from living room window. The incredible sunrises over the bay in the morning, and the glowing skyline of Boston at night. One night I was watching the Sox game on TV and they panned to a shot of the Hood blimp hovering over the park. I looked out the window and saw the blimp in the distance. I spent the next several minutes staring out the window at the blimp and saying, "That's the same one that's on the TV!" I guess I'm just easily amused.

We finished moving yesterday, and we are now officially guests at my parents' house. I just don't really feel all that great right now. I feel like a failure. I don't have a home anymore. I have a couch. I know things could be much worse. People in New Orleans lost everything; I just lost a crappy apartment. But it was my crappy apartment.

Dammit. I wanted to write about last Sunday. It was supposed to be upbeat and funny. But I'm not really in an upbeat and funny mood. I'm sorry.

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