The Psychopedia

Episode 108: How to Get Your Own Reality Show

2011-07-27T09:35:00.000-07:00

Oh, I know, you think it's easy! I mean, everyone has a reality show these days. I wan't even surprised yesterday when I turned on the tee-vee to see my neighbor mowing her lawn for three hours. Then I realized I was looking out the window and not at the tee-vee at all but nonetheless it was a riveting three hours. I should pitch that to Bravo. "Middle Class Mowing with Saggy-Boobed Sally."

My friend Beth and I had this idea about fifteen years ago for a television show called "Cooking With Booze." It was pretty much as titled, where we would cook a meal and at the same time drink a little and talk about the day's gossip. We thought it was an awesome idea and even had contacts high up enough to pitch it but no one thought it was a very good idea. And now practically every tee-vee show is like this, not to mention that My Drunk Kitchen girl to whom I will not even link because I am still so resentful that she got a very similar idea to work that I am going to go have a drink right this very second and it is only 11:41 in the morning.

After we gave up our lifelong (well, ten-minute-long) dream of "Cooking With Booze" we had an idea to do one called "Sloooow Food" where we would cook one meal over the course of eight episodes. And then at the end we would sit down and eat it for four more. It's like an Andy Warhol-type idea, or filming paint actually drying. Ooooh, paint-drying, mental note. But if you watch HGTV, you see the home-redo equivalent of that same idea with that one lady re-doing a house over the course of a season. And we would have done it without the bitchy assistant.

Anyway, you should think of a reality show to have. Because someone, somewhere is interested in what you are doing. I mean: don't look at me; I could not BE less interested! But don't underestimate how many brain-damaged people there are out there just starved for information about your life. I mean, hellllo, Facebook.

Episode 107: How to Piss Someone Off

2011-05-19T08:05:00.001-07:00

The list of ways to piss someone off is a long and varied one, but there is one surefire way that shows up as #1 on almost everyone's roundup: towing someone's car. I'm not sure why it makes people so mad, but it certainly does.

When I worked at a restaurant years and years ago, we had a very complicated parking lot and if a patron didn't pay attention to the signs as he or she parked, it was quite easy to block in fifteen or twenty cars. When it happened, we would try to find the person responsible, but it was a big place with several rooms and it was hard to keep up with who was driving the giant Hummer. I guess we could have asked "who has the smallest penis in this room? Ah, you sir, your Hummer is blocking in all the cars, please move it." But frankly, it was just easier to call Slappy Steve's Citywide Towing and say "load it up!"

So we did. Time and time again. And every single time the tow-ee got ratcheted up to Level Five Million on the anger level. Which always struck me as a funny tactic; what were we going to do? Say "gosh, your red face certainly makes a convincing argument, sir! I have seen the error of my ways and I will turn the clock back in time to before you were a complete asshole and too stupid to read the parking signs!"

About half the time, they'd pull the "I know the owner" routine, which at the time was like saying "I have feet," because everyone knew the owner; he was standing right there waving at everyone. The other half of the time, they'd threaten to kill us -- which at that particular time in my life would have been a welcome mercy. "Bring it," I would think. Alas, no one ever brought it.

I had a friend who was known as the Parking Nazi at the restaurant where he worked. He would tow a pregnant, one-legged blind lady's car if he had the chance and he'd twirl his mustache and cackle while he did it. That was the same restaurant we later trashed during a Christmas party by putting pool balls in the toilets. Heh heh heh. That's another way to piss someone off: fuck up the toilets. Heh heh heh. Pool balls in the toilets. Good times.

Episode 106: How to Navigate Sibling Rivalry

2010-12-09T16:37:00.000-08:00

So my sister and I are almost three years apart in age; I'm older chronologically, but she's older in all the responsible aspects. Like for example: she has a savings account ... while I still practice my Oscar speech. Because 44-year-olds break into the movie business and rise to the top all the time. I'm sure I'll think of one in a minute.

Anyway. When we were teenagers, we were very different in another way. She liked Loverboy, I like Olivia Newton-John. Her room was plastered with giant posters of Mike Reno's red-leather-clad ass, mine was covered with Livvy's pool-deep eyes, beckoning me to come take her hand, she is maaaagic, she won't let her aim ever strayyyyyy....nothing can stand in our waaay..... she'll be guiiiiding meeee. I mean, when I wasn't drawing pastel portraits of her exercising, I would sit around and kiss album covers with her on them and I was old enough to have hair on my legs, so that was something pathetic, lemme tell you.

It was two worlds that could never, ever meet and that difference manifested itself a lot of times - we fought constantly. Not just sit-around-the-fire tossing witty insults sort of fighting, but real fighting. And one time, we got into a monster fight and I threw a ladderback chair at her, and then she hit me in the head with a cast iron skillet. That really is the etching Currier and Ives forgot to etch and hand-color, if you ask me: the two of us locked in mortal embrace brandishing weapons that could only be found in an Amish kitchen.

So that fight got us in trouble, needless to say, because our mother really liked that chair. We were both sent to our rooms, which were next to each other in the hallway. We tuned our respective radios to our favorite stations - she was 103 KDF, I was Kix 104 - and laid down on the floor with just our head sticking out into the hallway so we could continue to taunt each other. "You're a drama nerd," she hissed. "Your hair is jacked up like a furry, tire-less Camaro!," was my witty riposte. "No one likes you or your stupid new nubby-weave double-breasted jacket, you nerd," she said, attacking my quite confident fashion sense, the usual low road for blunt types, if you ask me. "And besides," she continued, "Olivia Newton-John is a lesbian and she will NEVER LOVE YOU."

All lies! LIES LIES LIES! Now that I think about it, I will never forgive her for these lies, even all these years later! She is sleeping upstairs right now and I have a brand new smothering pillow from The Company Store. Hang on ... be right back.

Episode 105: How to Deal with Black Friday

2010-11-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

How you deal with Black Friday has a lot to do with which end of it you are on. Retail workers deal with it completely differently than the shoppers do. Like for example: when I worked in a bookstore on Black Friday, I took two Xanax. It sure made the day go by and at one point I was so relaxed I peed in my pants. But anyway! That's a stroll down memory lane I don't feel like taking right now.

My sister works retail. She has for a long time. Once she managed a doodad store that got particularly busy the day after Thanksgiving. Maybe this was because they sold Christmas cards and Christmas ornaments and Christmas aprons and Christmas menorahs and whathaveyou. Or maybe it was a coincidence. But anyway. She tricked a friend and me into helping her that day, telling me I would have such fun wrapping gifts and festooning gift boxes with ribbons and geegaws. But that is not how the day unfolded. It was more like the Bataan Death March, only there were a lot of lavender M&Ms and a whole bunch of orange ribbon.

My sister was very good at her job. She could do that fake smile thing and that "ohmigod, HI! Isn't that fifty-dollar marabou napkin ring just a HOOT! I just think it's DARLING!" and you had no idea that she was secretly thinking "I hope you die soon, shitface." But she was. That's what she was thinking. And that's what every single retail worker thinks on Black Friday. So be nice, shitface.

Episode 104: How to Have an Awkward Thanksgiving

2010-11-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I don't really have a Thanksgiving story. My family hasn't been a Thanksgiving-type of family in over twenty years, so I don't have any charming stories about MeeMaw chopping the head off a turkey (though I do have a distant relative named Georgia Lou who once chopped the head off of a snapping turtle) or PeePaw trudging through the snow dragging a sled full of oranges into the yard or whatever those olden-tyme pilgrimmy tradtions call for.

So then I was thinking that I would instead tell you the story of when a whole bunch of white friends almost burned down a black church on the 4th of July. There were fireworks involved - wayward fireworks - that whizzed around and smashed through the window of the church on the corner and when the fire truck got there, the inside curtains were on fire. There was whiskey and beer and a whole bunch of lesbians involved. Can you imagine the news coverage that could have been? My head is in a fevered state just thinking about it.

But since I wasn't there for that, I don't think I can tell that story either. So you will have to insert your own holiday-themed story into this episode of the Psychopedia. I can't do all the work, you know.

Episode 103: How to Read "Lolita"

2010-11-08T14:46:00.000-08:00

Okay, so art school. It's a lot of fun and very very hard and challenging but it is not exactly rigorous when it comes to the non-art-related fields. There was some silly one-semester-minute requirement for other liberal arts and they mainly consisted of classes called things like "Turning the Page: How to Turn the Page of a Book" or "Why Books are Rectangular." But there were a couple of really interesting classes taught by professors from the nearby fancypants university who would cross North Parkway and slum a little. One of the classes was called "The Search for the Great America Novel." We read six books - "Absalom, Absalom!," "Pictures of Fidelman," something else, something else and a Nabokov double feature, "Pale Fire" and "Lolita," which I had read before.

Now these English classes at art school were made up of a motley crew of people -- mainly people willing to be there at 8 in the morning for the easy "pass." This particular class had examples of the opposite poles of art school students in it. One was named Anne and I loved her. She wore pajamas to class and was always making nutty provocative art, like a self-portrait bust of herself made from Underwood potted meat. The other was Judy, who was an older lady who did large ultra-realistic pastel drawings of, oh, parakeets sitting on perches and she was always the one screeching out "I don't get why this is art" if someone brought in a drawing of a vulva to drawing class, which, coincidentally, Anne would do with almost mind-numbing regularity.

So! We get to "Lolita." Judy comes in in an absolute fury, demanding to know why we have been assigned this book when we shouldn't even be reading fiction! We should be reading true stories, like the BIBLE! Not this filth about a young girl and a father figure having sex in every little seedy motel in America. And there sat Anne in her patchouli-scented pajamas, grinning from ear to ear as she puffed a cigarette (ok, maybe not but in my memory she did) - who then leveled the room more effectively than Fat Man and Little Boy took care of Hiroshima - with one simple little question: "oh Judy, for god's sake. Haven't you ever imagined screwing your daddy?"

Now. Have you ever watched a watermelon be thrown from the top of a building onto the pavement below? That's pretty much what Judy's head looked like right before the screaming match began. And it was a screaming match as yet unrivaled, and that includes all of reality TV since then. I just sat there laughing - along with the professor - and doodling my new tattoo idea, which included the phrase "I Heart Anne 4-Ever."

I haven't kept up with either of them; I'm sure Judy's off in some windowless church putting a snake back in a box. Anne? Who knows. She's either in jail or a professor somewhere; I certainly hope it's the latter and she's spending her days opening the eyes of horrible, stupid Judys everywhere.

Episode 102: How to Bake a Pie

2010-10-21T06:10:00.000-07:00

I used to work at a movie theatre. Don't get too excited, it's not as fun as it sounds. But it was more fun than other jobs I have had, so it all evens out on the Fun-o-meter©. Anyway, it was a theatre that had six screens and all the movies basically started at the same time so we'd have a half-hour of stuff to do and then an hour of absolutely nothing to do. You could eat free popcorn and I certainly took advantage of that. There was one whole summer where I was worried that if it got too hot outside, I would actually explode like a Jiffy Pop pan.

We found lots of ways to occupy the downtime. We told one new employee that as part of his training he had to get in the popcorn warmer, which he did. We closed it and walked off and left him in there. Ha ha ha, stupid Mitch. Sometimes we had to check the bathrooms because we had a gentleman who would come to the movies and then go to the men's lavatory and remove all of his clothes, fold them and put them in a neat little pile and then just stand in the middle of the bathroom and greet people as they came in. "Hello," the naked man would say, waving.

One day, three of my co-workers had an eating dare. One of them had to eat an entire jar of mayonnaise. Then one had to drink a mayonnaise jar full of pickle juice. The third had to then drink the same jar full of Fanta Orange soda syrup. I didn't think the pickle juice sounded so bad, but I wasn't involved; I was preoccupied with popcorn. All three completed their dares and I think only Bob the mayonnaise eater puked. He'll correct me in the comments, I'm sure. But to this day he won't eat mayonnaise, and it's been twenty-five years.

Anyway, I could eat a whole pie.

(Please add Moon Pies to the approved list in your mind.)

Episode 101: How to Bathe Your Dog

2010-09-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

OK, so. We used to get birds in our house all the time. They would fly down the chimney and then hide in dark corners of the dining room until the moment we were preparing the samovar and then they would LEAP out from behind the curtains with their wings all atwitter and would get all up in our faces until we fell over with heart failure and then Fanny, our 100-year old cat, would jump six feet straight up and snatch the bird out of mid air and kill it right there on the spot. It got to where she would just sit in front of the fireplace and let them fly into her mouth as they came down the chimney.

So one time I decided to bathe our little dog Bernie, who was also a hundred years old. He was difficult to bathe, all shaky and twisty and jumpy and screamy. It made a big mess so the only way to do it was to just strip down and be prepared to get wet. So I was in the bathroom in my underwear with a screaming dog and a bathtub full of suds and it was all steamy so I had my glasses off. And I reached up to push my hair out of my face and....there was a bird on my head. WELL! I threw the dog down in to the water and banged against the sink and banged against the door and fell down on the floor and the whole time the bird was beating his wings against my head, which was probably not helping the stroke I was having. And the whole time, Little Bernie is squeeeeeeeeeling at the top of his lungs, too small to jump out of the tub as the water rose.

