Author: ME

It’s Good to Be Home

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

Congratulations. This is your pilot.

I went out of town on business again and I have to say, I really missed you guys. And by you guys I mean the voices in my head that I’m talking to whenever I write. Well, except for the voice named Garth, he’s a real asshole sometimes.

I traveled to New York again and had the Best. Flight. Ever. It was made of awesome because there was this one lady who had managed to make it all the way to sixty years old without ever riding an airplane anywhere and she was making her first plane trip. Right next to me.

Yes, you’re thinking, “Lorca, you are such a pure soul with such a loving heart for people. I know you made this horrible experience just that much more tolerable for this poor woman.” And ordinarily you’d be right. But not in this case.

If the woman had been normal-level-of-scared I would have maybe talked her down off the ledge or kept her mind occupied for a while during the TWENTY MINUTE flight. Yes, twenty, as in less than half an hour.

But when I saw that she was wearing a life jacket in her seat even though the flight from Birmingham to Memphis doesn’t even fly over a good-sized puddle and when she started this obnoxious loud moaning even before the doors were shut, I decided she is someone who doesn’t need to fly ever again. So I helped her come to that decision by making the entire experience as scary as possible. For her.

How To Scare The Shit Out Of Weird People On An Airplane:

Step One: change your ring tone to a really awesome siren sound and play it over and over right up until the stewardess tells you that you have to shut the thing off so it doesn’t mess up the pilot’s controls and make the plane fall out of the sky.

Step Two: quickly download the movie Memphis Belle to your iPad so you can watch the WWII air battle scenes throughout the trip.

Step Three: repeatedly ask in a loud voice, “Did you feel that? Did anyone else feel that just now? THAT. That grindy-sounding bumpy feeling. You know, kind of like something fell off. Are we leaning to the left now? I think we’re leaning.”

I was ready to implement Steps Four through Eight, but then she got all Tourettesy-sounding and threw up in the seat pouch in front of her so I backed off for a while. Only a little while. Because how do you not mess with someone during landing? There are all kinds of awesome scary noises and bouncy things are happening.

I’m pleased to say that I have now done my part to further the railway travel industry or the Greyhound bus people because that woman won’t come anywhere near an airport ever again, and I mean not even if the donor heart her grandkid needs is arriving in a red cooler and she has to go pick it up. More importantly, innocent passengers like me can now fly without fear of being thrown up on or annoyed. Although Garth kind of deserves to be puked on once in a while.

Men Should Be Outfitted with a LIKE Button

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

This man doesn't really need a LIKE button. We can kinda just tell...

DISCLAIMER: Obviously, I’m a girl and therefore there’s still a tiny part of my brain that thinks boys are stupid and smelly. It was an opinion formed in elementary school and there has been a marginal amount of experience since then to make me change my mind. But having said that, I’m going to have to admit that the word “men” in this post is more like the word “men” in the Bible…it means everybody. Except when it only means “that guy.”

So MEN (okay fine, PEOPLE, are you happy now?) should come with the Facebook equivalent of a LIKE button. It would go a long way towards curing a lot of what’s wrong with the world if we could see two little symbols on each other’s foreheads, one with the thumbs up, one with the thumbs down, and the number of votes next to each. Innocent bystanders would know instantly if you tend to be a douche-nozzle or if you’re probably a pretty okay person. Man. Whatever.

We have rating systems on websites that let us express our approval of everything from blog posts to toilet paper to the video you posted of your kid stuffing cereal up his sleeping dad’s nose. We get all kinds of like/dislike information on the content, but who’s letting us know that the guy standing next to us in line for a latte wouldn’t stop in the parking lot to let an old lady use the crosswalk so she could have a latte, too?

Think about it for just a minute without going all Clockwork Orange on me. It would be like the polite version of voting people off the island, only nobody really gets evicted. And what is the point of the LIKE button in the first place if not to inform others that this particular item was worth your time? So is it wrong to say that this particular MAN is worth the effort to give him a second look or that you should just move on to the next one? (I’m sorry, I’m enjoying the image of men with like buttons tattooed on their foreheads too much to switch over to saying PEOPLE at this point)

Rating systems are also put in place so that the providers of the content—whether it’s blog posts or toilet paper or uploaded cat videos—know that this is something the public wants more of. If you’re getting too many down-thumbies, you might be a total shit and you should probably do something about it. We would not only be warning people away from idiots, but we’d also be helping others with their self-improvement goals. It’s a win-win. Now hit the LIKE button on this blog post or I’m posting a cat video next time.

