To Pee, Or Not To Pee and other Toilet Humor

I just got back from the Men’s Room… wait, where are you going, no seriously, this is relevant to the story… I just got back from the Men’s Room and there are no dividers at the urinals.

Now for the ladies, many urinals have a piece of wood that separates urinals for privacy.  I can still see the face of the dude next to me so best not make any crazy relieved pee-faces because I will chuckle because I’m mean like that.  I don’t have a problem with the lack of dividers (since our bathrooms look like something you’d expect at the last truck stop three hundred miles out of Caracas… just because we build trucks here doesn’t mean the bathrooms have to look like truck stop bathrooms).  I started thinking about why anyone has them in the first place.  Are there that many dudes trying to get a look at other dudes junk?  Is that common?  Men eat a hearty meal at Sonny’s Real Pit Barbeque and have to disperse that 64oz Coke and as you’re doing your business, thinking whether to order the cobbler when Patti comes back and offers desert and if you’ll make it home in time for Ice Road Truckers, a dude saddles up besides you and suddenly you’re overwhelmed with the urge to look at his penis… his glorious, magnificent penis.

Awk-ward.

Or maybe he’s looking at yours.  I don’t know.  I don’t think my junk inspires gawkers but who knows.  I am just thinking was this such a problem that there are companies that make money preventing dudes from getting the urge to look at your junk?  It’s kind of like those tissue-paper seat covers where the middle never comes out right and they create the illusion they’re sanitary when really it’s a placebo.  Your butt’s probably the cleanest thing on you.  It’s covered in two layers of fabric (at least I hope so you skanks that like to go ala carte).  It never touches anything unlike my hands, my face, my forearms, etc.  What it really protects you from is the gross idea that your bare ass is pushed up like a pressed ham against the spot another bare ass just was.

Because of the lack of dividers, I notice some dudes, paranoid people will see their junk, leaning into the urinal.  Gross!  Standing upwind of your own urine as it splashes back at you amidst the cigarette butts and pubes grosses me out all the while happy it isn’t my job to replace the urinal cakes.  No way am I leaning into that, body pressed into the porcelain, my fancy Target Cherokee polo getting God-Know-What on it.  I would rather let a dude take a picture of my junk (sans face, of course) with his iPhone and post it on YouTube than lean into that perfect storm of bacteria.

Disney World has amazingly clean bathrooms all things considered.  They tell me, because I asked, there is a person that cleans them every fifteen minutes.  I often wonder when you go to Epcot and they have all the Cast Members from different countries, do any of them have to clean bathrooms because that would suck.  Coming all the way from Morocco and someone hands you plastic gloves and a bottle of 409… “Welcome to the Magic Kingdom!”  I was doing my business there once and I could hear this dude breathing and I turned around and there was this Dutch guy standing six inches behind me.  Totally freaked out.  Note to self: the Dutch have no concept of personal space.  It’s probably a small country unlike America and they can’t spread out the standard five feet no-fly zone reserved only for urinals and ATM machines.

Either that or I do inspire gawking.

I sit when I pee.  Not manly, I admit.  I never knew when this started because I didn’t do it as a child but it’s been going on for years.  It does make reading a whole lot easier.  So as this odd trait of mine was chipping away at my self-esteem and masculinity (along with my inability to throw, inexperience to firearms, disdain of sports and lack of automobile knowledge) to combat it I decided I would just start peeing upright and suddenly made a disturbing discovery.

I’m short.  Five foot six to be exact.  It’s my mother’s fault (she’s four eleven and three fourths which she is quick to remind you of).  I wear shorts a lot and as I was doing my business I noticed I am the exact height where my the bottoms of my shorts touch the top of the toilet bowl.  Putrid, right?  When I noticed that it almost grossed me out worse than the time I made a sandwich and decided to use the facilities before heading for the living room and caught myself in the bathroom with food.  Food should never be in the bathroom.  Ever.  Seriously, never.  I think I noticed my short dilemma years ago and have been copping a squat ever since and it became habit.

Ironically, for a person with no shame in public bathrooms, I like my privacy at home.  Maybe because I am with people who know me.  I like to do my business at the furthest bathroom from where people are gathering.  Probably self-conscious from my father who used to tell my brother and I that we sounded like cows peeing on rocks.  No woman has ever seen me pee.  Not her business.  Women on the other hand have no problem with that.  They’ve invited me in.  I’ve politely declined.  I have made excuses to avoid it (my stomach hurts, my mother is calling, I’ll be out here in the bedroom scratching my eyes out with these toenail cutters).