It's like one of those Saturday morning cliffhangers, isn't it? What would I do? How would it end? I wish I could say that the door creeeeeeaaaaaked open and ta-da! Fanny to the rescue, wearing a little tiny cat-cape, fangs dripping, tail twitching! But, alas, no -- she was asleep on my boudoir pillow. I eventually fell into a stack of towels and was able to cover the nasty little thing and throw it outside, where it promptly flew back up to its chimney nest and eventually down the chimney into Fanny's salivating jaws. And Bernie did not drown.

Episode 100: How to Act at a Restaurant

2010-08-28T07:39:00.001-07:00

This entry could have many many different accompanying stories; it was hard to narrow it down to just one that encapsulates the working-in-a-restaurant-or bar experience. I could tell about the time my friend Suzy put lit firecrackers in the tampon machine in the ladies' room of a favorite bar. I could tell about the time my own sister poured a pitcher of ice water into the lap of a drunk Vanderbilt girl (I know, that's redundant) who wouldn't leave a lit candle alone. But those are their stories to tell so I will tell you one about myself instead.

Easter Sunday brunch is the absolute worst shift a restaurant employee can work. Well, maybe Mother's Day wins by a nose, but either way, you have to deal with a million people who are having a meal with people that they as a rule cannot stand. I was working for some friends at a restaurant they had recently opened and this was the first Easter Sunday they had weathered. I was helping at the front door and by ten o'clock, there were fifty parties milling around outside on the sidewalk. I drank my Bloody Mary and opened the doors. We didn't have a real system for dealing with the wait list, so we had a yellow legal pad and a pencil. We also didn't have a way of calling you when your name came up, so I would write down brief, coded descriptions to help me find them when I needed. "Flipflops" meant "the filthy hipster with dirty feet." "Lily Pulitzer" meant "look for the idiot in pink and green." "Christian" meant "gaaaaaay."

The next four hours unfolded predictably. That is to say, disastrously. Like a Hurricane Katrina-style disaster and that is not an exaggeration. People wept when they heard that the wait would be two hours. They wheedled and bribed and begged and used their crying baby-type-children-things as props. A woman made her own mother pretend to limp so I would move them up the list. The healed acted sick and the sick acted dead. At two o'clock, when we were set to close, I still had forty names on the list and I had lost ten pounds, despite my constant Bloody Mary consumption over the course of the day. My mood had soured considerably and I had run out of mood-neutral nicknames for people on the list and I was extremely unhappy at the supposed reappearance of Jesus and resolved to take it up with him later and ask why he bothered to come back and save all these bitches who wanted their crab cakes and WANTED THEM NOW. You know why it took him three days to get up and push the rock door open? Because his table was finally ready.

Anyway. I cleaned off a table and returned to my post at the door where, much to my dismay, a dressed-up church lady was holding my yellow legal pad and fixing me with a beady glare. "So," she hissed. "I need to know: am I 'Fat Pants' or am I 'Bitchface'?" You could practically hear the theme from "Jaws" shuddering under the scene as I weighed my options. "Um, well. The bad news is that you are indeed, um, 'Fat Pants.' The good news is that your table is ready."

This was a risky strategy...it could have gone either way: she could have slapped me or she could have laughed and shrugged it off. There was a long pause as she mulled over these options and took my full measure from head to toe and back again. "'Fat Pants' it is," she intoned. "I'm starving."

And I led her to her table in triumph, with crowds cheering and streamers and glitter showering me from above.

Episode 99: How to Dress for a Costume Party

2010-08-26T08:20:00.001-07:00

It's almost September! You know what that means! You should have your Halloween costume completely finished and wrapped in tissue and kept in a fireproof box in case your house burns down. Because nothing is more important than winning the costume contest at Halloween. You can rebuild your house from smoldering embers, but you cannot - repeat, cannot - earn a trophy and a free oil change at Jiffy Lube if you don't show up in an outfit and win the contest on Halloween.

There used to be a big summer event here that benefitted the local film festival. Every year there was a theme - Science Fiction, Fellini, etc. - and one year there was a James Bond theme. I of course wore a ladies' bathing suit and a scuba mask and won the contest; I was Ursula Andress. But I have a friend who went wrapped simply in a bedsheet, wearing a velvet choker. She looked like every single morning-after James Bond conquest and it was a much better concept than me stuffed into a bathing suit, looking like a can of biscuits had just exploded. In hindsight, she probably should have won. But she can have my trophy when I die. Otherwise, what would sit on my mantle in the interim?

Anyway, this year's concept isn't quite clear to me yet. In this Era of Reality Television, there are a lot of options. Snooki feels a little last year. Any of the Real Housewives would be good but it's a little niche; if you have to explain the joke, then it isn't a good costume. The ladies of The View is always a good idea - as long as I can be Joy. But I'm not quite sure yet. Maybe I'll just stay home. Halloween this year falls on a Sunday. That's Mad Men night. Ohhhhh, waaaaaait.......

Episode 98: How to Get into Trouble

2010-08-24T18:29:00.000-07:00

Okay so this one time I was living with my mom outside of Atlanta; I was in the five-year-old department. We lived in a nice apartment complex called Tanglewood; I remember it very clearly,...it had little fake timbers like we were living in Robin Hood's refugee camp. Anyway. We were the last apartment on the end of one of the buildings and if you walked across the parking lot and down a little slope, there was a swimming pool.

My uncle - who must have lived nearby; this part is fuzzy - once threw me in that pool to teach me to swim. It was barbaric, but it worked. I mean...I'm here aren't I? My uncle also had a maid named Sally who looked after me in the afternoon. One day, while Sally was watching me, I sneaked (snuck?) away and walked down the hill and jumped in the pool and swam around until I looked like a really white raisin. The problem was I did not tell Sally I was going to the pool and she lost her ever-lovin' mind looking for me. I was finally located by her laser-beam eyes and thrown into the back of a pickup truck, whereupon I was delivered to my uncle, who was building a restaurant at the time (I remember! I was called Mrs Boomer's! What Georgia town was this? Athens? Marietta? Kennesaw? one of them, I'm sure). I sat in the back of the truck in the parking lot and waited and waited and waited for hours. Or maybe it was five minutes...you know how things are when you're a kid and you know the hammer's about to come down.

And then my uncle walked across the parking lot, dropped the tailgate and spanked the hell out of me. Don't worry, Oprah...it wasn't abusive; it was instructive. To this day, I do what I am told and people named Sally terrify me. They should just load up a plane full of Sallys and let them loose in Afghanistan because when you see a big ol' Sally wearing an apron headed your way waving a rolling pin, you put up your hands and surrender. I can't even watch The Sally Field program with the grown kids and the problems, whatever it's called. Because in addition to her Sallyness, she also has brittle bones and I always worry that she hasn't taken her Boniva.

I think my uncle also spanked me once because I refused to eat a tomato. But maybe that's something I should share with my therapist.

Episode 97: How to Bust Up a Crack Deal

2010-08-23T12:11:00.001-07:00

So I've been volunteering at a local cultural event-type thing and it's fun and exciting and I get to be outside for a couple of hours a night but you know what else? Other people are outside too and by other people, I do not mean the pinot-noir-sipping types who are attending the event. No, I mean there are people who make their living outside. And I do not mean squirrels, though they also ply their trade in the out-of-doors, generally. Also I have discovered that I do not like to talk to people. Well, close: I do not mind talking to people, I just do not like them to talk back. When I am done with my spiel, I am done with my spiel. Take your little sticker and go sit the fuck down, buddy.

La la la, so there I was with my donation bucket and a drunken lady person came up to me and asked for money. I said no and explained that maybe she didn't really get the general concept of which direction the money was supposed to be going so then she went and leaned against a tree where a few minutes later a gentleman in a Tommy Bahama-style ensemble approached her and handed her a little bag and then he left. And then a few minutes later there was a very distinct smell that does not smell like anything you can buy at Bath and Body Works because they last time I went there, they did not have a candle scent called "Hot Tin Foil."

So I ambled over in her general direction (I was nervous that there were so many kids running around - look at me caring!) and clanked my metal donation bucket ominously and the lady staggered off and fell over a curb and hauled herself back up and disappeared into the night.

And that lady was....Tanya Tucker! No, no, not really. I shouldn't say that, she is a nice lady. My mother once made a stained glass window for her bathroom and it was very exciting when Tanya Tucker called the house to discuss the details and I answered. I almost asked her if she was putting the stained glass window in her mansion in the sky but I chickened out.

I don't know who the crack lady really was, but I'm sure it was someone. Lorrie Morgan ain't doing anything.

Episode 96: How to Clean the Gutters

2010-08-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, I confess I have no idea how to clean the gutters. It's one of those things like laundry where once you start doing it, you're never really done with it so why start in the first place, right?

I live in a two-story house with a basement that's on a slope so when you look at it from the back, it's a three-story house. We hired this company to come clean the gutters on the backside of the house because I only have a twelve-foot-ladder and while I'm no Stephen Hawking, I am pretty sure three stories is higher than twelve feet. This guy - who was on his first day of work with this company - showed up and stretched out his big-ass ladder and he shimmied up it and hopped out onto the top of the house and then promptly slipped and fell. He bounced down onto the second floor roof, taking the third-story gutter with him. Then he bounced onto the first-floor roof and yanked the second floor gutter with him. Then he fell off into the oblivion that should have ended in the back yard but he accidentally grabbed the power line that led into the house and that electrocuted him, which certainly didn't come in handy when he fell on the metal stairs leading to the pantry door which he then bounced down, one at a time, denting each one. Then he was relieved to be over with it until he landed on the concrete patio and smashed his head wide open. Oh, and no one was home so he laid there for an hour.

But don't worry! Everything ends happily! ... we got new gutters.

Episode 95: How to Shop at the Liquor Store

2010-08-07T17:17:00.000-07:00

Yeah so, I have a god-daughter. Can you imagine? Someone said: "hey DG, I would like to entrust my daughter's spiritual education to you in case I die in a lawnmower accident or am accidentally poisoned like that guy on 'Big Love.'" I mean: really? On whose list am I even in the top ten thousand when it comes to spiritual development? Even my dog kneels and prays and then when she's done, she looks at me reproachfully as if to say "I ain't bringing any tennis balls to HELL, so you better get your SHIT together..."

One day, my close friend (let's say) Shmoozy* took god-daughter (hmm, ok, let's say) Shamille* on a series of errands. One of the errands involved going to Wal-Mart, one involved visiting a hair salon called Hair It Is and one involved going to the liquor store. Luckily for Shmoozy*, this particular liquor store had a child-friendly play area, presumably provided to give the ladies of the local metropolis enough time to peruse the aisles to select a poison to dull their particular sorrow. Not that Shmoozy* would need such a thing! No,no, she ain't no Real Housewife! She knows how to do it already! Anyway, it was the usual sort of play area: a pit of colored balls, a rocking horse, a mobile made of rusty nails and insulin needles. But Shmoozy* plopped my god-daughter into the little plastic-fenced-off area and went on her merry way, looking at the "pinots" and the "cabs" and the "whathaveyous" that are available here in our little corner of America. In other words: jars of moonshine.

So after a few minutes of browsing the new release section, Shmoozy* made her choices, checked her five cases of liquor out and then tried to retrieve Shamille* from the play area, whereupon Shamille* threw a hissy fit and screamed I NEVER WANT TO LEAVE THE LIQUOR STORE...I LOVE IT HERE.

Which explains my godfather position in a nutshell, if you ask me....

*not their actual names. Suzy and Camille are their actual names.

Episode 94: How to Deal With Snakes

2010-08-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

I don't have an overarching morality tale for this one, just a series of snake-related anecdotes of varying terrifying degrees:

1. I have been terrified of snakes ever since I saw Rikki Tikki Tavi and spent several nights wide awake, keenly aware of the nest of cobras under my bed.

2. There was a movie called "Ssssss" that had a scene where a woman was in her bathtub and the drain thing popped off and a bunch of snakes slithered into her bathtub. Not since Janet Leigh took a shower at the Bates Motel has there been such a frightening bathtub-related psychological trauma. I don't take a bath or a shower: I just rub an ice cube around.

3. My mom won't even say the word "snake." She says "you-know-what." "Your father killed a you-know-what in the side yard today." "Your father ran over a you-know-what on our camping trip. Wouldn't it be funny if "you-know-what" turned out to be something other than snakes? Like Belgian people, maybe? And my father was some sort of person who had a problem with Belgians? Ha ha, yes, that would be funny.

4. I went on a series of hikes in lovely parks around the state and on every hike, I saw a snake. In every instance but one, the snake was coming across the trail from the right to the left. So now I basically hike sideways, facing the right.

5. I have a friend who defends snakes and says they eat fifty pounds of mosquitoes a day or ten mice or something. I stop paying attention when I hear "snake" and just run in the opposite direction in general. Plus, he is clearly lying, in that way people who say "oh, this habanero won't burn!" and "oh, I'm sure there are no rusty, tetanus-loaded car bodies just beneath the surface of this brown quarry water!" are always lying.