I Might Be The Reason SOPA Was Proposed

ME Overly simple thoughts , , , ,


Let me be the first to tell you, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have no clue. All I know about SOPA is that Mozilla Firefox has a black band across the poor little fox character’s face and the Google doodle has a black stripe blocking it out. And that people keep saying we should stop SOPA and the other thing. Okay, I’m actually a little embarrassed for myself right now.

I’m also more than a little ashamed that Congress thinks I’m such a douche that you need to be protected from me. I am ever so sorry about that. I feel like I should be taking all my clothes off, slapping on a trench coat, and waiting for you behind a park bench. Like PeeWee Herman or George Michael or about eighteen different politicians.

Sure, I admit that in the past year I’ve used more than my fair share of dirty words on my blogs, words that my grandmother would smack me for using even if I didn’t actually speak them out loud. And there have been quite a few pictures of scantily clad people on my blog, but I swear I wasn’t showing them to you to get you all horny. I showed them to you because I was laughing at them. And yes, I wrote a blog post about filling a grocery sack with human feces. And I wrote about game wardens having wild animal sex in their bass boats. And I think I also wrote about diaper fetishes and bestiality, but I could have dreamed that last one.

All in all, our government thinks you need to be protected from me and they’re probably even right. But I can’t live in a world where you can’t pop over to the internet on your lunch hour and read about the time I accidentally walked into the porno section of our local movie rental place.

The real shame is I’ve figured out exactly what’s behind all this SOPA/Piss-in-Pipa thing…CONGRESS IS AFRAID YOU WILL SEE PICTURES OF THEM NAKED ON THE INTERNET. No, really, hear me out on this one. If YOU aren’t allowed to look at pictures of nekkid people online, YOU WON’T FIND PICTURES OF CONGRESSMAN WEINER’S WEINER. It’s so brilliant in its simplicity.

Rather than take a hard look at the dumb-assed shit our politicians have been doing in their off time, they just collectively decided NOT TO LET YOU FIND OUT ABOUT IT. They should have thought of it years ago.

So now all these blackout protests have been staged and I’m protesting as well. Be careful. If SOPA/Whatchamacallit passes, I’m going to post the F-word 500 times on my blog. No, I don’t plan to be creative about it. I’m just going to start typing FUCK over and over and post it online. You probably won’t get to see it because it will be censored, but I will feel better knowing that I did it. Yes, I will probably just pay some teenager to type it for me because said-teenager will find it funny and because I’m too lazy to actually follow through. But it’s the thought that counts.

Klout Thinks I Know A Lot of Stuff

ME Overly simple thoughts

I’ve blogged before about a website called Klout. It’s really…interesting. Basically, using all kinds of math things like probably calculus (it’s got to be good for something), Klout stalks you with your permission and finds out how much you post on Facebook and Twitter and other places. Then it stalks all your friends on Facebook and Twitter et al. It’s amazing how Klout can do all that stalking without even moving a muscle. It’s like that guy who can move the table cloth so fast you never even saw him do it.

After snatching up all this private information even faster than Homeland Security can do it, Klout figures out how popular you are. This would have been really useful in high school because then I could have told a few people that they were really not as “all that” as they thought they were. Yes, we used the phrase “all that” when I was fifteen.

Best of all, Klout then takes it upon its stalker-self to tell you how important you are about specific things. It’s all based on you and your friends and everything you talk about. And calculus.

So it made sense when Klout thought I was pretty popular about things like writing and authors and ebooks. I somehow got picked to be important about the Icelandic Volcano back when it erupted and closed down Europe, but I haven’t talked about that much lately. Well, until today.

But Klout has now decided that I am quite influential about a whole new topic.

Yes, I am influential about rabies. I wrote one lousy blog post about creative ways you might go about catching rabies and I’ve been branded as a sexual rabies expert. I clearly remember mentioning SEVERAL TIMES in that blog post that I don’t know squat about rabies and that I had to Google it. I ended up with more questions about rabies than I even started with. But now the whole internet knows I’m a rabies expert.