Some people read in the bathroom.  Don’t lend a book to Tony Lipari that has been in the bathroom because that book has now been tainted and thusly should be burned and burned post haste.  I am pretty sure Tony doesn’t get anything from the public library because although his taxes pay for it, that place is like a loaded gun to him.  My friend Raymond Pfriender kept this four inch thick book on the history of the Third Reich in his bathroom at the comic book store he owned (again, another bathroom that looked like a place where forty-five year old daytime hookers go to overdose).  It was there for years and at some point Jon Plant started reading it on Saturdays so when Ray finished he lent it to him.  He still has it in his bathroom and he’s been reading it slightly longer, in five minute increments, than it took to fight the actual war.  Comic books are the perfect bathroom reading material, twenty minutes exactly.  Natalie reads in the bathroom.  Her old apartment had a stack of magazines I normally would never peruse.  Domino, Today’s Bride, the obligatory Pottery Barn and Ikea catalogs and her standard labor/feminist propaganda newsletters.  She read a lot of Harry Potter in the bathroom.

While I am here, if Natalie’s younger sister Brittany is reading this, sorry about your Harry Potter books.

I once was playing with my new cell phone and dropped the stylus on the bathroom floor at work.  I just stared at it unsure what to do.  I am the guy who undoes his belt and tucks it into my pants so the end doesn’t touch the floor.  I tried to wash it and sterilize it with hand sanitizer but in the end I just threw it out and bought a new one.  My brother once dropped a cell phone into a urinal trying to talk on it pinned unsuccessfully between his chin and shoulders.  Cell phones aren’t made for that.  I once leaned forward (I don’t remember why) and my tie dipped into a toilet where my unflushed business was.

When Jon Plant gets bored at work he has been designing a bathroom where you wouldn’t have to touch anything.  A completely hands-free bathroom.  I say, like cold fusion, it can’t be done.  He tells me that’s what they said about splitting the atom.

Not in our time… but maybe that’s a world my grandchildren will live in.

MEMO RE: Jell-O Pudding & Gelatin Cups

TO:  Jell-O Research And Development
FROM:  James E Ford
DATE:  July 17, 2008
SUBJECT:  Desert Containers

I have been a long standing consumer of your tasty dessert products.  My only complaint is whenever I am done and put the empty container on the end table to finish watching The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search For America’s Next Doll, the weight of the silverware, my preference being the teaspoon, tips the plastic container over.  Eventually room temperture makes the remaining chocolatly delicious residue drip out onto my somewhat stylish (yet manish) glass end tables with adorning iron-rod legs.

This is why I am asking you consider making the cups larger.  I noticed when eating a yogurt (I am sorry but you weren’t here and I am weak) the larger yogurt cups are able to stand with the silverware in the empty cup because of the increased base radius.  Also note, the spoon being used is now a tablespoon, the preferred spoon of adults and the obese in a hurry to scoop food into their always gaping maws.  I realized I only preferred the teaspoon because it could get into smaller spaces the tablespoon, given it’s obvious girth, could not.

Thank you for considering these suggestions.  If you could find a way to put the skin on the top on the pudding like my mom used to make that would also be appreciated.

Confederacy Of Dunces

I went to the movies a few weeks ago with some friends.  My good friend Tony had some other friends meet us there we’ve never met.  We entered the theatre and took our seats (one third from the rear, center of the row, as recommended by Roger Ebert).  Tony’s friends decided to sit in the first third on the far right and there was, what seemed like a slightly awkward moment where Tony has to decide where he’s going to sit.  The movie ends and we manage to rendezvous outside and as much as I would have liked to stay and talked about the movie which is one of my favorite things to do (and it was The Incredible Hulk for Pete’s sake), I rounded up my nephew and cousin after two minutes and left.

I don’t know Tony’s friends but I couldn’t stay.  One of them had a shirt with a Confederate Flag and the text: If This Flag Offends You, Maybe You Should Learn Your History.

I had to go.

To me, presenting the Confederate Flag (on their car, in their yard, on their person) is someone who calls me “nigger” behind my back.  Maybe to my face but definitely behind my back.  It’s one thing to be called nigger, it’s another thing for someone to try to make you feel like an asshole for being offended by it.