6. I was planning a trip to the lovely, dark and swampy Congaree National Park. Then I ran across an FAQ for it and the first question on the list was "what are those snakes that keep falling from the trees into the boat?" Now I am going to Mammoth Cave.

Episode 93: How To Go to the Post Office

2010-07-25T07:12:00.000-07:00

One time I went to the post office. This doesn't happen a lot, as the post office near me is clearly some sort of way-station for people training to be brain-damaged greeters at some Wal-Mart of Doom located on the banks of the River Styx. It really is the most unnerving experience to go to this post office because you just can't believe that these people made it to the post office without being hit by cars or swooped up by birds that pick on lesser beings. It takes about eight seconds to see that half of the people in there have mis-buttoned blouses and drool down their fronts. And that's just the postal clerks.

ANYWAY. One time I went to the post office and the lady several people front of me set two wine glasses on the counter and asked that they be packed up and sent to her sister. Here is a transcript of the ensuing conversation:

Postal Clerk: I'm sorry ma'am, but I can't pack those up for you. We just mail things.
Lady: But I have to get these to my sister before her gift gets to me.
Postal Clerk: That's fine but that's not what we do. Some supplies are over on the counter there, feel free to use them and then we'll get this on the way to your sister.
Lady: FINE. (stomps over to counter and packs up wine glasses by stuffing them in a Priority Mail pouch and returns to counter)
Postal Clerk: (sigh) Well, I'll tape this up for you, I guess. Now we'll need an address.
Lady: (sighs) I don't know it. She's right down the street, two houses down from this post office.
Postal Clerk: Uhm, then since these glasses- packed like this - are going to break anyway and since it's so close, why don't you just deliver this lovely gift to her in person?
Lady: Oh, we haven't spoken in thirty years.

With that, the postal clerk figured out the address, taped up the box, took her money and threw the package in the big canvas cart behind him, where I could clearly hear both glasses shatter upon impact.

Episode 92: How to Be Modest

2010-07-20T07:36:00.000-07:00

So this one time, when I was in art school, the entire student body lost their minds at the same time and elected me as the Secretary of Student Council. My friend Russell ran as President, my future roommate Allison ran as Vice-President and my current roommate Dani ran as Treasurer. We all won, swept into Manchurian-Candidate-level power on what could only be called the "Hi, We're Drunk" ticket. I don't think we did a single thing during our term except throw a Halloween party (I went as an Arab) at an abandoned body shop where everyone had to sign an insurance release in case the floor collapsed. We also had a lot of "meetings" that were lavishly catered by Pizza Hut. So when you want to know where your "student activity fees" are going, college students, look at the waistlines of your elected officials because I can assure you some things never change.

Anyway. The Vice-President Allison and I had to go on a local cable access show to promote an upcoming student show. Vice-President Allison brought this incredible book she had made that was shaped like a three-dimensional hand and I brought an abstract drawing drawing I was working on that was from what came to be known as "The Drunken Smudgy Series, With Scratchy Bits." Vice-President Allison talked and talked so eloquently about her book and then the badger-faced TV hostess turned to me and the drawing I was holding and asked "and who did this drawing?" Somehow I knew this was not the time to shine a light on myself. So without missing a beat, I said "Lady, I have no idea." Which turned out to be fortuitous because the hostess then held it up to the camera - upside-down - and said "I don't get this at all! What is it? Is it a cat?" and I repeated what I had decided was now my mantra: "Lady, I have no idea." And she went on for ten minutes about how "art is such a mystery, isn't it?! I mean, anyone can do anything and say 'It's art!' and who are we to argue, right?"

Lady, I have no idea.

Episode 91: How to Know Where You Are

2010-07-17T07:01:00.000-07:00

So this one time I went to a wedding in Wisconsin. I was the plus-one. I sort of knew the groom and I knew the person I went with and I knew one other person who also knew the person I went with but, hmmm, not everyone was talking to each other, so needless to say it was like a wedding from Lifetime TV where Tori Spelling plays someone and then someone else either cries, dies and/or sleeps with danger. Oh and the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile was there.

Anyway, Wisconsin was really beautiful. I had no idea before I went that it would be as pretty as it was. I thought it was all going to look like where Laverne and Shirley lived before they moved to California (which they shouldn't have done, right? Am I right?) and I thought it would smell beer-ish, but no, it was bucolic and all rolling-hillsy and blue skies and dairies and there was a mustard museum (did you know you can spend ninety dollars on mustard? Well, you can. It was in Mt Horeb but I just looked it up and it has moved to Middleton, which is where the wedding was! So don't go to Mt Horeb looking for it, though there are also big statues of trolls there) and The House on the Rock, which is like porno for hoarders.

But Wisconsin was missing two things: salad and black people. Seriously, this food. I mean. I've never seen so much meat and cheese in all my life. I was so excited when I went through the food line at the wedding, and there was this GIANT bowl of salad. And when I went back through it a half hour later, the exact same amount of salad was still in the bowl. No one was eating the salad. But oh my goodness, they enjoyed their various sliced meats and stuffed meats and meat on top of meat and meat wrapped around meat, washed down with some meat and then some meat for dessert, with a meat sorbet thrown in there somewhere. And then they cut the wedding cake, which was made of meat.

Episode 90: How to Go to a Craft Fair

2010-07-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

Ok, so in theory I should really love craft fairs. I like hand-made things and I like chicken gyros and you can usually find both of these things at a craft fair. But I do not like craft fairs. I keep going to them, trying to figure out what the big deal is and I have come to the conclusion that there is indeed no big deal at all. I mean: if I wanted to see grown-up hippie women wearing no makeup, I can just go to nice air-conditioned Whole Foods...I don't need to traipse around in the hot July sun looking at butter churns made out of petrified corn-husks to do it.

Another thing about them that makes me crazy is that while yes, I admire the raku salt and pepper shakers (and I do), I do not have to respect the fact that they are $110. Do they pour out salt granules in some fancy way? Does the pepper fly around the room after coming out of one of the porcelain holes? Because for $110 dollars, it better. In the end, they are still just salt and pepper shakers and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some things are only supposed to cost $5 and they should never ever cost more than that. I am also looking at you, heirloom tomatoes. You're a fucking tomato. One dollar.

Episode 89: How to Beat the Summer Heat

2010-07-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

OK, so I went to college in Memphis. I know, it sounds so genteel and Southern and wouldn't it be great sitting around on porches and singing "Hound Dog" all the livelong day but let me tell you something: "Memphis" is an Egyptian word that means "hot as fuck." I have no memories of my four and a half years in Memphis that do not involve me attempting to cope with the sweltering, overwhelming heat. One January, it snowed six or seven inches and my memory of even that is that it was still ninety-seven degrees. In the shade.

I was also incredibly poor during my time there. I would eat Nabisco Saltines and Peter Pan peanut butter for weeks on end - to this day, I get queasy if there is too much peanut sauce on my Thai food. Anyway, one summer - the hottest summer in the history of summers; a summer so hot the glass in the window panes slumped - I was so poor that the electricity in my apartment got turned off. I was in-between paychecks, so I couldn't run right down to Memphis Light, Gas and Water and have them flip the switch, so I had to suffer ten long days without my window unit air conditioner or my little box fan or even ice cubes from the freezer. I passed the ten days and nights by filling up the bathtub with cold water and lighting a few candles and clambering in the tub and reading "Lolita" and then "Jude the Obscure." Both benefitted from my near delirium brought on by heat-induced brain-fever and both are now among my favorite books. And now both of those books are fused together in my brain, each one a parenthesis around the hottest ten days of my life.

Episode 88: How to Make a New Year's Resolution

2009-12-28T07:28:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so New Years' Resolutions. I never make them, and I'm always surprised at the ones people do make. "I'm going to practice my figure skating more!" You figure skate? Uh, okay, hi dork. "I'm going to perform a good deed for the needy every day." Okay, well, here's my routing number; please deposit fifty dollars into my account every day and wa-la! Mission accomplished!

Anyway, last year, my mother decided that her resolution was to not sit in the back seat of cars. Shotgun only. Which I thought was a funny resolution because it's incredibly selfish. Needless to say, it was a resolution I could get behind, like, say, "From now on, I will only let other people pick up the check." So the car thing: the four family members would walk to the car and Mom would stand next to the front passenger door and studiously avoid making eye contact with anyone until the door locks shot up and then she'd whisk herself into the seat, slam the door and fasten the safety belt in one quick series of movements and then she'd shout "we're off!"

She made it to April before there was a conflict. Because in April, my dad had a heart attack. He was in the early stage of it when my sister and I got there so we decided to just haul him the two miles to the hospital rather than wait for the ambulance and we all rushed out of the house and ran to the car and riiiight as we got there, I wondered: "will she do it? Will she refuse to give up the seat?" There was a flurry of activity as I threw some boxes from the back seat into the way-back and then when I looked up, everyone was in place, waiting for the other doors to open.

Sooo, dear reader, what did she do? Did she give up ownership of her seat to her dearly beloved husband without thinking about it? Or did she take one look at my father, who was not unconscious or dying and in fact just seemed a little more irritating than usual, and slide into the front seat, her newly self-declared rightful place?

I'll leave you to decide. But careful with the comments...she reads this!

Episode 87: How to Decorate a Christmas Tree

2009-12-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

Okay so here we are again at Christmas and every year, starting in like March, the arguments start up again. No, not the ones about Obama....those started in late January. No, what I mean is the old "where are we putting the Christmas tree this year" one. We've had it in so many rooms that we forget about it sometimes and one year we opened a door in mid-April and saw a fully decorated Christmas tree still standing there.

We used to be live-tree people and then all of a sudden we weren't. I think it was the year I got it into my head that we were going to take the tree to some magical wood chipper and get it back as mulch and so we went off to do that and when I sold my car a few years later, the guy asked "what the hell size air freshener do you have in here" that was the last year of the live tree. And when we go fake, we go fake. Big white plastic tree with lights attached to the branches. It only takes eleven hours to put all the limbs on it and then after a bottle or two of wine, we start decorating it. My favorite ornament is the golden peanut and when I find it in the box, I hang it up and that is the official signal that I am now done with tree-decorating. So I go pour some more wine and watch my sister do all the rest while I do color commentary and in general criticize her ornament placement as bourgeois.

Anyway, have a happy holiday and remember that all that really matters about your Christmas tree is that it's never going to be as pretty as mine.

Episode 86: How to Get Something for Nothing

2009-09-17T18:30:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a land far away - well, Virginia, anyway - my parents discovered that they were going to move to back to our ancestral homeland, North Carolina. Well, one of them discovered it anyway - Mom. Dad had orchestrated the whole thing! I think the exact announcement was "la la la, get off your ass and pack everything up, lady! We're moving!" Yes, I'm pretty sure that is an exact quotation but then again, I'm no stenographer.

Anyway, in their Virginia dining room, they had this cheap-ass polyester Oriental rug bought from whatever the equivalent of Target was at the time. It was a burnt orange and brown sort of thing with frizzy fringe. Not meant to be a family heirloom of any kind, just intended to be a bit of warmth on the feet. And now I digress because the rug was on a slate floor in the dining room...the very slate floor where people were murdered during a killing spree where some malfeasants busted in the sliding glass door and killed the previous occupants while their children cowered in a closet and then everything ended in a hail of gunfire further up the mountain and I discovered all this while watching the year-end wrap-up on the local news but, oh, maybe I should save the rest of that story for another episode, like maybe How to Get Your Parents to Tell You They Bought the Polanski/Tate House For a Song.

What was I saying? OH YEAH, the rug. So in anticipation of the move, Mom sent the rug off to a rug cleaner, who came and picked it up and then right before the move returned it all rolled up in brown paper. Mom had it loaded onto the Bekins van and then upon arrival in North Carolina, unloaded and placed in the dining room.

The North Carolina house required a lot of work so it took a few months and my good Christian grandmother Margie came down to help out occasionally. So it was finally time to deal with the dining room and Mom and Margie unwrapped and unrolled not a brown and orange polyester rug from a discount warehouse, but....a gorgeous black and lavender wool rug that was so handmade it practically had the fingernails of Persian children embedded in it. There was an awkward silence. Obviously the rug cleaners back in Virginia had accidentally switched the rugs all those months ago. Mom panicked. "What do I do? This is someone else's family heirloom! OHMYGOD." And then Grandma Margie settled deep into a bargello-covered wingback chair, took a long, deep toke of her Winston, exhaled, and said "I don't see the problem. Keep the rug."

And it's a Strong Family heirloom to this day.

Episode 85: How to Act Like an Adult

2009-08-24T18:49:00.000-07:00

Okay okay, so a month in between posts. That's because I've been busy trying to officially Get. A. Life. Still no luck on that front but I did have a funny conversation recently with my world-famous friend Melanie! I saw her at a party and it was a very Nashville kind of party - you know, "come over to my house and listen to my friends sing!" And frankly, I've lived here twenty years and have tried every single day to avoid going to this very sort of thing but it was actually fun and good-hearted and the singers were really crazy-talented and there were, well, sausage balls and crockpot Swedish meatballs.