The really sad thing is I had actually emailed Klout and told them I really needed them to list me as being influential about badgers and no, quite frankly, it really wasn’t any of their business WHY I needed that title. They wrote a lovely follow-up email telling me that it really was out of their control and if I wanted to be influential about badgers I would have to talk about them a lot more.

I don’t know anything about badgers. I’ve never seen a badger up close. I do have a dog that is rumored to be quite the anti-Christ of badger bad-assery, but that is the extent of my badger knowledge. I’ve now used the word “badger” in this blog post seven times, if you count my typing the word “badger” to let you know that I was talking about badgers. Wait, nine times.

If repeating a word over and over doesn’t actually make me an official internet expert on badgers (ten times), then nothing ever will. It’s a tactic politicians have been using for years, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing that mindlessly repeating myself won’t get me anywhere.

It’s Hard to Change the World When the World Is Kinda Stupid

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,
Pink Legos are not inappropriate. THIS is inappropriate.

I accidentally clicked on something one day and it automatically signed me up to get email updates on how bad everything is in the whole world. It’s kind of depressing and I really would like to stop getting these updates because they make me sad, but how do you click “unsubscribe” to receiving email updates about how they’re beating women in foreign countries for trying to go to school or how polar bears are drowning because there’s not enough ice left for them to take a breather on?

So I continue to receive updates from Change.org and I even sometimes get so mad at the news item that I read it and think about it and consciously don’t switch over to flipping through YouTube videos of people falling off of stuff. Instead, I even click on the button that lets me sign a virtual petition to stop countries from throwing gay people in jail just for being gay. I really do try to be a good person. Sometimes.

But these people are in serious danger of losing my interest and it’s not just because I ran out of Ritalin. This week’s petition is…get this…to get Lego to quit making pink Lego bricks because they’re sexist.

Okay, even I admit that I’m way oversimplifying things here. Apparently, Lego introduced a whole line of cutsie items that come in girlie-girl colors and have little Lego girls in them instead of the creepy-looking Lego people that they usually sell. What the hippie petition-people don’t like is that these Lego kits for girls show the little figure-people doing things like sitting by a pool or going shopping. Apparently, that’s degrading to women. And to Legos. And to swimming pools.

I’m completely confused. If we can sell dolls that go shopping and we can sell whole room-sized play kitchens for little girls to stand in and pretend to cook, why can’t little girls have Legos that sit by the pool ordering MaiTais?

The whole point of Legos is they’re awesome and they snap together to make whole creative worlds that you can pretend to be in. Folks, when I’m escaping reality for a while, I’m absolutely sitting by a pool drinking a beverage. Not only that, but as long as we’re pretending here, in my alternate reality my body looks a whole lot more like that little Lego girl’s body than my own disastrously warped middle-aged body, plastic ponytail included.

When did it become wrong to let a girl pick out the pink toy? If those smelly little boys can have every Star Wars scenario ever thought up by nerds who still live with their moms all spelled out in expensive plastic bricks, why can’t girls have shopping Legos, as long as they were the ones who decided to play with them? Would it be better if there was a little plastic book the little plastic girl could be reading by the little plastic pool?

If you people really want to protest against Legos, I have some suggestions. One, how about we all admit that Legos are made out of plastic that was mixed together in a lab and therefore don’t have to cost more than the tank of gas I burned to get to the nearest major city that has a Lego store? Two, why the hell does it have to be so difficult to get two Legos apart without involving my finger nails and/or my teeth? Three, does it have to be so damn painful to step on a Lego barefoot in the dark at three o’clock in the morning when the dog has to go out?

Those are some mere suggestions if you’re really determined to bitch about Legos. I, on the other hand, would use that pent up energy to protest things like living conditions for children in inner-city public housing or the rape of women soldiers in the U.S. military. But hey, pick your battles I guess. I’ll be out by the pool thinking about the state of the world if you need me.

UDPATE: Wouldn’t you know it, I write this blog post and then I’m so worn out that I go lay down on the couch for a while. And there’s a commercial for the girly Legos. It looks just like Polly Pockets or Barbies, only these are made from Legos. I don’t get it.