Was this that guy?  Probably not. I am sure they are nice people (or Tony wouldn’t have anything to do with them).  My friend Kendra’s mom had a pink Confederate Flag on a bandana she used to wear and never questioned it until she wore it in a room with me and suddenly she was a little embarrassed.  That’s White Privilege and I’ll get to that later.  She thought I was mad at her and treated her different, which I didn’t.  Paula, that was guilt kicking in and sometimes it stings a little.

Heather Caine and I were once driving back from lunch and on seeing the flag on a truck she told me she didn’t see the problem with it and asked me what I thought and I told her.  Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the flag of the south.  It’s the flag of the Confederacy.  The flag of another country formed when a group of people who didn’t like where the country was heading and decided they would succeed and form their own country only surrendering at gunpoint.  It was a flag of a country, that after the other first world nations had done away with the practice of slavery deeming it barbaric, they still wanted to own human beings as property.  That is what that flag actually is.

She looked at me and said, “you’re right,” and promptly changed her stance.

I’ll get the argument that the Civil War was about state’s rights and not slavery but it’s state’s rights to have slaves.  The argument wasn’t about how their taxes should be spent or whether to practice daylight savings time.  No states would succeed and let millions go to war to defend abortion or gay marriage.  But slavery?  Nobody gives up three trillion dollars in property without a fight.  People have told me it was about the South losing their culture, traditions and heritage but I never heard of the Union coming in and telling them how they could worship, what songs they could sing, how their foods should be prepared or what clothes they could wear.  They were told “lose the slaves.”

For those who argue with me slavery was only one of many factors for the Civil War, I give you the famous Corner Stone speech (Savannah GA, March 21, 1861) of Confederate Vice President Alexander H Stephens one month after he was sworn into office before the Civil War.

“…Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition….”

You can’t read that and with a straight face say the Confederate Flag is a symbol of heritage, not hate.  There is a reason Ku Klux Klan is always toting it around with them and it isn’t because it doesn’t clash against the white.  It just clashes with everything else.

It sucks to be on the losing team.  I was a fat black kid in school and I know that.  And whenever a group of people are emotionally wrecked, their denial reinvents the importance of their cause.  Reinforce that what you did was okay.  Erect statues and glorify something that should be forgotten.  There used to be a Confederate soldier in front of the courthouse years ago and people would say “wouldn’t you want your ancestors remembered?” and my friend Tiffany told me her grandparents were Nazis during the second World War and they’re family never talked about it, not because it was politically incorrect but because they were ashamed.

Sure, I would want my ancestors remembered… but not for that.

I Googled “Revolutionary War Reenactment” and get 13,100 sites.  I Googled “Civil War Reenactment” and get 157,000 hits, roughly twelve times as many.  I lived in Pennsylvania, where they wrote the Declaration of Independence, an hour outside Philadelphia.  Where they just look for an excuse to dress up as Ben Franklin and they were never like they are in the south. 

Natalie calls it White Privilege.  Where you live in a reality that your race and the consequences of your race are of little concern to you.  That white people can put Barack Obama on a shirt as a monkey and not see anything wrong with it.  The idea that everyone is expected to bend to their culture, language and religion and the moment that is jeopardized they’re literally on a border with guns.  I’ve worked at places where people had bumper stickers that read, “If I Knew They Would Be This Much Trouble I Would Have Picked My Own Cotton.”  That there are probably few places they would want to go where they would feel uncomfortable.  Natasha Modavi invited me out for a Friday night with some of her friends to Charlie Horse which she assured me was not redneck.  Just for the record, they is a 90% chance any bar or restaurant with the word “horse” in the name is a little too redneck for my tastes.  Experience has also proven any bar with the word “pony” in the name is probably a Gay bar.

The Confederacy and the south are two different things.  The Confederate Flag is worn by people the same way someone from Gainesville sports a Florida Gators shirt or bumper stickers and can’t name a single person on the team.  It’s being used as a symbol to say this is where I am from like Puerto Ricans have their flag in their car and every Italian restaurant is decked out in red, white and green.

People do things and aren’t sure why they do them whether that is wearing a flag you don’t understand or wearing your pants cinched below your ass.  But in the words of Stephen Colbert, the Confederate Flag says The South like a Swastika says Oktoberfest.

Just don’t look at me like I’m the asshole.

More Wedding Cakes for Natalie to Veto.

She loves me but not this much.  I show up with this cake and I guarantee she’s gonna shove it somewhere.

 

WTF?

Sunday morning Nat and I are laying around the house, she finishing off the last Harry Potter book and I’m reorganizing my PC and she gets a text message from her youngest sister, Brittany.