ANYWAY, there was funny Melanie, all bosomy and pleated in the dress department. And we were talking about how you go from being a not-adult to being an adult. And I was saying blah blah blah about how I think it's when you wake up and don't want IKEA furniture anymore, that what you really want is a four poster bed that looks like it was slept in by Andrew Jackson. And another friend chirped that for her it was not eating peanut butter crackers for dinner, that there were other things out there like seitan and tofu. But then Melanie chimed in: "I used to have this thing for hipster guys in tennis shoes. I would always fall for them. But then the other day I saw the handsomest guy and he was getting in his fancy car and I looked down and there they were: lace-up Converse. And I almost wanted to shout: would a nice penny loafer kill a man? And that's when I knew I was an adult."

Which just about sums it up, if you ask me.

Episode 84: How to Make a Martini

2009-07-22T07:47:00.001-07:00

Okay, look, jackrabbits. I don't care how you like your martini. I don't care if you graduated from Mr. Boston's Bartending School for People Who Couldn't Get Real Jobs. I don't care how your father did it. I don't care how Don Draper on Mad Men does it. If there's no vermouth in the thing, it ain't a martini. The end, wrap it up with a bow and smoke it. Don't give me that "I just glance at the vermouth bottle." First off, it isn't really funny, even when you do that smarmy wink thing. Second off, a martini without vermouth in it isn't a cocktail at all. It's just a very cold shot of gin. Which as we all know is what hoboes drink. Vermouth makes you James Bond; lack of vermouth makes you Jack Nicholson in Ironweed. And if you have just recently enjoyed a "chocotini," congratulations on your upcoming diabetic coma. Too bad you're gonna die without having had a real martini. And don't even get me started on this vodka martini nonsense sweeping the nation one Applebee's at a time. Gah, I need a drink.

Episode 83: How to Go Camping With Small Children

2009-06-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

So last week I went on an awesome camping trip to Mammoth Cave with my friend Meg and her Chicago friends Judy and Rob and their hilarious, very citified twin children. I think the kids are six, but I could have that slightly wrong. It was the kids' first camping trip and that was verrrry interesting. Lots of questions. Why are we cooking outside? Why are we sleeping in a tent? Why is this tree here? When is it my turn to fall out of the hammock? Is the chicken ready? Is the bacon ready? Where are you going? Where have you been? Can I go sit in the car and play my DVD player? Would you like me to show you the remote for the DVD player? Again, when is it my turn to fall out of the hammock? Would you like to hear me sing a song about the fifty states in alphabetical order that rhymes? I always like to name the campsite to reflect the tone and tenor of the trip - like two weeks ago it was Camp Dogbite because I got bit by a dog - and it becamee quite obvious quite quickly that the only name for this campsite was going to be Camp Ohmigod Please Quit Singing That Song.

ANYWAY. So I had it in the back of my mind to tell a ghost story at the campfire one night and the only ghost story I know is "The Monkey's Paw," which I only know because it's the only ghost story my father told when I was growing up and he basically tells it wrong because when the lady opens the door at the end, Dad just screams real loudly and scares the ever-loving-beejezus out of you and you never do find out what happened because you have to go change out of your pee-soaked clothes because he is a really scary screamer. So the day before the night, I sort of observed the kids to see if they were ghost-story-ready and I eventually determined that they were not. But the boy kid decided he wanted to tell a ghost story so he made us all be really really quiet and he started by telling us that this was going to be a very terrifying tale and we should prepare ourselves to be scared witless. Then he lit the flashlight and held it under his chin to make his scary face and very seriously intoned: This is The Tale of the Invisible Latté... and I laughed so hard I really did almost pee in my pants.

Needless to say, none of us slept a wink.

Episode 82: How to Be a Good Samaritan

2009-06-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

Okay y'alls, so if you were to hire a private detective to ask around about me, your Psychopediast, I think you'd find that almost anyone queried would immediately respond "oh, he's such a giver."

And it's true! I give people headaches, I give people hard times, I give people what for... ha ha, I'll be here all week! Stay for the veal!

No, I am not famous for my generosity. I mean, I am friendly and I never say bad things about people to their faces and I will go out of my way to run an errand to Target for you if I am going to a Target, so I don't really feel too badly that I haven't adopted a Cameroonian or rowed around in circles in a rowboat in New Orleans with Sean Penn.

But recently, my bountiful cornucopia of generosity was tested! I went on a camping trip with my friend Sarah. We drove for a few hours and then set up eight million pieces of camping equipment, one of which was an air mattress. Now, I have an air pump, so that took about eight seconds. And we laughed and said "oh, ha ha ha, don't you feel sorry for people who blow these things up with their lungs?" which apparently some poor people still do even though if you go to Target (or I can go for you!) you can get a pump for fifteen dollars and avoid the fainting black spots and possible date rape altogether.

ANYWAY. About an hour later, we went to get ice. On the way back, we saw a person at a campsite blowing up his air mattress with his mouth. I figured this was a sign from lower-case-g god so I went back to our site and got my pump and then rolled back down the hill, where I jumped out of the car and offered him the use of my fancy air blower. He took me up on it - we pumped up the air mattress in like five seconds and then when I turned to go, a dog came out of nowhere (actually, from under the picnic table, where he had been sleeping) and bit me in the leg! A deep bite; torn skin! Black blood! Texas tea! Then the guy - Dutch, long hair, patchouli-smelling - said "Thanks!" without mentioning the river of blood that was forever staining the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area along with its watershed and I limped back to my car, drove back to the campsite, drank fifteen glasses of wine and then fell asleep and vowed to never help another living soul as long as I was drawing breath.

That was six days ago and so far I am not frothing at the mouth or afraid of water and not one person has called me Old Yeller, so I guess I'm safe. Unless I have goddamned rabies, and then one of you better fucking help me and give me a kidney or a pancreas or WHATEVER it is that cures rabies. Or you can drive your own sad self to Target after I die.

Episode 81: How to Make a Hot Brown

2009-05-13T20:56:00.000-07:00

Seriously, it's not dirty - it's a sandwich. I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago during Kentucky Derby week, but I didn't want to post it so close to the fried bologna one because you might get the wrong idea about my eating habits. Which are above reproach, FYI.

Hot browns are like my third favorite food. Let's talk about that, the difference between food and ingredients. For example, tomatoes. Tomatoes are not food. Tomatoes are ingredients. If you slice them up and put them on a lovely BLT, well, then now you have some food. The same with eggs. An egg alone is just a dumb old ingredient that came out of a chicken. But if you whip it up into a chocolate souffle, well ta-da! Food!

Actually, I don't really know if hot browns are my number three food because I can't think what the two above it might be. But I hesitate to say hot browns are number one because I might think of something I like better later.

Anyway, the hot brown. Do they have them up north? They originated in Louisville and Kentucky was a Yankee state but people forget that all the time and I think of the hot brown as pretty southern. The only place you can get them here are those little old lady tearooms where they have Victorian needlepointed chairs and lacy window curtains and they're only open from like 11 until 1. So getting one these days isn't very easy. But it's worth it!

You know, if you type the words "hot brown" enough, it does start to sound a little dirty, like something my father might say. "I'm going to the bathroom to make a hot brown." I guess that's why they're #3. Because if I made them #1 or #2, it would seem even dirtier and I could probably never eat one again.

Episode 80: How to Stay On My Good Side

2009-05-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

Y'know, I think the single worst thing about the onslaught of the internet* is this idea that everybody gets to say whatever they want and have a valid opinion. I assure you: you have no right whatsoever to an opinion, especially if I think it's dumb. I have one friend who insists that that's wrong - that everyone's opinion is valid - which as far as I'm concerned just proves my point. Hi, Carol!

I have some other friends who own a new restaurant and they're suffering through an onslaught of suspiciously-organized-sounding negative web reviews and comments by people with names like "FauxFoie" and "Pork-ePig" and oh, whatever - don't get me started on Foodie people who think they're clever - you get the picture. The reviews always start "my husband and I have dined in the FINEST RESTAURANTS in the world..." which means they haven't been outside of East Twatsqueal in fifty years but, you know, they watch "Top Chef." Gah, these people. Excellent choke-on-their-own-vomit candidates, all of them.

They had one lady call out of the blue after the chef appeared on one of those loopy noontime television shows (they're always called "Hey There, Whereverville!") wearing a baseball cap instead of a chef's toque. She ranted and raved and cussed for like an hour about that, how it was an an insult to the word "chef" for him to not wear a chef's toque. They responded that she was an insult to the word "lady" and then they went and got all likkered up on Makers' Mark. Ha ha, so there are some opinions I can get behind. But if you want to stay on my good side, you better be pret-ty careful.

*Don't say "internets" or "webernet" or "intertubes" or any of those other dumb hipster things. You know it's called the "internet," just like I know you're a complete "idiot." Oh, and stop using unnecessary quotation marks. I promise the next one won't be so rant-y.

Episode 79: How to Avoid Annoying Hipsters

2009-05-13T16:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, first off y'all, if you are a self-proclaimed hipster and are reading this - and let's face it, you aren't because I am neither Charles Bukowski nor Chuck Palahniuk - you can rest assured that I know whereof and whatof I speak. For fifteen years, I was the hipsterest hipster who ever did live and I can tell you one thing: I was one hundred percent insufferable. So just quit spluttering your pursed be-French-cigaretted lips and either read on and learn or just head on over to the vegan green tea restaurant you like so much. Meanwhile, I'll be sitting here in my recliner, typing away with my Cheeto-covered fingers waiting for tonight's IDOL! on FOX! results.

The tiny hamlet in which I reside used to have one relatively decent record store. Yes, record store. I know: I'm old, right? Anyway, every Tuesday I would brush my asymmetrical hairdo with my patchouli fingers and put on my thrift store togs and black Doc Martens and trudge up in the late morning sunlight to the record store, where I would head straight to the "Import Section." You know the section I mean - this is the section where you can get a particular record two weeks before everyone else for three times the price - but you were the first one in your ten-roommate apartment with the awesome new Siouxsie and the Banshees twelve-inch single and by the time everyone else could get it, you were rolling your eyes and yawning with boredom, having moved on to some other new obscure thing put out by 4AD.

ANYWAY. One time I was in there and the cashier was going on and on about some new record she had just heard and about how fabulous it was she could get me an advance copy and ohgodIjusthadtogetitrightthen because this was a cashier I secretly admired because she seemed even more genuine hipster than I could ever be. So I bought whatever record it was and raced home and dropped the needle on my new acquisition and....it was Tracy Chapman. And I don't know if you know this - did you know this? - but once you even listen to a Tracy Chapman record, your genuine hipster cred goes down the drain. Sell the thrift store clothes, let your hair grow out. Sell the Allen Ginsberg volumes (if you can!) and the little John Giorno chapbooks. You get to keep the Doc Martens though, because you have now officially become a Lesbian.

Episode 78: How to Make a Fried Bologna Sandwich

2009-04-22T15:55:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, I have two stories about fried bologna. Oh who am I kidding? You believe it! But I think that might make me sound a little trailer-parky, so I'll leave out the one about my father's quintuple bypass and go straight to the one about the fire alarm.

One time Sister Meg and I rented this fantastic house. It was a beautiful restored Victorian, practically a mansion, with all modern updating inside and on the second night we were in the house, we were exhausted from unpacking so we didn't want to bother with a fancy dinner. So Sister Meg rustled up a couple of fried bologna sandwiches...you know, like Jackie O or Brooke Astor might do. Marie Antoinette, perhaps.

Oh, if only it had been so simple! But no, smoke went everywhere and the fire alarm went off and contacted the fire department and we desperately dialed our new landlord, who was super fancy and nice and ritzy, because we didn't have the alarm code yet and she was all "what on earth are you cooking? That smoke detector hasn't gone off in ten years!" and it was with great hesitation and through gritted teeth that I practically whispered: "We are making fried bologna sandwiches." And you could feel her regret about renting to us through the telephone.

Later that year, a tornado hit the house. We deserved it - once you fry up bologna, the White Trash Gods just KNOW.

Episode 77: How to Be a Freelancer (or An Inventor)

2009-04-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

Oh, the exciting world of freelancing! The high-powered meetings where I'm flown by private jet from board room to board room, where I show two sketches I whipped up in the Admiral's Lounge and am then compensated with tax-free thousands and a time share in the Seychelles!

No, that's not what it's like at all. Well, mostly not. I just now looked at my Daytimer and here's what the life of this particular freelancer looks like:

8am: Roll over, stare at clock. Two more sleeping hours!

10am: Turn on The View. Get thumb ready to mute Elisabeth every time she squeaks, which is often.

11am: Get up, look over lunch menus from various local boites and bistros. Phone in order for clam spaghetti.

12 noon: Get in car, go pick up clam spaghetti. Detour to bookstore, coffee house, ice cream shop, etc.

1:30pm: Send out emails to clients along the lines of "oh, I'm sorry you didn't get that file! There must be something wrong with your email!"

2:00pm: Nap.

3:00pm: Send out emails to clients along the lines of "oh, I'm sorry you didn't get that file! There must be something wrong with my email!"

3:30pm: Turn on Turner Classic Movies and watch an Irene Dunne move. Another one. There are a lot.