You Dirty Tag Whore

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,
This is me wondering what the heck this "tagging" thing was...it was disappointing how not-sexy it is.

I got tagged. Here in Alabama there are two choices for what tagging something could mean: first, I’ve killed a wild animal and I stuck a piece of heavy cardboard through its ear to show it to the game warden, or second I accidentally shot myself while hunting wild animals and the coroner has stuck a piece of cardboard through my ear to show me to the game warden.

I now know that it means that somebody tagged me on her blog and so now I’ve been tagged.

When I first read the notice that I had been tagged, my first thought was that this was some internet sex thing. I was about to cancel all my accounts online and have the internet connection shut off. But then I read it more closely and I saw that the creepy person who tagged me is actually a blogger I recognize and even though she’s really smokin’ hot and writes about shmexy vampires for a living, I don’t think she’s into me in THAT way. But thanks, Erica Lucke Dean, for thinking I’m totally tag-worthy.

Now I’ve gone back and read the fine print and it turns out that tagging isn’t going to get me laid or make me dead, and while only one of those is good news, it’s still a relief that nothing kinky is happening with my internet activity. So here are the answers to the questions that I’m supposed to post now that I went and got myself tagged up. I mean, tagged.

WHAT WAS THE HAPPIEST EVENT OF 2011?

Event like as in a holiday or event as in getting myself out of a situation without involving the cops, the paramedics, a lock smith, or the town Tarot reader? Um, I would have to say that getting to touch a dolphin in the ocean was pretty neat. See? We can see a wild animal without tagging it…

WHAT HAS BEEN THE SADDEST EVENT?

Huh. That one’s a stumper. There’s not a lot of sad going on around me because I have this eighth sense for sniffing out mood killers and running away like someone’s on fire. I guess not finding out my kid’s class was having a Christmas party and therefore making her be that one kid whose mom didn’t send anything. That sucked a lot.

ONE UNLIKELY THING YOU DID:

Here’s the thing, all this stuff that I do that shocks the shit outta me? Yeah, everybody else totally saw it coming. But something I did that I never really envisioned myself doing was getting my hair caught in the hinge on my kitchen cabinet and having to cut myself free with a steak knife from the drawer while my O.A. (occasionally asshole) husband stood there laughing really hard and absolutely not helping me.

WHO LET YOU DOWN?

The entire U.S. government. And the Auburn Tigers. And the undersea gods who make tsunamis and the weather patterns that make tornados. All of you pretty much sucked toe last year.

WHAT MADE YOU LAUGH?

Valium. Shut up, it’s medicinal.

WHAT MADE YOU CRY?

Hmmm. I don’t remember doing a lot of crying in 2011. Oh wait, some butt-muncher stole my dog and then it managed to get away, but then it was hit by a car. Yeah. Cried a little bit.

ONE THING THAT MADE YOU PROUD OF YOURSELF?

I made a completely amazing papier mache frog head for my daughter’s Halloween costume and it rocked. Technically, I did that back in 2010 but I’m still riding the high from that one.

ONE CHALLENGE YOU OVERCAME?

The parking garage. I finally learned how to get out of those things without needing my Garmin.

WHAT WILL YOU CHANGE ABOUT YOURSELF IN 2012?

That’s a dangerous question. What if I make all these grand plans and you people actually expect me to go through with them? We’ll start small with I’m going to finally learn how to multiply fractions. From there, I’ll work my way up to remembering to write down stuff in my checkbook register to keep my husband from having to call up all my usual haunts and ask them if I wrote a check in the last ninety days. He completely thinks about tagging me when I do that.

I’m sharing the love here by tagging Greg from DogsOnDrugs.com because I kind of secretly want to know all this dirt about him now that I found out just how many times he can toss the F-word into one conversation about grocery shopping. Yeah, buddy, I know you read this blog and there’s your name right there on the screen and you’re gonna be all, “Holy F! She F-in’ said my name! She’s so F-in’ amazing! I need to F-in’ grocery shop!” (I may be slightly exaggerating Greg’s amazement at this announcement. It may be more like, “Holy F! This is like an F-in’ chain letter that you gotta F-in’ keep goin’ and I don’t do that F-in’ stuff,” only I don’t think he would say “stuff” after saying the F-word that many times.)