OH EM GE!

The rest of the text and the conversation that follows is none of your concern so we’ll leave them to their privacy.  What I would like to point out is the “OH EM GE.”

I hate text messaging.  I’ll do it if I have to tell several people the same thing (“Change of plan.  Be at my house at 6:00p”) or leaving a message for someone who I know can’t answer their telephones (you’re driving, in a meeting, etc and I shoot you a “we’re playing Xbox at 8:30p if you want in.”)  But to hold a conversation via text?  Hate that shit.  Just call me.  It’s why I have a telephone.  Having a telephone and using it to text is like having a television and using it as the flat surface to read your newspaper.

The popularity of texting has lead to textspeak (or at least that’s what I call it, I am sure some dude at Newsweek has already named it something better).  This is the shortening of words to save time (because of the conversational nature of texting) and that originally cell phones didn’t have keypads.  No problem.  We do that in English all the time: @ is “at” or % is “percent.”  The Federal Bureau of Investigation becomes the FBI, you’re with me here.

This brings me back to Brittany and her text: OH EM GE!

She’s spelled out an acronym.  OH EM GE is the phonetic spelling of Oh My God which has been textspeaked to OMG.  And she spelled it out.  Keep in mind, OMG was originally designed to not have to spell out “Oh My God” but there she is spelling out the acronym and saving herself one character (from nine to eight) in the process from actually using the King’s English.  It’s kind of like abbreviating Ohio as OH… it’s two letters, does it really save anyone real time.  I always pictured dudes sitting in a room fighting over the abbreviations for Mississippi, Michigan and Missouri and then they get to Ohio and a dude looks at the others and says, “is this really necessary?  It’s just two letters shorter.”  Then some other dude, I like to call him Dirk, says, “yeah, but if everyone else gets it and they don’t, they’re only gonna bitch… have you ever been to Wooster?  Those fuckers are crazy.”

My apologies to anyone from Ohio or Wooster.  I have never been to Wooster.  I just like saying it.  And I guess for Ohioans two letters is still 50% less writing so good for you.

I picture an entire generation spelling out DEE EM VEE and EYE ARE ES.  My personal favorite would be the EN DOUBLE AY SEE PEE and suddenly we’re a nation of Nell Kelty’s spouting out gibberish while we yell at shoddy English skills of newcomers (which I am using instead of foreigners since when they get here they are no longer foreign… use it so it catches on).

Understand, I fancy myself a writer.  Language means something to me and my head throbs a little when I see “through” spelled as “thru” or “doughnuts” spelled as “donuts.”  My OCD kicks in when I see the abbreviations for days all three letters and someone decides Thursday should be “Thur.”  The kicker is always words misspelled to be cute.  Kash N Karry or Google.  Never mind having to watch rappers punctuate their sentences with an infinite amounts of “umm, you what I’m sayin’”s and misspellings of “Boyz,” “Thugz” and my personal favorite: “Niggaz.”  Take a word that literally means lazy and ignorant and misspell it.  Good job there, Tupac.

Oh shit!  I just Googled “Niggaz” and it came back with 6.7 million hits.  I Googled “Niggers” and it came back with 2.7 million.

I lived with a girl named Heather years ago who when instant messaging would spell “cool” as “kewl.”  Didn’t save her any characters.  Didn’t save her any time.  It just made her look illiterate.  A friend recently told me a story about a young woman who applied for a job at his office, interviewed and presented herself well.  He concluded with the standard, “we’ll be in touch” and as he looked at the very professional resume to verify the contact information he noticed the email address, azzshak3rhottie@aol.com.  And this is exactly my point.  I am sure she thought that email was cute when she was sixteen but here she is as an adult talking to adults, not her dumb little friends, and didn’t see the problem here.  The other day my seventeen year old cousin text messaged me and signed the text “+0ny NgUy3n.”  That’s Tony Nguyen for those in the cheap seats.  Again, using the same amount of characters and saving no time unlike when I abbreviate my own name as J Fo (which would have been really cool for Jennifer Lopez until that restraining order kicked in… I guess a love letter and a pillow filled with human hair doesn’t go as far as it used to). 