5:30pm: Visit liquor store, pretend to browse the fifteen-dollar wine, buy Yellow Tail anyway. Who do I think I'm kidding?

6:00pm: Mess up office real fast so soon-to-arrive-home housemate thinks a lot of work got done. Clean house (read: hide wine bottles.) Act exhausted.

So as you can see, there's a lot to keep up with. The View is on five times a week.

Episode 76: How to Shop at the Grocery

2009-03-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

I know you've all been biting your fists and rending your garments wondering where I've been. But I have a good explanation, I promise. I've been in an insane asylum...to which I was committed after a particularly discombobulating trip to the local grocery store. My sister found me around midnight, sitting in the pantry, wrapped only in plastic Kroger bags and a turban made from Saran Wrap, trembling and muttering "I only wanted snow peas...I only wanted snow peas" over and over again.

You see, I have a particularly awful local grocery store. Don't get me wrong: it's enormous and brightly lit and they have a pharmacy and all the current up-to-date information about Brad and Angelina and poor poor Jennifer, so it does have its good points. Alas, steady Enquirer-eating does not make for a healthy diet, which is sad because unless you can put it in a microwave or cram it in an ice cream cone, my grocery store doesn't carry it. I once asked if there happened to be any whole garlic bulbs in the back and they offered to special order it for me. I guess they thought I might be planning for a meal a few weeks in advance or something. One time I bought beets and the cashier asked me if they were "for eating or for planting?" as she futilely thumbed through the PLU booklet while I said "B. It starts with a B. As in 'bumbling.'" Whereupon she started looking for 'bumbling,' which I'm fairly certain might be some sort of seedless cucumber. And then there was the other time when I got escorted out by security after having a complete nervous breakdown because I knew the PLU number for the tomatoes on the vine but the computer did not! 4664! 4664! For goddamned sake it's 4664! Why can't they program it into the computer? I've been complaining for five years and still, only I seem to know the number. 4. 6. 6. 4. Ohhhhhh, where is my Saran Wrap turban? WHERE?

I go to other grocery stores occasionally and it's like a slap in the face, with their fancy produce sections and their cous cous. But I chalk it up to some sort of caste karma. I get the grocery store I deserve. Which means I must have fucking murdered the pope in the past or something.

Note: this diagram represents my fantasy grocery store, not my actual one.

Episode 75: How to Remodel Your House

2009-02-27T16:03:00.000-08:00

If you know me - and let's face it: since you're reading this, you probably do - you are well and truly bored with my tales of woe regarding my double-bathroom renovation that took three years. Well, you'll be happy to know that those tales are now coming to an end, as we finally signed the "The End" paperwork last week. Of course, our vicious letters and constant bitchiness eventually brought down a national chain of (let's say) Flexpo Design Centers in the process, but hey, someone's gotta pay, right? Sorry, stockholders!

The great joke (on us!) of it all is that the two bathrooms involved in the renovation total maybe 100 square feet. They're two ca. 1932 bathrooms, so you can imagine how small they are, and we didn't enlarge any footprints or even move fixtures. Meanwhile, the short-haired lady down the street has had a Biltmore House-style addition to her house completed in three weeks and is already on the goddamned tour of homes.

But la la la, whatever. It's all over now. Though the cat that got drywalled into the walls is still severely traumatized and just wanders around in counter-clockwise circles, meowing in Bulgarian, which I do not speak unless someone has brought Absinthe into the house. And my motor-scooter is still missing a mirror from when a wayward plumbers' butt knocked it over in the basement. And several accessories from Pier One that were damaged in a tragic crown moulding incident remain unmentioned in any of your local memorial gardens and/or cemeteries.

And oh yeah: three years of my life are missing. Fuck you Crapco Design Center! I'm glad you're bankrupt!

Episode 74: How to Survive as a Waiter

2009-01-28T10:52:00.000-08:00

I can barely believe it took 74 episodes of The Psychopedia for me to get to this one and I thought for sure I had already done it, but the Official Psychopedia research assistant/fact checker assures me that no, this subject has not yet been episoded.

So here we are! How to Survive as a Waiter. The short answer is: it's impossible. They all die at age thirty, like all those people in Logan's Run where the minute they turn thirty their palm jewels turn red and they have to go to this thing called Carousel which is not a Rogers and Hammerstein musical but instead this thing where you float up into the air in a flame-covered bodysuit and get laser-beamed to death because in the future, anyone over the age of thirty is useless. Hey, that's just like today! I better sit on my hands.

ANYWAY! I used to wait tables at a joint that was sort of the end of the line for a lot of people who worked there. I mean, they didn't go to Carousel and get laser-beamed or anything, but it tended to be peoples' last restaurant job. It was the most fun place ever to work and you got away with drinking and not working and more drinking and being rude and drinking and so on and once you've had all that freedom, it's almost impossible to go work at Applebee's.

One time I had a table of six people who I could tell I hated on sight and there was one lady at the table who made this big to-do blabbering on and on about her shellfish allergy and I said "okay, just don't order any shellfish and we'll be fine." And then someone else at the table ordered scallops. So when all the entrees came out, I put them in front of the appropriate person and about two seconds later the shellfish lady stared screaming because her neck and face were swelling up because she had reached across the table and speared a scallop from someone else's plate and eaten it. So I went over to see what I could do to help and she started screaming at me I TOLD YOU I WAS ALLERGIC TO SHELLFISH! I TOLD YOU I WAS ALLERGIC TO SHELLFISH. And I asked "well why did you eat one, then?" and she screamed back I DIDN'T, YOU IDIOT! I ATE A SCALLOP!

Things do get a little fuzzy at this point - peppermint schnappes and all - but now it was (as the kids say) on. No, I didn't have any Benadryl. Would she like some trucker speed? No, there was not a doctor in the house. Would you like to talk to the painting professor from Vanderbilt? She's right over there. No, I'm sorry, I do not know the Heimlich maneuver. But I do know the Charleston. How 'bout we try that?

Eventually, her husband walked up to the mini-mart on the corner and got her some Benadryl and she took it and five minutes later was knocking back the Long Island Teas without a care in the world. They tried unsuccessfully to have me fired - especially when I added the tip on. Party of six, no arguments...IT SAYS IT ON THE MENU! But that was like a daily occurrence, someone trying to get me fired from that job. Once I actually did get fired, but I just showed up the next day like it had never happened and kept right on working. I suppose I should feel guilty about being perfectly content to watch a person die from a shellfish allergy - shellfish that I delivered, no less. But I don't. She was too stupid to live in the first place. If it hadn't been a scallop, it would just be something else later. It's called thinning the herd.

Episode 73: How to Fart Discreetly

2009-01-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

When I was in the third grade in Goldsboro, North Carolina, I had a teacher named Mrs Larkin. She was an older African American lady who dressed up to come to class every day, in jewel tone pantsuits with giant artificial corsages that matched her costume. She wore her glasses on a chain around her neck. I suppose in today's world, she would be thought of as "eccentric," but no, really she was just insane.

One time she accused me of cheating on an art project (an art project!) because I spelled "Halloween" correctly on a Happy Halloween poster and she didn't think a third grader would know how to spell "Halloween" correctly so I got in trouble for that but I think the real reason was because she had spelled it wrong on the chalkboard and I corrected her spelling on my own project. That was the same week buck-toothed Rebecca Smith stabbed me in the wrist with a lead pencil. It was a very trying Autumn.

Mrs Larkin also could not abide the idea of anyone "passing gas" (I guess she thought she was being classy saying it that way) in her classroom. So she made a big deal about reminding us EVERY DAY that if we were going to feel the pressing need to do such a thing, we were to raise our hands and tell her we were about to do it - and we had to say "pass gas," no other vulgar terms, thankyouverymuch - after which she would allow us to walk over to the classroom door and stick our derrières (again, classy) out into the hallway and then and only then could we "release." That's what she said, "release."

Well you can imagine what a whole bunch of third graders thought about that. Up and down all the livelong day so we could fart into the hallway, even if we didn't really have to. And once one person had asked, there was a parade of twenty more arms shooting into the air so we could all go giggle our way across the classroom and "release."

Anyway. Mrs. Larkin. She was one mean old biddy.

Episode 72: How to Make Risotto

2009-01-21T12:23:00.000-08:00

I love risotto. I could make and eat it every day. I love everything about it; the prep, the process, the flexibility, the flavor. And with the one exception of an ill-fated butternut squash version about which no one is allowed to speak, I'm very good at making it.

But this story is about something else! Although risotto-related. When I was in Italy, lo these many years ago, I went to Venice with my friends Beth and Thom and oh my my before the trip we would not shut up about how excited we were about getting to eat some risotto in Venice, where risotto has its origins. Risotto risotto risotto, we would not shut up about it. By the time we got to Venice, in Week III, however, there were a lot of other foods we had not shut up about. When we were in Piemonte, we would not shut up about white truffles. White truffles, white truffles, white truffles! When we were in Chianti, we would not shut up about cinghiale, the wild boar. Cinghiale, cinghiale, cinghiale! When we were in Lucca, we would not shut up about chestnuts. Chestnuts, chestnuts, chestnuts! You get the idea. And maybe you hate us already. But that's okay! I hate us too.

In other words, we were fooded out by the time we got to Venice and we forgot ALL ABOUT our obsession with risotto. And so on the last night in Venice, we were in some restaurant in Dorsoduro and uh-oh, there it was on the menu...risotto! So Beth said "I'll have risotto!" and the lady said "no risotto! Risotto only for two!" So I said "oh, okay, then in that case I'll have the risotto as well!" and the lady smiled and said "si, risotto for two!" And then Thom said "I'll have risotto as well!" and the lady said "no! risotto only for two!" It's so labor intensive they would only make it in batches for people in pairs and this odd number was really causing some problems. It was very traumatic and somehow the lady made us feel like the ugliest Americans in the history of ugly Americans, this while another table of Americans kept saying "Eye-talian" this and "Eye-talian" that.

So we ended up not ordering it at all! We never did get to eat risotto in Venice, which is why I hate that fucking place. I hope that city sinks into the goddamned ocean.

P.S. I don't really hate you, Venice!

Episode 71: How to Know If the Glass Is Half-Empty or Half-Full

2009-01-14T10:56:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I can never figure out if I am an optimist or a pessimist.

For example, I am fully expecting to win the Powerball drawing this Saturday night. One hundred and sixty-five million dollars. I'd tell you my numbers but then I'd have to share with you and I'm not really a sharer. So on Sunday, I'll be hunting for a solid gold bathub that dispenses gravy, which has been a lifelong dream of mine. So if you know a source for one of those, do give me a jingle. Then after that, I am going to buy my old company that I used to work for so I can fire a few people. You know who you are. And there are three other miscellaneous people I am going to have killed.

So I guess that makes me an optimist.

But then! I start thinking, "oh, the taxes on a hundred and sixty-five million dollars! What a burden! And ugh, I'll have to change banks because my current bank only lets you withdraw four hundred dollars at a time which so far has not been a problem since I've never had four hundred dollars in the bank but if I had one hundred and sixty-five million in the bank, I might have some sort of immediate need for like a quarter million dollars (if I find that bathtub, for instance) and do you have any idea how hard it is to close a bank account these days? So then I think, "gah! I don't want to win!"

So then I think maybe pessimist.

I've looked at the rest of the family to see if there's some sort of genetic pattern and here's the evidence:

Sister- pessimist. "You're too fat and you're either going to break that ladder or fall off of it."

Father - optimist. "I can make you another ladder! I like a project! I'll put it on the list right now!"

Mother - realist. "Who do you think you're kidding? You aren't going to ever clean those gutters."

Episode 70: How to Watch "The Sound of Music"

2009-01-12T19:43:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I'm sure you think you know how to do it, but trust me, unless you sat next to my friend David while watching the greatest movie of all time (his words), YOU DON'T.

I was recently on vacation with a handful of friends and on the final night of the trip, we popped in the DVD version of The Sound of Music that has the singalong version on it (yes, two people went to bed immediately). All that means is they put the words to all the songs on the screen during the musical numbers like subtitles. And by the way, all the songs are faster than you think. Like when you sing them while vacuuming -like you do, I'm sure - you sing them at a certain speed. But you aren't singing them fast enough, trust me, no matter how fast you are singing them. The big mystery for me is why is the movie eight hours long if the songs go so fast? And why do they show it at Christmas? There's not a Christmas scene in the whole movie. I've never gotten that.

But ANYWAY lemme tell you...David didn't need the subtitles. And not just for the songs. He recited almost every line of dialogue before the actors did. In a way, I wished we had just watched him do it; it would have been an hour shorter. Seriously, it was like watching Rainman perform the Collected Works of Shakespeare. I won't bore you with a song-by-song replay, but at one point he got up and moved to the other side of the room, telling us we were making him sing off key. As if. You should try it sometime, the singing along. That Do-Re-Mi song is like running a goddamned marathon.

Episode 69: How to Start the New Year Right

2009-01-05T11:55:00.001-08:00

Oh the end of the year has been so EXCITING I have hardly had a chance to Psychopedicize very much. Actually, no, that is a lie. The end of the year has been a BORE and the reason I haven't been educating you lately is because I was off researching how to turn each of my fingers into corkscrews, so I could save time opening wine bottles during the holiday season. And maybe after.