A Classic Case of Pinot Envy

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

WHAT?!? I had a coupon!

I’ve already confessed to my love affair with gas station wine, but I may have hit a new low. There are apparently all kinds of wines on the market that are made of everything from muscadines and blackberries to the finer fruits like canned pineapple. I had one yesterday that has been aged since all the way from back in November. It actually claimed to be a Blackberry Merlot but I’m pretty sure it was a soda that someone had simply poured a little bit of moonshine in to make it classify as alcoholic.

Don’t mistake me for someone who has no ability to discern the finer things in life. I just don’t have the money to actually consume the finer things in life.

So why don’t I just face facts, you ask, and slap a ballcap on my head backwards while sitting on the porch of my single-wide trailer drinking beer like a lot of my neighbors? Because I’m a snob, that’s why. I never said I was humble, just poor.

I’m very attached to the image of settling into my chaise on the veranda in the evening with a piece of lead crystal stemware clenched in my happy little fist, the bouquet of a fine wine swirling around my head like an alcoholic thought balloon while the setting sun reflects off the golden pool of a wonderful pinot. Instead, I sit on my back deck drinking wine that came in a box out of a glass that came free with the jelly that was inside it. But it all looks a lot more like my dream version of events after that third glass of wine, probably because the industrial ethyl alcohol the “vineyard” put in it is messing with my brain. Or because I’m just now too drunk to notice the flock of wild turkeys that just walked through my backyard. Wait, no, those were swans, I’m sure of it.

I Missed Out on the Chance to Rock the Side Ponytail Look

ME Overly simple thoughts , ,

No, her puppy hasn't died. It's the ponytail making her sad.

Thanks to my parents’ amazing ability to plan for things and my own perfect sense of timing, I never got the opportunity to wear a ponytail jutting out from the side of my head. I was being born right as that look was at the height of junior high school girl fashion and I managed to hold off on growing enough hair for it until the fad fizzled away.

In a tragic twist of classic-looks-never-go-out-of-style fate, the side ponytail is back and it looks just as stupid as it did in 1974, except girls today don’t have the added benefit of wearing pastel high-waisted jeans and roller skates to complete the ensemble. Lucky me, I managed to get really, really old before the look came back so now I still have an excuse not to wear it.

Has anyone else somehow not noticed that a ponytail right behind your left ear simply looks like you started with a regular ponytail, but your mom caught you talking on the phone in the hall closet when you were actually grounded from using the phone and in real mom style simply reached into that dark closet, felt around for your head, and yanked you out sideways by the hair?

Do you ever see really stunningly beautiful women like Duchess Catherine (the future Princess of Wales, not that psychopath from Russian history) with a wad of hair asymmetrically wadded up and glued to the sides of their heads?

My fantastic good luck doesn’t end there. I narrowly missed Member’s Only jackets in the 80s and was already too grown-up for Punky Brewster-like knee-length high top Converse sneakers in the 90s. Just due to my own extreme good taste I never wore full eyelid neon blue shadow or lipstick that you apply by squeezing a small woodland creature all over your mouth like some deranged Disney movie evil villain.

In hindsight, I’m now really, really sorry that I looked down my nose on people a couple of years ago who were wearing their pajama pants as actual clothing. Now that my day begins at 4:30am and I fall into bed most nights after ten, I’m convinced those people are smarter than us all. By the time that look comes back into style, I’ll actually BE old enough to wear my pajamas all day from the comfort of my wheelchair.

Comic Sans: It’s Like a Hug from Your Computer

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

I got a tweet the other day (I never thought I’d string those words together in the same sentence) in which someone in the publishing industry literally begged people to stop using Papyrus font in their work correspondence. It took me a minute a) to figure out what she was talking about and then b) to care a lot about what font people chose to use.

I must admit the error of my ways. Yea though I looked down my nose upon this hapless woman’s plea, within five minutes I had bumped into this sign:

I had to stick my photobomb note in there to prove this wasn't found on Google images.

Really? What 13-year-old girl was assigned the task of posting that sign in the breakroom? Is that really the kind of information you want coming out in Comic Sans?