In Brittany Maxwell’s defense, I believe she’s twenty (out of high school, not old enough to drink) which places her in that bracket somewhere behind my Generation X (a term I despise only slightly less than our society’s need to label everything and the redundant labels (Generation X, Y and Brittany who should be Generation A or B by now)).  If I am doing my math correctly (and I suck at math to the point I can’t count to twenty-one without being naked), Brittany is born somewhere in the late eighties.  It would have been around 1995 when she achieved self-awareness making her part of a generation raised on DVD, cell phones, high-speed internet and Sony Playstations.  She’s probably never used a TV with knob (or one that only worked in black & white) or spent more than five minutes in an arcade (where I spent most of my college money playing Tetris and in my defense, I would make one hell of a Grocery Bagger).  The era of home video games that came in eight colors and a joystick with one button that either fired or jumped but it didn’t do both so you better figure it out before that purple square that was supposed to be a dragon kills you.  You didn’t beat those games.  They just got faster and faster, harder and harder and eventually you died with a little less money than you had earlier… much like life.

To her, Eddie Murphy has always been in a fat suit, phones always had answering machines and MySpace is where I should be allowed to post my personal business knowing full and well the rest of the planet can see it.

This is what they tell me is a generational gap.  I am learning to deal.

C U L8tr.

J Fo.

Twenty-Three Things You May Not Have Known About Natalie Maxwell

In honor of my fiance Natalie Maxwell’s twenty-eighth birthday on July 2, these are some of the things I have learned about her in the past year.  As always, anything in bold blue is a link.