ANYWAY! I spent a fun five days in Eureka Springs, Arkansas for the New Year's holiday. I know what you're thinking: it must have been a crystal meth-filled holiday, what with it being in Arkansas and all! But no, even though crystal meth does flow like the RIver Jordan there, we kept mainly to cheese nips, macaroons and vanilla vodka. Most of us had gone to college together so it was just like The Big Chill but instead of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine," it was "You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive. And singalong Sound of Music, so yes, you can imagine, I'm sure. Nothing makes people choose different chairs faster than originally sitting next to the wrong person when you get to "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," let me tell you.

We took turns making dinner; one night, David and Jeff made filets and roasted green beans and potatoes made out of unicorns or whatever and then another night, Dani and Don made quesadillas and tortilla soup. I was paired with Sarah, so we made bean water. Our theme was "The Joad Family New Year," apparently. Hahahahah that's what they get for pairing the two poorest people up! Then we laughed a lot at dirty phrases that we don't really know what they are (AND DON'T TELL ME), like "rusty trombone." So that was funny because now we're all going to try and say them innocently in conversation and whoever laughs we'll secretly know is a total pervert. That's a good trick for the new year.

Anyway, Happy 2009 from your Psychopediast. Keep tuning in; you've been doing a lot wrong, I can tell.

Episode 68: How to Give Directions

2008-12-02T05:56:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, my mother took me to Yosemite National Park. She and Dad lived just a couple of hours away from it, but it took a couple of me-visitings before I could get over there. I was very very excited to go and I pored over maps to figure out the best way to get there and how we would spend the day and everything we would see. As we were headed by big wide super-highway and then a nice two lane regular paved road, I noticed that there was a tiny hairline road on the map - Chowchilla Mountain Road - that would deposit us right there at beautiful Wawona, exactly where we wanted to go, since we were headed to the Mariposa Grove first. It looked like it would cut our drive time by about a half hour and hey, we'd get to see something other than paved highway. Yes indeed, it delivered on that promise....not only did we NOT see a paved road, we also saw our lives flash before our eyes.

Within seconds, we knew we had made the wrong decision. We were in a tiny Volkswagen Beetle on a twisty, rutted fire road that basically went straight up and then straight down. Over and over. If I looked off to my right and down 10,000 feet, I could see the exact spot where we were going to end up exploding into a giant ball of flame. While on the nice paved roads, Mom and I had been chatting merrily about any little old thing but once we hit Chowchilla Mountain Road (it just SOUNDS evil, doesn't it?), the sparkling repartee dried right up. After twenty minutes of brushes with death, Mom finally said "We can't turn back." To which I replied "sure we can!" and she said again "no, we CAN'T TURN BACK." And she was right; there was no way to turn around; the mountain went steeply up on the drivers' side and steeply down on the passenger side. There were none of those fancy wide spot pulloffs you frequently see in your more hillbilly areas.

This went on for about a half hour and a half hour of no talking is a LONG TIME when you're driving to your doom, let me tell you. We were so deep into the wilderness - having wisely told NO ONE that we were coming this way - that we passed D.B. Cooper's parachute hanging from a tree. We were so focused on getting off of that godforsaken road that we could have happened upon a band of Bigfoots dancing the Mashed Potato and not blinked an eye.

And then, as if by magic, the road descended and crossed a creek and there was a small sign announcing that we had entered Yosemite National Park! Oh, praise Jesus, mainly because now I didn't have to tell my father that I had killed my mother in a fiery car crash down a mountainside. A few more twists and turns later and we came out of the woods and...onto a golf course. There were several players teeing up and they all froze in mid-swing as a little silver Volkswagen drove across the fairway, across the paved road and into the Wawona Hotel parking lot, where we hopped out and bought a sandwich.

It ended up being the best part of the Yosemite trip and now that I know it's there, I'd go on the same road again. But it's funny how frightening it was at the same time - what's around that next bend...if anything? That's probably some Deep Thought that we should all think about or needlepoint onto pillows.

And just in case you think I'm exaggerating about this road, some other idiots did the same thing. But THEY didn't make it to the golf course! HA! Babies.

Episode 67: How to Keep Warm

2008-11-20T07:06:00.000-08:00

My father used to be a hunter. Before that, he was a golfer. After that, he was a sailor. We had a sailboat (named the Andelé) with stained glass windows because you know what? That's how the Strong Family rolls. He has also been President of his model train club (sssshhh, don't laugh) but he got impeached because he called another member of the model train club an asshole. He is a man of many interests. I would not be at all surprised to pop into his basement workshop lair and find him at a loom, mid warp or weft, hard at work weaving his own camping tarp.

ANYWAY. What we are going to discuss today is the Great White Hunter period. This was when we lived in Ft. Worth, Texas and Dad's company had a lease or something on a not insignificant parcel of scrubby land somewhere in a southerly direction from Ft. Worth. I know what you're imagining: a great stone and wood lodge rising out of the desert, with a giant antlered chandelier in the main dining room and a terrace that overlooked the wide open space of central Texas. Hmm, yeah, not so much. What you should be imagining is an un-level trailer, furnished with dirty sofas and Miller High Life wall clocks, jammed into a tangle of mesquite trees.

So Dad decided to take me hunting one very cold winter. We were going to kill a deer, about which I had mixed feelings. I wasn't interested in killing anything, but I was very interested in eating venison sausage. So we go to the "hunting camp" (EYEROLL) the night before and go to sleep and Dad shook me awake at 3am because we had to sneak quietly down a dirt road (to trick the deer who were sound asleep in their SOUNDPROOF bushes, I guess) and climb up into this plywood box jammed in a tree which I can guarandamnedtee you was not up to any sort of building code. Seriously, like hillbilly moonshiners would have taken one look at this thing and said "uh, no, I ain't getting in that."

It being the 80s and all, and because it was a million degrees below zero, I was wearing a puffy down coat (I was also wearing my Close Encounters of the Third Kind "We Are Not Alone" t-shirt, but that's just a value-added detail; it has nothing to do with the story). The coat was one of those nylon shell kinds. Swiff swiff swiff. That's what it sounded like whenever I moved. Swiff swiff swiff. It sounded like someone was constantly letting air out of a balloon. So that was making Dad insane and finally he told me to just get in the corner of the wooden box and go to sleep. Which I did. So a couple of hours passed by and I woke up to a click click click sound and I looked up and there was Dad, cocking the big rifle gun thing and pointing it over the edge of our rickety perch. I peered out through the seam where two sheets of very thin plywood met and saw a buck having his morning breakfast of nubby leftover foliage. And I couldn't do it, I couldn't let him shoot the deer. So I suddenly moved as if to see what was happening. Swiff swiff swiff. Swiff swiff swiff. And the buck heard me and bounded into the mesquite underbrush!

And then my father slowly turned the gun on me and shot me. Ha ha, no, not really, though frankly the fact that the story doesn't end that way surprises me as much as it probably does you, especially if you ever met him. Dad gave up hunting soon after that - mainly because we moved to Tennessee, though in the intervening years I think he did once whack a gopher on the head with a shovel.

Episode 66: How to Visit the Continent

2008-11-10T17:49:00.000-08:00

A decade or so ago, I was really lucky to get to go to Italy for three weeks. I went with some friends - Beth, Thom and Giles - who were all far more well-travelled than me and when the plane landed in Milan I was almost electric with excitement. So of course, I was one of only two or three people pulled out of line to be frisked, touched, searched and almost danced with. These jackbooted fascists opened up my luggage and went through every single pair of my boxer briefs. They opened up the box of Breathe Right strips and made me demonstrate how they worked. They asked me if my friends smoked pot. And they did all of this in Italian which despite what you probably think sounds very accusatory, so I of course said "yes!" to everything. Luckily (eh, for my friends), "yes" was a word they didn't seem to know. So after about an hour of stress and frantic worrying about what prison I was going to end up in, they let me go and we then went by bus and train and train and train to Alba, home of the white truffle, where we eight some hilarious eight-thousand dollar meal that was worth every penny. I still don't know how they got that sliver of truffle into the middle of that egg yolk.

Three weeks later, Beth and Thom and I sat in the middle of a McDonalds in Venice, proclaiming the Filet-o-Fish to be the best single recipe ever invented, a judgement I still stand by.

Episode 65: How to Vote

2008-10-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

Back on Election Day 2000, before the coup, Sister Meg and I were lucky enough to snag tickets to the Gore/Lieberman victory rally in downtown Nashville on Legislative Plaza. We arrived early and parked far far away and made it through three levels of security and pat-downs and purse-investigation. We stood on the granite plaza in front of a giant bank of journalists and TV screens, all ready to listen to President-elect Gore come out and we waited and waited and waited. Hundreds of people were gathered and roped off in different access-level areas. Lots of "No New Texans" lapel buttons. I saw one that said "Gay Men Hate Bush." There were giant TV screens on either side of his eventual stage and they kept blinking in and out so we couldn't really follow the story of what was happening. Evey now and then, we'd see some good news - Hillary over Lazio in New York, Gore takes Florida, etc. Then Florida was un-Gored and the journalists on the tiers behind us were going apeshit.

Being 2000, not everyone had a cell phone so there were just a few people on the phone for several hours, relaying the news or the not-news or whatever. Hours went by without us knowing what was happening. Never-was-been Marilu Henner came out - though as far as I know, she was not on the ticket - and sang a song from Chicago where all the lyrics had been changed to reflect politics and Al Gore and it was mind-bogglingly bad, though everyone smiled and laughed that way you do when a child tap-dances to "The Good Ship Lollipop" and doesn't fall on her face. Then another hour went by and Cher came out - also not on the ticket, though maybe she should have been! - and gave us a cheering-up speech, telling us we'd pull this out, but she didn't sing. More hours went by.

Al Gore never came out, though we had heard rumors he was staying in the hotel beside the plaza, watching from a penthouse window. It started to drizzle. It was 11:00 or so and the crowd started dwindling and eventually we broke up and trudged back to our cars, dripping wet, denied a victory speech - or indeed a presidency, though we didn't know that just yet - by Al Gore.

I guess that's my Woodstock, the thing I can say "I was there" about. It was a terrible night, all the way around. But mainly because of Marilu Henner and her idiotic song.

Episode 64: How to Go to an Art Show

2008-10-23T06:31:00.000-07:00

So this one time, my friends Beth and Thom and Griffin and I went up to Chicago for a weekend of art and eating. I think we might have gone up specifically to see this big Monet show at the Art Institute but maybe not because even though we did go to the Monet show, I've never been a huge Monet fan. I mean, I like him fine but I find that like licorice and the novels of Hermann Hesse, a little goes a long way. So in other words, I have no idea why we went up there.

When we got there, we checked in with our friend E* with whom we were staying the first night. We made our way to whatever side of town he lived on and Griffin and I were shown to our quarters in the basement, where we were to be sleeping on two giant black leather sofas arranged in an L shape. We were exhausted so we went right to sleep without even turning on the light. Five hours later, at the crack of dawn, cock-a-doodle-doo! cock-a-doodle-doo! Now I was pretty sure I had not been transported to a faraway homestead in the middle of Iowa during the dark of night so I opened my eyes and hmmmmmm. There, staring at me from the laundry room door, was a full-grown rooster, leashed with a sad little string to the washing machine. Turns out our friend E's mother was a high priestess of Santeria! And our little cock-a-doodle-doo-ing friend was set to be that night's sacrifice. Which is a lot of information to wake up to, let me tell you.

Later that day, we went to the Monet show. Long lines of people who pretty much just wanted to get to the gift shop. We were all standing in the octagonal room that had different examples of Monet's hay-stacks on each wall so you could see how he had painted them at different times of day to capture the different qualities of light. A lady swept in, sniffed, and declaimed quite loudly, "I don't get it; it looks like a big muffin!"

And that, my friends, is how to not go to an art show. Even though it totally does look like a big muffin.

*name obscured because I don't want a menacing, doomed rooster in my laundry room

Episode 63: How to Select an Airplane Seat

2008-10-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I just got back from a vacation in Palm Springs and other than riding on an airplane out there (and coincidentally on the way back as well), this fascinating anecdote has nothing to do with actual flight. But it's a good story and I don't really want to call a Psychopedia entry How to Be Racist because some people have found the Psychopedia through Googling and I'd hate that to show up at the top of a search result.

On the first day that I was in Palm Springs, I went on a tour of the stars' homes. I know, you're thinking this must have been the most glamorous thing imaginable but in actuality it turned out to be a cross between hilarious and appalling. First off, our tour guide Ed (his quotations will be in parentheses) was a hundred and eleventy years old and his idea of a movie star was Marie Dressler. Marie Dressler! ("Yes sir, here's where Tugboat Annie lived!") So I just went and looked up Marie Dressler and here's something: she was born in 1868 and Tugboat Annie was made in 1933, which was in fact the last year whoever the hell Marie Dressler is even MADE movies. Who exactly did Ed think was on this bus? Grandma Moses? Methuselah? Joan Rivers? Though I confess I would like to see her 1918 opus, Red Cross Nurse.

