My Left Foot

I started to write this over a month ago, then thought better of it and let in languish in Draft Hell, then later thought, this is a perfectly good post. There are some people that don't have any posts. So here you go...

I noticed something this weekend that somehow went undetected for 29 years. Something that shocked and horrified me and left me completely confused as to my very existence. The middle toe on my left foot is the shorter than the rest of them. Well, not the pinky one, but the two on either side of it. It looks like one of the bone segments is missing. This is messed up.

Is it possible that I've somehow overlooked this my entire life? Feet fall slightly above the veiny backside of the wrists as my least favorite body parts, so I suppose my conscious effort to avoid looking at them could have kept me from discovering the horrible truth. The even more unsettling question is this: what if this is only a recent occurrence? What if at some point I actually lost a bone? For two consecutive summers after I graduated high school, I accidentally smashed my bare left foot into the coffee table while turning the corner from the living room to the dining room. Both times, the doctor said you can't exactly put a tiny cast on your toes, so each time it just sort if healed on it's own. Maybe it got smashed so hard and so repeatedly that it's now permanently stuck in a "shy turtle position." I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to make of all this, I'm freaking out.

Well, not long after that, I looked again, and the toe was normal sized again. That makes even less sense than when it looked like a bone was missing. This has left me with an interesting theory and a solid conclusion. The theory is that due to previous damage, sometimes the middle toe on my left foot inexplicably regresses into my foot. And the conclusion? Feet are gross and should not be looked at or thought about under any circumstances.

Missing bones or not, I've always had problems with that foot. Despite my best efforts, the shoelace on my left shoe always comes undone while I'm walking. It's untied right now. On every pair of shoes I've ever had for as long as I can remember, the left lace always comes undone. Double knots do nothing! Occasionally, extra long laces prove to be the culprit, as my right foot will inadvertently step on the excess lace and pull it loose. But I have actually witnessed the lace shake itself undone entirely on it's own, simply by the movement of my foot walking forward. It's maddening.

On the other hand, err, foot, The right shoe is fine. Laces don't magically untie themselves, and the big toe is the largest, with each of the others progressively smaller, just as God intended. So why does my left shoe refuse to stay tied? Does the size-changing toe have anything to do with it?

Zig-zagging up my body, I get pains in my right hip sometimes, but not my left. I guess that's because when you walk, one foot is working in conjunction with the opposite hip. Isn't it? I think my whole body is being thrown out of whack because my left foot is all weird.

And now, in an amazing feat of showmanship (feat...hehe) I will now predict not only who will post the first comment, but what it will say:

Michele said...
GO TO THE DOCTOR!!!!

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Obligatory Catch Up Post

I've been a little distracted lately. It's been known to happen. But I'm back now, and nothing is going to, holy crap, what's that little music icon? Is that a new Blogger feature? Oh. Nevermind, it's a Foxytunes feature. I can now insert current track as my signature. But I'm not currently listening to anything, And since you most likely can't see the icon I'm referring to, this entire paragraph probably hasn't made any sense to you. Suffice it to say, if you use Firefox and have Foxytunes, you'll see a little G-clef icon just below "Preview" when you're creating a post in Blogger.

I actually almost posted something over a month ago, because something happened that scared the crap out of me. Or, I thought something happened, but it turned out to be nothing. It's sort of embarrassing, actually. Maybe we should move on to something else.

A lot has happened in the past few months. Michele finally got the new job she's been trying to get for nearly two years. Some places have very strict rules about blogs; some say you aren't allowed to have one, even if only post during off hours; some are so strict that you can't even have one in your household. I don't want to get Michele in trouble at work, so I won't say where she is now. But it rhymes with Barvard Bedical Bool. There. Let's see them crack that code.

We're also without Brianna for the summer. She stays with her grandparents in South Carolina during summer vacation, but with Michele just starting her new job, we weren't able to go down there to drop her off. So her dad suggested we take a weekend trip and meet them halfway, in Maryland. We stayed in Hanover, which has this enormous mall with a Medieval dinner place and a 24-screen movie theater shaped like an Egyptian temple, with a giant Anubis statues and everything. We weren't there long enough to actually go to any of these places, but we'll be back Labor Day weekend, and we should have an extra day, so maybe we can go check them out.