“But wait,” you say, “Comic Sans is adorable. It makes me think of kittens and singing manatees, the kind whose tails have NOT been chopped apart by motor boat props.” And while I readily agree with you that there’s some level of comfort to be offered by notes spelled out in the Microsoft equivalent of balloon letters, some notices just need to be taken a little more seriously.

But then again, the delivery of bad news just might be better received in a font that makes you feel secure and giggly. I imagine all kinds of termination notices might go over better if they were a little…fluffier. Audits might be more pleasant if all of the documentation of your pending jail time for tax evasion were spelled out in Middle-School-Girl Sans. Like this, for example:

And while truly nothing short of a Silkwood shower will permanently erase the sting of finding out that someone in a nearby cubicle is a non-hand-washer AFTER he borrowed your pen, your stapler, your scissors, and your car, the world can still be a better place if we all leave each other notes in horrifically age-inappropriate font. So have a nice day! J

Versatile Does Not Mean “Limber in the Bedroom”

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

For some reason, I always thought referring to someone as being versatile meant that they were somehow capable of all kinds of kinky sexy acrobatic-type stuff. Apparently, it’s actually a compliment? Mea culpa to the person I blocked on Twitter for calling me versatile and if I figure out how to unblock you I will. And I’ll mail you an apology kitten.

No, I actually got nominated by the made-of-all-things-amazing blogger Write_Me_Happy. I don’t know her real name and if I did I still wouldn’t tell you. This is the internet, you stalker. Sorry, that just slipped out. So, thank you!

The cool thing about the Versatile Blogger Award is it’s the award that keeps on giving because now I get to nominate people. I think that’s how the Nobel Prize works. Maybe not.

Anyway, here are my nominees for the Versatile Blogger Award (that sounded very Oscar-For-Best-Actress-ceremony in my head just now):

  1. DogsOnDrugs.com
  2. TheBloggess.com
  3. TamponCrafts.com
  4. Grammar.QuickandDirtyTips.com
  5. TraceyHansen.com
  6. WritingontheRocks.com
  7. RachelintheOC.com
  8. IndieBookCollective.com
  9. GoodEReader.com
  10. PubwriteGroup.com
  11. HyperboleandaHalf.Blogspot.com
  12. TheFunnyBlog.org
  13. LianaBrooks.Blogspot.com
  14. TheaAtkinson.Wordpress.com
  15. EricaLuckeDean.com

That list isn’t at all comprehensive, but I didn’t have to put a ton of effort into thinking this through. Instead, I just looked at my online history and realized that these are the blogs I go to most often because they are worth staying up late to read even though I have to go to work in the morning. I don’t have to explain to you why I spend so much time on TamponCrafts.com. That’s my business.

Part of the nomination for this prestigious award means a profile of the winner, kind of like those hazy-filtered montages they do during the Olympics where John Tesh briefly narrates the heart-wrenching life story of the little gymnast who overcame bastardism, Communism, and typhoid to triumph on the balance beam. So here is some not-so-interesting information about me:

  1. I once had to eat a live octopus because it was the polite thing to do.
  2. I stepped on a toothpick as a child and had to have it surgically removed from my foot, then proved I’d learned my lesson by stepping on something else the next month and having to have that removed as well.
  3. I once had to wear the Domino’s Noid costume in a parade because I was the only one small enough to fit in it.
  4. I auditioned to be the Water Skiing Goofy at DisneyWorld, but I’m too tall.
  5. I’ve never eaten a Big Mac in my life.
  6. My favorite wine is Southern Gold, which is grown and bottled within two miles of my house.
  7. My second car was given to me by a relative and it was a huge improvement over my first car despite that fact that its interior had once been on fire.

I didn’t leave John Tesh much to work with but the images of me staring morosely out the window will make up for it.

Finally, there are rules for those that I’ve nominated and they are listed below. Thank you to everyone involved in furthering my greatness. I will remember your kindness when I take over the world.

Fine Print for My Nominees:

1. In a post on your, blog, nominate 15 fellow bloggers for The Versatile Blogger Award.

2. In the same post, Add the Versatile Blogger Award.

3. In the same post, thank the blogger who nominated you in a post with a link back to their blog.

4. In the same post, share 7 completely random pieces of information about yourself.

5. In the same post, include this set of rules.

6. Inform each nominated blogger of their nomination by posting a comment on each of their blogs.