ANYWAY, that was Marie Dressler's house. We also saw a house Marilyn Monroe lived in for twenty minutes ("I used to come here and watch her get the mail. Or male. If you get my joke") and Madonna's Palm Springs cottage ("there goes the neighborhood") and also where Liberace died, which was just this funny little house with a GINORMOUS candelabra in the front and Elvis' honeymoon house ("I didn't get Elvis.") We drove by one of Paul Newman's places and everone on the fucking bus "awwwwww"ed like he was their freshly-dead uncle or something so then when we drove by Lucille Ball's house, I "waaaaahhhhh"ed appropriately, but no one laughed because people just don't get me.

We also visited some famous mid-century modern buildings ("I guess all I can say about modernism is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.... now, have I told you about Marie Dressler?") and sites of old hotels and racquet clubs that aren't there anymore - seriously, we were parked in front of a hospital for twenty minutes while Ed told us about how he and his friend the tennis pro used to "do the joints" and run into Eddie Cantor or somebody and it was all just insanely tedious in a smells-like-mothballs way.

But things got verrrry interesting when he started in on the Indians. And that's what he called them, Indians. Only he sped up the middle syllable so that it really did sound like "Injuns." Actually, he only called them Indians when he wasn't calling them "lowly savages," and no I am not making that up. But it turns out that this particular band of lowly savages is like the ONE band America didn't exactly get to cornhole ("all the other Indians are poor and alcoholic!"), because they ended up with a ton of land in the Palm Springs area and according to Ed, they have whitey by the shorthairs because they don't pay taxes or have to abide by building codes or even, I don't know, wear pants if they don't want to. Ed was quite worked up about them and really, he did go on quite a bit ("They're sitting pretty and don't pay taxes! And we GAVE THEM the land!") Which of course made me snort out loud since we took it from them in the goddamned first place. Ed must have had a particularly painful Indian-burn or Indian -giving-incident in his past.

Then Ed went on to tell us a "hilarious" joke about former Palm Springs mayor Sonny Bono that ended with "I've Got Jews Babe." The whole thing really made me want to go put on a headdress and some moccasins and hatchet Ed to death. Which if I had been on Indian land I probably could have gotten away with. I should have asked Ed.

Episode 62: How to Pack a Suitcase

2008-10-07T10:16:00.000-07:00

I'm in a suitcase-pack-y frame of mind because I am in the last stages of packing for my trip to Palm Springs for a long weekend. I think that in the face of a nationwide-possibly-worldwide economic depression the best thing to go do is spend a bunch of money on cosmopolitans and expensive tee-shirts! I'll be hiking around in Joshua Tree National Park a little bit with my friend Carol, who won the trip because she's GOOD at her JOB and she decided to take me with her. So we have to hang out with all of her co-workers and I have to pretend to be all interested in what they're saying. I'm sure I'll say something that gets overheard incorrectly and misinterpreted and all sorts of misunderstanding will occur so in other words it's like I'm Mr. Jack Tripper from Three's Company.

I'll be back next week, tanned and rested...unless drinks aren't included and in that case, I'll be yellow and shaky.

By the way, my mother says she once saw a Miss America contestant pack a suitcase live onstage as her talent show talent, but I just can't believe a thing could ever happen. Though in 2002, I did see Miss Nevada, Teresa Francisca Benitez, recite the father's courtroom monologue from The Laramie Project. She came in third. While I'm gone you should think about that.

Episode 61: How to Order Mexican Food

2008-09-30T08:57:00.001-07:00

When I was in the seventh grade, I lived in Fort Worth, Texas. I attended Wedgwood Middle School and took Spanish. I was a terrible Spanish student, though I quite liked my teacher, Señorita Flores, who looked like a cross between Lily Tomlin and Rita Moreno. But I had come from North Carolina, where there were no Spanish classes and I thought it would be fun, like art class. I didn't know you actually had to learn it and I think the window had already closed on the new language thing for me. All I ever learned to say was "Cuando arrelgran me cuarto! No encuentro nada! Tia Luisa!" which might (or might not, shut up) mean "My room is a mess and I can't find a thing! Aunt Louise!" I don't even have an Aunt Louise so how dumb is that language?

But! We went on a field trip to Mexico! Can you imagine? Two teachers and thirty students on a bus, across a national border by dark of night (they woke us up and we had to go into a sad green room and get the fuck scared out of us by the Mexican police) and then in the lovely city of Monterrey for three days? It just seems crazy and un-doable now. Like it sounds illegal or something. The other teacher was the eighth grade Spanish teacher, Señora Ornelas and she was one miserable bitch, let me tell you. All of the meals were orchestrated and planned and they were all in the dining room of the Gran Hotel Ancira, which seemed fancy to my seventh-grade eyes but was probably just a normal hotel. All of the meals involved roasted chicken and one night there were a couple of us who wanted to try other things, you know, like MEXICAN FOOD. Señora Ornelas shut us down right quick and told us we were going to eat the roasted chicken because it was already PAID FOR and we were GOING TO LIKE IT. And she said it all in Spanish, and when I was later given a D on a Spanish test in the eighth grade, I tried to argue that a D simply wasn't possible because I had understood all the words Señora Ornelas had said that one time in Mexico. Señora Ornelas said "DG, you've made your bed and now you must lie in it." And I said "I choose to sleep on the floor." I was then sent to the office where I was paddled by the vice-principal, after which I vowed revenge against Señora Ornelas, a vow I have kept close to my heart all these years later and I swear to you if I ever lay eyes on that beady-eyed Señora Ornelas again, I will give her a piece of my mind. In fluent Spanish: ¡Tu cara de madre estas mismo mi culo!

ANYWAY. The day after being denied authentic Mexican food, we went to the neighboring town of Saltillo, where Señora Ornelas rode a sombrero-wearing donkey. Like most people who choose to ride a donkey, she looked like an idiot.

Episode 60: How to Budget

2008-09-29T11:32:00.001-07:00

Well Christ on a cracker, people. Thanks to the monstrous, mind-boggling incompetence of, oh, every elected official since 1967, I'm now officially on a budget! And also it seems that my Great Drive Across America in early August wreaked (wroke?) a little havoc on a credit card I wasn't supposed to be using very much and now I am practically like a member of the goddamned Joad family, eating locusts for dinner and washing my clothes with a stick.

It's hard but I have discovered some ways to keep things cheap. The main one is: drink at home. You'd be surprised at how much money you can save by not going to bars. For one thing, the drinks are about 80 percent cheaper and for another, you aren't tempted by drinks that cost thirteen dollars in the first place because let's face it: you don't have any elderflower liqueur at home so you won't be needing to make any drinks that have that in it. You also won't be tempted to buy other people drinks, which I almost never am anyway because every single time I have done that, they're all happy with beer until the drink offer comes and then it's all "ooohhhh, could I see the wine list?" and it's all downhill from there; before you know it, you're pulling out the previously mentioned verboten credit card so you don't have to pay with loose change from your car. It really is surprising how many drinks I've paid for with loose change. Drinking at home also cuts down on the number of DUIs that might come your way, so it's win-win.

ANYWAY! Another way to save money on strong waters is to be friends with restaurant owners. You just show up and say "hey! Is there any sample wine? How about any marked-out-of-stock bourbon? Or wait, I know - GRAPPA!" And there always is and they hand it over like I have a gun to their heads. It's like magic. If magic involved putting a keychain in a hat and pulling out a dry Manhattan instead of a rabbit. Which it should be, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, let's face it - who the fuck needs a rabbit?

Episode 59: How to Change a Tire

2008-09-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

Oh sure, I know what you're thinking. "Why changing a tire is as easy as pie! If those dirty mechanics can do it, surely I can as well!" And you're right...you can! But here is a cautionary tale, just in case you're getting a little too big for your britches.

My very first automobile was a 1972 Chevrolet pickup. Rust-colored. Not originally; I think she was brown first but gradually rust sort of became the overall color-scheme by the time she came my way in the early Eighties. Her name was Angel and she had a wooden bed. A bed made of wood! Gee, the Seventies were a long time ago, weren't they? Anyway, Angel was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and let me just say...nothing good ever came out of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and I have seen the list of things that have come out of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. So Dad and his friend Charlie went down to buy Angel for me - she cost ninety dollars - and hmmm, my mom or someone (this part's fuzzy) followed them back while they drank fifty six-packs of beer (it was the 80s!) and suddenly she noticed something...empty beer cans were falling from underneath Angel as Dad drove her back! No, Angel wasn't some sort of beer-can-laying magical hen - I wish! - no, she just had holes in her floorboards and the empties were falling out through them. The good thing was if Mom fell too far behind in the second car, she could just follow the beer cans.

So Angel was mine. We had many adventures together: I rear-ended an Indian family (dot variety, not woo-woo) on the way to a rock concert at the Armory. Once my friend Julie and I stole some blinking road signs and put them in the back of Angel and then we shoved them all under our other friend Greg's car so that when he started his car and put it in reverse, he'd tear his muffler off, which he totally did along with busting his gas tank. Oh ha ha ha ha, those were the carefree days of innocence, were they not?

But here's the story I am supposed to be telling: Angel once had a flat tire and since she was the sort of car held together with eight pieces of masking tape and a rubber band, it was easy enough to change the tire myself...twirl twirl, flap flap, switch. My parents were in the process of moving to another house, so after I changed my tire, I loaded up Angel and carried some stuff over to the new house and then on the way back, (cue dramatic music!) the front left tire just flew off and sped across two lanes of oncoming traffic! Sparks from the disc-y wheel-y thing flew into the open drivers' window as I slammed on the brakes and veered into the center turning lane. I hopped out and had absolutely no idea what to do - the tire had rolled off into a field, lost forever, and a good inch or two of that metal disc had gotten worn down. And having been schooled in the nighttime soap opera intrigue of Falcon Crest and Dynasty, there could only be one explanation for this latest turn of events: someone was trying to kill me. So I sprang into inaction and left Angel there in the suicide lane and walked home, where I fixed a lovely glass of strawberry Quik and settled down to watch a very compelling episode of Knots Landing, where an eerily similar plot was unfolding, when one Miss Jill Bennett committed suicide by tying herself up and gagging herself and putting herself in someone's trunk, where she died, thus framing the owner of the car for her murder. (Which might possibly have happened later in the run of Knot's Landing, but this is how I remember it).

Mom and Dad were quite surprised to see Angel in the middle of the street when they followed me home an hour or so later. Dad says he remembers cop cars there; Mom says he's exaggerating (which is a family trait, so....) but the end result was that Angel got towed home and I got in trouble (no one bought my murder plot explanation) and I also didn't get to watch the rest of that episode of Knot's Landing... so if someone could please tell me what ultimately happened with regards to the Jill Bennett plotline, that'd be great. And it was all because I didn't put the lug-nuts back on when I changed the tire. Hehehe. I said "lug-nuts."

Episode 58: How to Be Charitable

2008-09-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this one time I went to this big fancy benefit for some charity or something and it was a dress-up thing, sort of costume-y or at the very least formalish. It was in different locations; you moved from one to another over the course of the night, which never made much sense because the event was sponsored by Absolut and they practically forced us to drink fifteen vodka cocktails at every stop and there were like nine stops, so you can just pull out your stupid iPhones and calculate that right up right now, whydontcha? A bunch of friends and I all decided to go together; the theme was something Vegas-y but also somehow Nashville-y so my friend Jeff and I decided to go as Siegfried and Roy Clark, but we couldn't find the right outfits so at the last minute we went as Liberace and an employee of Caesar's Palace, like maybe a doorman, dressed as a Roman centurion. Trust me, it made sense at the time.

So anyway, there were like ten of us and we couldn't quite figure out how to move everyone around from place to place, so we ended up renting a big U-Haul and putting my living room furniture in there (it's very safe, I'm sure!) and everyone piled into the back of the van while Liberace drove around town from place to place trying to figure out how and where you parked a giant U-Haul full of drunkards. We ended up just pulling in front of each place and unspooling the ramp and parading down the ramp into the various parties while everyone stared at us like Apollo 10 had just landed. But! Before we did that we picked up our friend, hmmm, Fleffanie (name changed to protect almost everyone involved) , who is one funny girl but when she has to go to the bathroom, this girl has to go to the bathroom. And, as it turned out, she had to go to the bathroom. So all my friends are sitting in the back of the U-Haul in the dark when suddenly there came a hissing/dribbling/peeing sound. Psssssssss dribbbyyy driiiibbbbyyyyy and then: sob sob sob sob. Sobbing crying. And deadly quiet from the other people in the back, who were all silently praying that there wouldn't be a sudden lurch forward. Which there was! And everyone backed up against the very front wall of the truck and stared through the inky black darkness in the general direction of the crying peeing girl.

So you remember that when some Girl Scout comes to your door trying to get you to donate money to her organization. You might end up with pee-feet. Sure it's a good cause but in the end, pee-feet are still pee-feet.

