The Things You Find Behind the Toilet

To Fill the Void When 'From G's to Gents' Wraps

Darin & I were flipping through the channels after EUReKA (RIP Stark) and happened to catch a teaser for the most awesome Real World/ Road Rules challenge ever. As Darin put it, 'it's like Survivor, but with people who have no business trying to survive anywhere.' This year, MTV is tossing the hapless twits and twats on a desert island and watching them all claw each others eyes out. I can't wait. Next season, they should let them loose in the far north woods during bear season with salmon strapped to their genitals. How much would you pay to watch CT get wasted and try to start a fight with a grizzly?

In the Woods by Tana French

This book starts out with a bang of a mystery. Meet Detective Rob Ryan, your narrator, a newer member of Ireland's homicide unit, but seasoned, nonetheless. He knows when people are lying and he knows how to lie back to get confessions and justice. He also has a secret that he has been concealing. His name is actually Adam Ryan. A rather infamous boy who was discovered one day in the Knocknaree woods clinging to a tree, his shoes full of blood and three claw marks on each side of his back. He remembered nothing of his lost time, including whatever happened to his two best friends, now gone forever without a trace.

Fast forward to present day, he and his partner are assigned to a case of a twelve year old girl who was found murdered in the same woods.

Intriguing, yes? Well, yes. At first. We learn that he is in love with his partner - a deep love, he trusts her with his life - and although they had spent many a night together at her place, they have yet to consummate it. We learn that this case just has to be tied to Rob's old case. He finds the barette of the little girl he was friends with, the very barette she was wearing the day she disappeared a few yards from the current murder scene. Old characters from Rob's past crop up, tied to the new case in mysterious ways. Tana French gives us all kinds of leads and subplots, which include every member of the young girl's family, big-time property investors, local punks from the neighborhood, a possible psychopath and even a possible MONSTER. The whole time I was reading it, I thought, "Oh wow! How is she going to pull this off?"

Then the book takes a ridiculous turn 3/4 of the way through. All of the sudden, Rob, our main guy, starts acting completely out of character. He treats his partner like garbage. I am not going to spoil this, but he becomes a total dumb jerk and after the big anti-climactic, monologuing reveal, he sort of takes the reader aside and tells us how we might be upset with his actions, but this character tricked us too. But the character didn't. The character had been painted as a possible suspect from the start. It wasn't a surprise, just a possibility come true. The end.

What happened to "Adam" and the other kids that day out in the woods? Dunno. And I don't think Tana French knew, either. Anyone can start a mystery, but it takes a real storyteller to be able to finish it.

Happy Wedding Shower Weekend, Erin!

I had a great time - it has been too long since we had a few drinks together & started talking about things that make Darin close the patio door on us! Love you!

There Will Be Blood.

I was trying on the Bridesmaid's dress for my friend Erin's wedding yesterday one last time before taking it to the tailors. My mom was on the ground trying to pin the hem, while Nadja banged away on a xylophone, wailing a nonsensical tune, and Romana repeatedly flung herself at me crying to get picked up. I kept pushing her away because she was stepping all over the dress, then Nadja got closer until she, too, was practically sitting on the material draped on the floor, still banging and yelling away. Romana took a flying leap at me and I grabbed the dress so she wouldn't trip all over it. Instead, she tripped over her own feet and landed face-first on the hardwood floor. To say she was screaming bloody murder would be an understatement. Upon hearing the noise level in the room rise, Nadja rose the volume on her xylophone and elevated her racket into a thundering crescendo. I was kissing and holding Romana, who was beside herself, the dress was falling off and my mother was frantically putting all her sharp sewing equipment away. I handed Romana off to take off the dress and looked in the mirror. I had blood all over my lip, face and neck, where Romana had been burying her little head. Turns out, she split her lip and was bleeding everywhere. Thank god the dress is red.

This would never happen to Angelina Jolie.