1. Complains about my “old people music” (which is from the seventies and early eighties) and how she doesn’t know these songs. This goes on for forty seconds of complaining it’s old until the chorus and she realizes it’s American Pie by Don McLean… at which point she has a eureka moment that she knows the song which is followed by a declaration that the song still sucks (although admittedly not as bad as the Madonna cover.
2. Her dessert or choice is cake. She swears by the superb skills of the Publix Bakery although I have bought her cake from Wal-Mart on several occasions and she never knows the difference. Let’s be clear I am not trying to trick her, I just don’t tell her where it’s from.
3. Yells for me to change the channel when a there is a commercial for a horror movie. Apparently small Asian children scare her. In her defense, they scare me, too.
4. Keeps a roll of paper towels in her car per her father’s advice. Her sister, Brittany, does the same thing. It’s fairly unsightly to see a full roll of kitchen paper towels in the back seat of a car since you can’t properly hide them. This would be funnier if she’d ever read Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy which I am pretty sure she hasn’t.
5. Uses the phrase, “Holy Moley” in actual conversation as an exclamation with complete seriousness. Like Oopsie Daisey, Double Dog Dare, and Golly Gee Willikers, these are rare outside of the vocabulary of ten year old children in the 1950s and Billy Batson. When accomplishing a great feat she will also yell out, “SHUCKY DUCKY QUACK QUACK!”… whatever that means.
6. Suffers from an affliction common in human females and birds that if she’s covered with a blanket she’ll immediately fall asleep. Also, all places in America are too cold. I have a theory this is one of her fascinations with Mexico isn’t the love of the people, music, food or culture as she claims but because it’s fairly warm and they don’t have air conditioning. I once saw her put a knit scarf on in March while I was wearing shorts (which I always wear shorts). I am not sure if she was genuinely cold or just wanted to look cute in a knit scarf… regardless, I refused to be seen with her like that.
7. Every few weeks she does her hair. This is a six-hour process I look forward to because it means I’ll get to watch three movies in a row using the excuse I am keeping her company. During this time I like to refer to her as Farina. She does not know who Farina is.
8. Lives in fear that someone will break into her Hyundai Accent and steal her belongings. She leaves nothing in her car overnight (including her trunk). She will unload her car every evening which means laptops, luggage, books, work for home, etc and then ten hours later load everything back in. She does this knowing someone keeps a Lexus SUV thirty feet across the parking lot from her car.
9. Has a collection of Winnie The Poohs she’s had since the first one her father gave her. Very specifically, Disney Winnie The Pooh. Classic Pooh “is crap.” I personally like Classic Pooh because I believe bears with polo shirts and no pants are just pervs. Naked bears are just natural.
10. She watches very little television which mostly consists of HGTV. She votes every season for the next Design Star (whatever that is) and takes pride in picking the winner. I watch HGTV with her to test the accuracy of my Gaydar, while not nearly as accurate as my Blackdar or Pregdar, it has become fairly well-honed. Natalie says it doesn’t count on HGTV, E! or Style Network.
11. Bought the entire series of Sex And The City at Christmas for $15 a season. The sixth season was split into two parts and she refused to buy them because it was one season being sold as two and that’s robbery. So I had to go buy the remaining seasons to complete the series because I have a very low (mostly humorous version of) Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the incomplete series was making me nuts.
12. Often makes cookies in the evening while watching old episodes of My Name Is Earl. Whenever they say his complete name (Earl J Hickey) she chuckles because she thinks his name is funny. She has also come to the conclusion Earl’s ex-wife, Joy Turner, is the most un-feminist character on television and has somehow managed to be her favorite.
13. Yells at the television during news broadcasts as if Glenn Beckcould hear her and engage her in a debate. I often have to pause the TV so she can get it out of her system and I can hear whatever act of douchebaggery Ann Coulter has to say.
14. Is very excited to play video games although she sucks at all of them. She got excited when she caught me playing Frogger and as I was explaining the controls she yelled, “I know how to play Frogger,” and promptly died. She blames the complexity of the Xbox controller. I blame poor motor skills lost during her years of “book learnin.’”
15. She hates Disney World. Not as a theme park but mostly as a corporate conglomerate. I specifically proposed to her there so she’d have to like it a little. The next time I plan something special it’ll be at the Republican Convention just to cheese her off.
16. She is quick to poke fun at my low-level Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (which, had I a show on USA Network solving crimes would be he-sterical) but doesn’t find it odd that she schedules in her Palm Pilot when to change the water filter and flip her mattress.
17. Will often ask me some nerd related question so she can understand a comment she heard one of my friends say which usually ends with me explaining, “Hal Jordan was a test pilot who found Abin Sur who was a Green Lantern, which is like a cop for the universe. That dude died and gave Hal this ring which is an all-powerful weapon and protects him so he could be the new Green Lantern and defend Earth.” Then Natalie says, “if the ring protects him how did the alien Green Lantern die.” I have no answer for this and I am tired of her questioning my childhood.
18. She’s a packrat. She throws very few things away. She gets this trait from her mother and I believe it’s common of lawyers in general. In the consolidation of households I found a box of cassette tapes I was ready to throw out. I asked does she even have a cassette player and she said she does for when she goes walking. If you didn’t know, Natalie goes walking for thirty minutes an evening in 1990. She protested because she might someday need these. Sweetie, nobody needs to own a cassette copy of MC Hammer’s “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘em.”
19. Natalie is completely unable to tell a joke properly. I have seen her try but like a monkey riding a bicycle, I know it can be done… it just never looks natural. There is no real joke or funny story here. It’s actually kind of sad.
20. Jimmy Doesn’t Know: Natalie has a crush on Matt Damon. Not so unusual except she generally doesn’t like his films (with the exception of the Bourne movies which fit her formula for action films (Cute Boys * Ass Kicking / Explosions, carry the unnecessary gore = Good Natalie Action Movie)). After careful analysis she’s convinced me that Matt Damon’s films are better choices than Ben Affleck’s but not much better to actually watch. I am not threatened by any of this since he’s in California and I am here and reaping the benefits of her getting all worked up after Rounders. Whatever, that dude’s middle name is Paige and I was smart enough not to be in All The Pretty Horses.
21. She watches Reality TV shows to add simulated drama to her otherwise (and thankfully) drama-free existence.  This mostly comes from HGTV The Next Design Star (where somebody manages to cry every week over chartreuse), Work Out (where a bunch of lesbians can’t decide which one of them is hotter) and on occassion Flavor Of Love Girls in Charm School.  If you haven’t seen that last one it’s essentially The Bachelor if the bachelor was a washed-up crackhead Yoko Ono responsible for the downfall of one of the best Hip Hop bands of the eighties and all the girls were hoodrats with an intimate knowledge of which five inch clear heels will look best while hanging from a stripper pole.  I actually had to download the final episode from Xbox Live so she could see it.  I am starting to think this whole feminist thing is just an excuse to get out of the house.  In her defense, she doesn’t watch this much.
22. Natalie has a collection of t-shirts of things she’s done and places she’s been.  The ones I am talking about are not t-shirts from cities or colleges.  No, these are the t-shirts most people keep and in the next purging cycle throw out.  There are a plethora of shirts from various family reunions.  Last night’s was from a Chili Cook-Off she volunteered at so she could see some free bands play.
23. Natalie sings the incorrect lyrics to songs (unknowingly) and when corrected adamantly insist her revised lyrics are better.  Admittedly, her lyrics: “Sherry don’t like it… rockin’ the cash bar… rockin’ the cash bar,” doesn’t make any less sense than the original lyrics.