Xiobhan: All About the X

On my Christmas list

100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed

It’s the diary of a slutty sixteen-year old Italian girl and it is apparently an international best seller. I think I need to read it for this Amazon reader review alone:

boy howdy! i really need to meet this young lady! she's definitely right up ol' lance's alley! bein' a limber li'l gal and all! read this and you'll see! YEEEOWWWWWW!!!!!!!! i'd sho' like to get up with her on her 18th birthday!!! hot hot hot!!!! smell like the weekend, yo!

Thankful

Where's Mommy?

Big props to KY Girl (the state, not the jelly) for sending me this and TOTALLY pissing me off.

Where's Mommy?

Hmm. Interesting.  So, my kid is going to be a serial killer because I work?  Writing a book is a lot of work.  Some might say that it’s almost a full time job.  Who took care of your kids while you were writing a book vilifying working mothers?

About the Author
Mary Eberstadt is a part-time research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review, the critically acclaimed journal of conservative thought. Her essays and reviews have also appeared in the Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary. She is married to the writer Nicholas Eberstadt and has four children.

Gosh. You do sound busy… Good luck with little Nick junior when he starts to torture chipmunks.

We drove up to Philadelphia this weekend to visit friends. After dating for two years, and being married for seven, there are times when the husband and I simply have nothing left to say to each other.  These times tend to come during long road trips.

Husband: "Good road."

Xiobhan: "Yes. This is a good road. Smooth, flat, straight.  Much better than 295. As far as roads go, I think this may be one of the nicest that I've ever been on.  Boy! You sure do know your roads..."

Husband: "Possum killer."

Now, I could have taken this personally and gotten all girl-sensitive about it, but I figure that A) I was sort of begging for it and B) "possum killer" was a vast improvement over "poop finger," which I also take responsibility for, as about an hour earlier I put my index finger in front of him and asked, "Is this poop? Do you think that's poop?"

Faker!

The husband and I went to a very nice  reception last night at a gorgeous home in Chevy Chase.  Our good friend's sister is an ar-teest and the reception was a gallery exhibit of sorts.  Senator Warner was there.  She had some very fancy friends.  I used to live up there, like, ten years ago and it was a bit of a struggle to navigate us back home again.  I claimed, with much confidence , that I remembered my way around.  As I was slowing for a stop sign, not all that confident that I actually could get us home,  I saw a fat and furry gray creature waddle out between two parked cars. I said, "Look!  A possum!" And then, whump-ump.  I stopped . "Oh my god. Oh my god. I hit it.  I hit the possum." The husband said, "Keep driving."  I was frozen.  Hands ten o clock and 2 o'clock, watching the possum in the rear view mirror.  "It's moving!  It's on it's back! It's legs are flailing. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod! I hit it."

The husband was quite firm that he was not going to put a half dead possum in the back of the truck and drive it to a veterinary clinic where we would pay money to have them either examine it , fix it or euthanize it and he was even more clear that should we get out and go back and look at it that he had no way to put it out of it's misery himself.  So I kept on going, leaving a gravely wounded possum flailing on it's back in the middle of Western Avenue where another car would most likely come along and do the dirty work for my husband with another sickening whump-ump.  Did I mention that it was on it's back? Did I mention the flailing? I am sick to my stomach just recalling it which has been about every 20 minutes since it happened.

I have never hit anything. Except the rear end of a Honda Civic that braked WAY too soon for the conditions...those conditions being a sunny spring afternoon.  Hitting an animal could very well be the worst feeling in the entire world.  Beyond the sound  of the whump-ump and the sight of that poor thing in the road, there's the feeling that it was a straight out hit and run and I was a criminal.    I actually comforted myself with the thought that maybe it was just some crazy teenage possum prank where they dare one another to go into the street.   One of the other possums hits the side of the car and then possum A, the possum that's desperately trying to be one of the cool kids and agreed to the dare in the first place, lies in the middle of the road, thrashes about and his little buddies cheer. Maybe that's where the term "playing possum" comes from.  The rest of the little bastard possums were laughing their asses off from the safety of the bushes while I was bursting into tears.  Well I won't fall for that again.  Next time I'll make sure I get him.

Soap Box

Someone asked me right after the election if I felt any different about the war effort now that I had a son.  I was asked how I would feel if Beck was drafted to fight in an unjust war.  I was as honest as possible in my response that I would probably try and get him out of it regardless of it being “just” or “unjust” because I’m a mother and I don’t want my kid getting shot at.  Watching the news last night and the latest media storm over the marine that shot and killed a wounded Iraqi soldier, I told Beck: “Baby, if you ever do have to fight a war, please, please, please kill the guy that is trying to kill you first.”

War is ugly and awful. People kill each other. That’s what war is and that’s why nobody likes it.  We read the headlines every day about soldiers dying. They are ambushed. They are blown up and shot down.  Shooting the insurgent, insuring he was dead and not about to detonate a bomb or pull a gun, secured the safety of every marine in that mosque. Having the media there to film it, criticize and second guess it is wrong. 

If you Googled "Porn Star Names" and found yourself here, welcome

Being that it’s almost Thanksgiving, I think it’s time to retire the $7 straw handbag that I bought at Target last summer. Brand name: Exclamation!  Or maybe Exhilaration! or something really enthusiastic like that.  Either way it’s cute and if asked where I got it, or anything about it, I do what any other style conscious yet cheap woman does, I lie and say I got it at Saks.