F You, Jolie-Pitts

I was sitting in my OB/GYNs office last week and flipping through the People magazine with the Jolie-Pitt twins on the cover. The article inside opens up with something like, "The kids are often found playing hide and seek in the sun-drenched olive groves surrounding the estate, while Angie and Brad spend intimate quiet time with the newborns." It goes on to say how Brad and Angelina give one-on-one sessions to each kid to make them feel special as well as having family fun together as often as possible. "It's chaos! But the fun, wacky kind!" Maddox can speak fluent French, Shiloh holds the babies and dotes over them, Angie breastfeeds them both at the same time every three hours, they used IVF to conceive, but only because they wanted to get pregnant right away, NOT because they have fertility problems... wait, what?

It is bad enough that the life they can afford to live, the life chocked-full of money, nannies, chefs and palatial estates in the French countryside is a lie to us normal folk. But then they lie on top of that to create this image of a Brangelina Babymaking/collecting Shangri-La, which is as fake as Angie's tits. (Yes folks, any time you can visibly see the tendon that connects one's bicep to their forearm means that there should be no breast tissue to speak of unless it is taught skin over a bag of saline.) There is no fun and wacky kind of chaos. There is irritating chaos, tiring chaos, infuritaing chaos, exasperating chaos and the chaos you try and tune out. 6 kids going in different directions is not cute nor fun. Babies are hard enough to nurse one-on-one, so the story of it working seamlessly together every three hours is false. And no one does IVF unless they: a. Do not have access to a penis, b. do not have functioning ovaries or a partner with a high sperm count, or c. are in a sexless marriage, or a marriage of convenience.

And there I was, sitting in that waiting room and saying to myself, Are my kids sun-drenched enough?

It's a lie. A big fat unattainable lie. and we are subconsciously bombarded by it every day. Our lives aren't good enough. We can only be whole if we take our Nike shoes out for a run every morning, we can only be whole by having children - all of Hollywood is doing it, we can only be whole by vacationing enough or by drinking green tea... wait no, white tea or Yerba Mate, now. Everything we buy and ingest makes us who we are and with these products we can control our destiny.

All human experience is to be controlled to garner the highest level of happiness and if you're not happy enough, something is wrong with you. Perhaps you need a Yerba Mate. We are sold a bill of goods that we must be successful, rich, extraordinary, zenlike, athletic, passionate, sexy, funny, smart and #1 in every category lest we... LOSE. Losers. And now, celebreties are telling us what perfect and wonderful lives they lead. A life that is not only beyond anyone's means, but beyond the limits of reality as well.

And we're all here, trying to carry on with a nagging feeling that something isn't right. Perhaps we're not rich enough, we don't have time to do all the things we want to do, we aren't respected enough at work or our kids don't know how to speak French. And we don't realize how depressing it is until we start crying when a song sings at us to break our rusty cage and run. Or we wake up in the middle of the night unable to breathe and it happens again at the dinner table a week later and then upon waking the following day. And then you realize you don't really need anything. And you have to answer the question: How do I live unaffected?

Not reading People magazine in waiting rooms is a start.

At The Bottom of Everything by Bright Eyes

We must talk in every telephone
Get eaten off the web
We must rip out all the epilogues in the books that we have read
And in the face of every criminal
Strapped firmly to a chair
We must stare, we must stare, we must stare

We must take all of the medicines too expensive now to sell
Set fire to the preacher who is promising us hell
And in the ear of every anarchist that sleeps but doesn’t dream
We must sing, we must sing, we must sing

It’ll go like this:

While my mother waters plants
My father loads his guns
He says death will give us back to God
Just like this setting sun is returned to this lonesome ocean

And then they splashed into the deep blue sea
It was a wonderful splash

We must blend into the choir
Sing as static with the whole
We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul
And in this endless race for property and privilege to be won
We must run, we must run, we must run

We must hang up in the belfry
Where the bats and moonlight laugh
We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past
And in the caverns of tomorrow
With just our flashlights and our love
We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

And then we’ll get down there, way down to the very bottom of everything
And then we’ll see it, oh we’ll see it, we’ll see it, we’ll see it

Oh my morning's coming back
The whole world’s waking up
All the city buses swimming past
I’m happy just because
I found out I am really no one