One week after we got back from halfway-to-South-Carolina, Jose packed up and moved all-the-way-to-South-Carolina. Before he left, we got together one last time at my parents' house (my family went to Maine and we were watching the dog, the birds and Glenn's iguana). We didn't really do much, except talk and watch something about 80s songs on VH1, but that was enough. Even Hedie showed up, and explained a cryptic text message I'd received a few days earlier. (By the way, come down to Hajjars in Weymouth for wiked [sic] [expletive] awesome karaoke night) It was kind of sad, (Jose leaving, not Hedie's text message) especially since we could have at least gone with him half way if he had left a week earlier if if Michele's parents were able to take that weekend off from work, but he's happy and I'll probably still end up seeing him as much as I have been recently anyway. And I'm assuming we'll be doing Fantasy Football again this year, so I'll be beating his ass from eight states away. I think it's eight. Do you count the state your in? Well, anyway, I'll be beating him from as few as seven or as many as ten states away depending on your counting system. I think.

What else happened? Oh, over the past few weekends, Michele and I had some mini-vacations, just the two of us. It's been great. Weekends are that much more enjoyable when you actually go out and do something instead of sitting at home catching up on your DVR and recuperating from five days' worth of Joeisms. And we haven't had to spend too much because we saw The Dark Knight for free (two complementary tickets when you buy ten General Mills products, thank God we love cereal) and last week we went to the Harvard Natural History Museum, which was all free because Michele is an employee of um...Barvard. We walked around Harvard Square and took a nap under a tree in Harvard Yard. This weekend we're going on a sunset cruise on the Charles River.

Sunday was Michele's birthday. It was also annual Black and Orange Flying Bug Thing Orgy Day. There was a big group of them on the walkway leading to our house, all clustered together. At first I thought an ant was bringing in a big haul. You know how ants can lift many times more than they're own weight, and sometimes I've seen them carrying of much larger insects. But this group, they were all black and orange beetles. And a few inches away, there was another group of them. Still a bit further away, one black and orange beetle all by himself. That's rough. I got to the car, and two more orange and black flying bug things were on the front windshield, one on top of the other like on the Discovery Channel. Another exhibitionist couple was doing it on our back windshield. Michele doused the ones on the front with washer fluid and tried to flick them off with the wiper blades, but they were just out of reach and kept going at it like champs. Then it rained. A lot. And all the orange and black sex beetles most likely all died. I think that might have been Asop's lost fable.

Well that's it for today. Come back tomorrow to see if I can keep this going. I'm sure I have at least three more in me before I lapse again.

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The Greatest Thing in the World

I will now attempt a transcript.

Unholy Humpty Dumpty Mutant Eggman thing is sitting on a wall...

Kinder...yibbo shaky!
shakes smaller, non-mutant egg

Me unscrabbly.
unwraps foil cover to reveal chocolate egg inside.

Choca Doobee!
opens chocolate egg to reveal yet another egg, this one made of plastic

Doubly Choco Doobee, ops wubbo! (laughs)
opens yellow plastic egg, tiny plastic man which could possibly be a soldier but on further inspection he's got a red chef's hat on and holding a wooden spoon (also inexplicably red)

Tooooyy!
Mutant Eggman has apparently just eaten some of the chocolate

Yodel yum and choco scrum with multi-pumfabo toys!
picks up a small toy airplane from assortment of Kinder Surprise toys next to him

Oh, grobelee!
moves arms in circular motion; raises eyebrows. outside in the cold distance, a cuckoo cuckoos

Me scooble now. Nogo. Wheee!
Mutant Eggman does the "redrum" finger thing, and freefalls backwards of the wall. Proper British Announcer says "Kinder Surprise from Ferrero."

Discuss.

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But I'm Your Density...

Why didn't George McFly divorce his wife when his son came out looking exactly like the guy that "helped" him get her to go out with him high school? Once Marty hit puberty, George should have been a little suspicious of the striking similarities. As if that wasn't bad enough, she named the kid after him, just to rub it in!

Maybe he just decided to let it slide. Why let one little indiscretion ruin a good thing? Maybe he thought, "It could be worse. At least he doesn't look like Biff."

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Nonfiction Books: Why I Hate Them, Why I Think Every Nonfiction Author Should Die A Horrible Death, And Why You Should Think So, Too

Why does every single non fiction book include a colon followed by a friggin' paragraph-long subtitle? That ticks me off a lot more than it probably should. It doesn't help that the two biggest offenders, political hit jobs and and self help books, are the two most deplorable genres anyone could ever write about. It's bad enough they're blood-sucking leeches, but do they have to be so obnoxious about it?

One of these days someone is going to write "CHAMPION!: The true story of how I overcame adversity, and against all odds, wrote a book with the longest subtitle in history and scored a bunch of chicks and a sweet movie deal, so look for Champion!: The true story of how I overcame adversity, and against all odds, wrote a book with the longest subtitle in history and scored a bunch of chicks and a sweet movie deal in theaters this Summer.



If I ever write a nonfiction book, The title will just be something short, followed by a colon. And the entire inside of the book will be the subtitle. Beat that, you stupid jerks.

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