So I brought my red purse out from the back of the coat closet and began transferring everything from big straw bag into smart red bag which I got at, uh, Neimans. Confession: I never clean out purses before putting them away for the season so digging through them is a fun little walk down memory lane: business cards for people I don’t remember meeting, the lipstick I thought I lost, receipts, restaurant match books and snotty Kleenexes.  Lots of snotty Kleenexes.  At the bottom of the red bag was a nametag that I found last year in the ladies room of the Mayflower Hotel.  I was so smitten with the porn star-like quality of the name that I wore it all evening at a networking event. The nametag was Tara O’Toole’s. Tara O’Toole attended a public policy research forum that evening and had abandoned her nametag in the loo where I found it, with great pleasure.  Tara O’Toole, if you ever Google yourself and find yourself here because I have said, “Tara O’Toole” four times, I have your name tag.

A few years ago, when we were having work done on our house, my husband called me all excited and said, “Guess what the name of the HVAC guy is?”

“I have no idea.”

“Think ‘porn star!’”

“umm….Dick Black?”

“No!  Harry Johnson!!!”

Yes.  His name was Harry Johnson, and he was huge. It still makes me giggle.

This week we had a little in-house retreat for my team.  We kicked off the day with a team building exercise designed to get to know each other.  We paired up, interviewed our partner with a set of five questions, and then wrote and illustrated a “Biography” of that person on whiteboard paper folded twice over. With crayons.  (None of this was my idea…) We then presented our “books” to the rest of the group.  Despite being a senior manager and having a responsibility to lead by example and show the team what a positive experience the “Biography” exercise could be, I shirked my duty and mocked it. Openly.  (Maybe I didn’t realize how seriously everyone else would take it, as most spoke movingly about members of their family, and shared pivotal moments in their lives.  A few gave touching childhood anecdotes. Um. Yeah. Not me.)  For starters my partner and I decided that our regular names weren’t interesting enough for our books, so we chose our porn star names: first name being the name of our childhood pet and the last name being the street we grew up on.  I was Msy Surrey*.  She was Flopsy Cranston. In fact, we decided that our real lives weren’t interesting enough either so we took a wee bit of creative license and gave snarky answers and drew inappropriate illustrations.   Our books were best sellers.

What’s your porn star name? 

* Our second dog was a greyhound named Nipper. I’m not sure that Nipper is a good name for a porn star. 

It’s an even worse name for a fluffer.

By Order of the King

The husband turned 38 yesterday (didn’t that always seem really old?) and we all had to suffer through the Birthday King.

This is where he appoints himself the world’s thirty first reigning sovereign monarch and marches around the house referring to himself in the third person. Sample conversation from last night:

X: You can either A), feed the boy, B) change the boy or C) lay there like a slug. 

H: I shall choose C. for I am the Birthday King and it is good to be the King.

X: Well then I guess I’LL do A and B.

H: (inaudible)

X: Did you just say “watch your attitude?”

H: I said, “It is with much gratitude.”

Thankfully the boy is too young to bow down. Oh, and Birthday King? Sneaking in and dousing me with ice water will not stop me from singing Raffi in the shower.  It will just make me ornery.

I like to oot, oot, oot ooples and ba noo noos…

The husband went out and bought one of the worst shirts I have ever seen. It’s a horrific Tommy Bahama featuring hibiscuses and hula girls and it was on sale for I’m sure a number of reasons. He was inexplicably excited about it and insisted on wearing it out with the guys Saturday night.  (Our friends Tom and Anita have a new baby girl. Everyone came over to our house for drinks, then the guys went out leaving the women to make dinner and coo over the babies.)

As he was getting dressed, I tried to talk him out of wearing the new shirt. I reasoned that in addition to being a silk blend, short-sleeved and bright orange, it was November, and he’d be too cold.  "It's a summer shirt."  He replied, with a straight face, “Oh, I’m wearin’ it Spicoli style.”  Yes, Spicoli style. He wore the damn thing with long underwear. Cream colored, waffle weave thermal long underwear. Oh, the humanity.  I comforted myself with the thought that maybe it was so incredibly uncool that somewhere, it might be cool. Like trucker hats.

As for the women and baby party, I made seared Ahi tuna over greens.  I do a great soy/lime vinaigrette and with toasted almonds and mandarin oranges.  The whole thing is to die for. Anyway.  The new baby is beautiful.  Anita is Latina and Latina babies are born with the craziest heads of hair. Hannah Gabrielle has more hair than the husband and it’s black, shiny and sticks out in all directions.  One friend said, “She going to be a model!” and I said, ‘Derek Zoolander.” (Oops.  Filter ON. Note to self, don’t make fun of other people’s babies.)  Here they are side by side. You be the judge. Blue Steel

And just because I can’t go a post with out a cute picture of Beck.  Here he is in the jaunty cap that Aunt Steph and Uncle Drew brought him.  The tag read “Tartan Spanky.”  I think this ranks right up there with the bonnet. This cap could be made better only by a Green pom-pon on top.  Ooh!  I’m going to go Google baby “tam O’shanters” right now.

In need of Tech advice:  the husband left Tab World up and running the other day and his laptop has been ravaged by spyware and adware and other Trojan horse type of infections.  I spent most of last night installing clean-up software and deleting programs that had installed themselves, “Honey, did you really want to bookmark Grannies Who Love C*ck?”  Tonight I’m just going to suck it up and do a System Restore. I told him next time just go out and eff a crack whore.  He’ll catch less.

Seed of Chucky

Cumming soon to a theater near you....

Who thinks this is a good idea? How, exactly, was this pitched to studio heads?
"Get a Load of Chucky"

Visualize: an ejaculating Chucky. Chucky's "Oh Face," (oh! oh! oh!)
There you go. Now try and get some work done.. .