Episode 57: How to Stalk a Celebrity

2008-09-11T10:59:00.001-07:00

I know, I know. You're thinking to yourself "gosh, after just learning how to use a fake ID I wonder if I can use those same skills to manufacture an all-access backstage pass to Suzanne Somers' upcoming county fair performance!" Devoted reader, I advise against it mainly because it's simply easier to just outright stalk a celebrity in his or her natural setting. In the case of Miss Somers, I suggest you start hanging around the Dairy Queen; she's surely due for her shift any time now.

Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, living in Nashville does have its advantages. Did you hear my eyes roll? One of them is that a lot of celebrities are here and I always enjoy seeing them doing mundane things. It's funny to see Emmylou Harris at Target looking at clock radios, which I did one time. Or Nicole Kidman enjoying a nourishing hot bowl of steam at a local bistro, which I have also seen. Tipper Gore - soon after the 2000 White House loss - once looked over my shoulder as I operated the computer at a restaurant. She seemed interested, but then maybe she was trying to figure out where her next paycheck was coming from and perhaps thought she should brush up on her skillset. Bonus feature: the valet reported that she was listening to an Usher cd in her car. I've managed to be in the same room as both Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin (though not at the same time), thus inching me closer to the 9 to 5 trifecta. One Jane Fonda to go.

I waited on River Phoenix one year to the day before he died. He was with that snooty Samantha Mathis and it was the Halloween shift and I was dressed as a Sprocket (remember when Mike Myers was funny? Gosh, that seems so long ago!). He didn't laugh a single time at any of my touch-my-monkey jokes, but perhaps he was not a Sprockets fan. However he was a militant vegetarian and ordered everything all crazy complicated and we were super busy so I sort of forgot to write any of that down and when his pasta dish came out, he ate it all up, slurp slurp slurp, even though there were about two cups of chicken stock in it. And there's your Psychopedia lesson for the day: avoid canned chicken stock. It's a gateway drug that will eventually lead to your eventual heroin overdose on the Sunset Strip.

Episode 56: How to Tailgate

2008-09-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

There are two deep dark secrets I have (hahahaha, no, there are like a hundred and seven) that seem to surprise people: I like to go camping (more about that later) and also I love NFL football. I don't know why those things are so surprising; I guess people think I'm just sitting at home obsessively polishing my Fabergé eggs and combing out kitty wigs. But no, I'm not doing either of those things, at least not on weekends - those are more like Tuesday-ish activities. The football thing seems to surprise people the most. I can't imagine what they'd do if they knew that I was also a fierce Fantasy Football participant (team name: Awesome Thunder, though it used to be Mincing Prisspots and before that, Beaver Patrol).

Over the last four years, I have been the beneficiary of free tickets to Tennessee Titans home games, and over the last decade, I have supported them through better and worse, richer and poorer, cheaper beer and not cheaper beer. NFL games are not really a place for liberal-leaning Democrats. There's lots of standing and praying and heart-covering and anthem singing and military plane flyovers and GINORMOUS waving American flags and, oh, I don't know, slitting of fingertips and mixing up all the white people blood. It's a lot of American rah-rah, and you have to mean it, or you get the hairy eyeball from every Klan member this side of Pulaski, TN - birthplace of the KKK - which is almost all of the people in my section, as far as I can tell, except for the delightful Catholic family I tailgate and attend with...and we all take a nap during the third quarter anyway, which is when all the white power snake charmers get up to their recruitment mischief, I'm sure.

It's super stressful right now to go to a game and endure all the enforced patriotism because of the upcoming Revolution or possible not-Revolution, where they just might sell us all into oil-company slavery but that's okay because Jesus wants us to drill offshore and ruin everything his supposed father spent all those seven days making all pretty and shit and... wait, what was I talking about? SEE? That's what happens at football games: you go to drink seven dollar beer and root for some two-digit-IQ-having-quarterback and a bunch of hulking guys who never wrote one single college paper and you end up signed up for a no-sex-before-marriage promise ring and you're singing backup for the motherfucking Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But! At least there are nachos.

Episode 55: How to Not Kill Yourself on a Friday

2008-09-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

Bad things happen on Fridays. I just looked up a few of them. For instance, Peter the Great imposed a tax on beards on a Friday. Squeaky Fromme tried to shoot President Ford on a Friday. John Roberts was nominated for the Supreme Court on a Friday. On the Road by Mister Jack Kerouac was published on a Friday! And those are all just some of the things that happened on just the Friday, September 5ths throughout history! Imagine if you look at all the other Fridays how many that multiplies out to. (Um, upon fact-checking, I realize that I have it wrong; all those things happened on September 5th, not necessarily a Friday. But I'm not re-researching; that's for the lovely people at Alfred A Knopf or the kind gentlemen at Farrar Straus and Giroux to do. Hint hint.)

One thing I do have right is that you should never ever ever go to lunch with the boss on a Friday, especially if the boss initiates it. If such an invitation comes your way, I am here to tell you that you are about to be fired. This very thing happened to an old boss of mine just a few years ago, when her boss called her at home and asked if she'd meet him for lunch at a very fancy restaurant later in the day. Now my boss was a smart lady and she said "are you going to fire me?" and her boss said "we'll talk at lunch" and my boss said "fuck that; if you're gonna fire me, I don't want lunch...I want the fifty dollars lunch was gonna cost." She ended up falling in love, moving to Louisville and going to the Kentucky Derby, where she hit the trifecta or the doubledown or the quadraplegic or whatever it is those gambling addicts call that stuff. So you see, skipping lunch really pays off.

I myself never even bother going to work on Fridays just to avoid getting fired. So don't say you never learned anything from the Psychopedia.

Episode 54: How to Slice a Sandwich

2008-09-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

Ugh. If there's one thing I can't stand it's baby talk, or more specifically full-grown adults who infantalize every word with more than three syllables. There is nothing grosser on this earth than listening to a forty-five year old otherwise normal person say "veggies." It makes me want to choke them, seriously. You can talk to a BABY that way or if you have a dog that weighs less than five pounds, maybe. Or if you've had a stroke and have to spell everything out with your blinking eyelid and that extra syllable or two really might cause some sort of irreversible eyelid sprain. Other than those exceptions, just say the goddamned word.

Another one I've noticed a lot of lately is people who say "samwich" instead of "sandwich." I can't decide if people are being cute or if they're just stupid; it's hard to tell because the line between those two things can be so, so fine. And don't get me STARTED on "sammiches." And I just KNOW that that is the sole responsibility of one Miss Rachael RAY and I suggest you don't bring HER NAME UP around me EITHER.

I think I'm ranting too much today. I better go eat some Lemonheads and calm down.

Episode 53: How to Use a Fake I.D.

2008-08-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

I recently ran into a college sophomore who insists that college students don't have fake i.d.s anymore and it was all I could do to not call up her dean and have her expelled for wanton stupidity. But then, she's in the science club, so who knows; maybe science students are too busy trying to come up with cold fusion to really need a Long Island Tea. But I mean! No fake i.d.s on a college campus! Hahahaha. Okay, good luck with that research paper, Einstein.

Anyway! I used to work at a restaurant where we had this rich spoiled kid come in to drink all the time. His name was Jaime and he was small - like not midget-y small, but Garanimals small - and we all knew he was underage but we were all so drunk ourselves we never carded him so he drank and drank until his little tiny body couldn't hold any more drinks (so like three drinks total) and then he would get in his Trans Am and squeal the tires all the way home to wherever he lived, the orphanage or something. This went on for years and years and one day one of us said "wait, he's been drinking here for years...surely he's legal now!" and then we dared another of us to card him. Turned out he was 27, so we had been thinking he was underaged the whole time when really what the deal was was that he was one of those people who stop aging, like Joan Rivers. Turns out he was also a big time drug dealer who I suppose went to schools and sold drugs because he'd fit right in with the K-12 crowd. The whole thing freaked us all right out, let me tell you. But not as much as it freaked us out when Jaime went missing and his decapitated head turned up in an elementary school sandbox a few weeks later.

So there's your lesson for today! Act your age or you end up headless.

Episode 52: How to Pass a Psychological Evaluation

2008-08-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

I know a lot of crazy people, but they're not crazy in any sort of medically measurable way. They're more nutty than crazy, I guess. Eccentric, one might say. I mean, I know one person who makes a living singing funny songs about skunks. I know someone who brought along a month's supply of Cipro on vacation to Charleston, South Carolina four years ago during the Democratic National Convention - which was where? NOT CHARLESTON! - because she was certain we were all going to get anthraxed to death that week. I know someone who doesn't like Mark Twain. I know someone who wears her hair in a beehive shape and isn't doing it to be funny; it's just the way she likes it. I know a guy who is obsessed with fish ponds - and I mean obsessed, like he is one step away from putting on a mermaid suit and swimming around in there with his stupid bug-eyed carp. I know someone who drinks Courvoisier and Sprite...together. I know someone who leases his car. Totally nuts, right?

But sometimes I think how it would be really easy for any of them - us, really - to go just that one extra step and look or be certifiably committ-able if a stranger were to size us up. Sometimes I catch people giving me the stinkeye and all I'm doing is like walking down the street wearing one of those giant Vietnamese rice paddy hats (I usually do it without the ox, though), and I just know that they think I'm a menace to society and so they lock up the children when they see me coming. So I'm thinking of not calling people "crazy" any more because I'm worried it'll bounce back and stick to me. But I can't come up with what the new word I call them will be. "Retarded" is definitely out, because the word police say so. I'm going to have to put my thinking cap on and come up with one. My pointed, Vietnamese rice-paddy thinking cap...

BY THE WAY. Did you all know that some dumb company called Google has stolen my idea? Mmmm hmmmm, they have How-Tos every day on the little iGoogle home page! Two of them every day that link to WikiHow, whatever the fuck that is! And maybe they did it before I started this. BUT! I go every day to see what they're doing and then I make sure I don't do that. But today was close, because I have a How to Stop Being Jealous in the pipeline and they already did it (WITH A QUOTATION FROM THE BIBLE!) and now I'm in a quandary because it'll look like I'm copying. In a quandary, I say!

Episode 51: How to Ride a Horse

2008-08-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

I've only ridden a horse once that I can recall and let's just say it did not go very well. I was young, like seven or eight and I was visiting with my cousin T-Bird. People sometimes ask if I'm making that name up but no, that was his name. I'm sure he had some other name but I don't know what it is. He was just plain old T-Bird...and I can't really think of what that might be short for, so who knows? And I'm not sure if he's my cousin. His father (who we call Uncle Sam even though he's not an uncle) and my mother were cousins, so actually I think T-Bird and me are third cousins. ANYWAY. T-Bird lived with Uncle Sam and Aunt Nancy (who isn't really an aunt, because...oh, nevermind, you get the picture) on a tobacco farm outside Raleigh, North Carolina. And I was summering there, and that might clue you in as to exactly what kind of eight-year old I was - the type that used the word "summering" with some regularity.

So one day on the farm, T-Bird teased me about never having ridden a horse and to show him, I climbed up to prove I could do it. I don't recall the horse's name but I'm sure it was something like "Child-Hater." I also don't remember anything about the riding part of it because I was pretty focussed on figuring out why I was all-of-a-sudden face down in the briar patch. I think I was only on the horse for like five seconds before he threw me off.*

Two other things of note happened to me this same summer. The first was when Uncle Sam made T-Bird and me move a stack of boards from one side of the road to the other to keep us busy one day. I ask you why reading a good book wouldn't have achieved the same thing but I suppose that's neither here nor there. I ended up stepping on a nail on purpose so that I wouldn't have to move the boards anymore, but then I had to go to the doctor and get a tetanus shot, so that little scheme didn't quite work out as planned, and this is a character trait I still have, the "oh, I'll do this thing!" and forgetting that there are consequences, which I will probably finally realize one day when I burn down the house or something.

Then a couple of days later, Uncle Sam asked me which I would rather do: go pick tobacco in the field all day with him or would I perhaps like to stay behind with Aunt Nancy and bake blueberry pies all the livelong day? Even at eight years old, I was fully aware this was the dumbest question ever asked in the entire history of question-asking and I jumped up and stood on a step-stool and quickly began rolling out dough as fast as possible.

Which pretty much explains how the rest of my life worked out, now that I think about it. Sigh.

*Honestly, this might or might not have happened. I have told this story so many times I can no longer remember if it happened to me or to T-Bird but I needed to tie this post to the drawing somehow...so you get a slightly embroidered version. The other stuff is totally true, though!

Episode 50: How to Balance a Checkbook

2008-08-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

Beats the shit out of me.

Episode 49: How to Be the Craziest Person in the Neighborhood

2008-08-19T11:29:00.000-07:00

I admit that I do not have the absolute craziest neighbors in the world. Some of them are odd in that way neighbors are always odd, like the lady who keeps asking me what church I go to (exactly how she keeps forgetting my NO COMMENT reply I have no idea) or the guy who has a twenty-foot-long yacht in his yard just sitting on its keel. It's been there for ten years without moving but this is the same guy who's always trying to start petitions about cleaning up the neighborhood and I never sign them because I think he should look in a mirror just ONE TIME. I also think he's the one that put all the anti-John Kerry stuff in my mailbox, but that's a different story for another time. And I have a nearby house or two where there might be a chicken...or at my hopeful best, a goose. And we did have a guy for a while who had a wooden cut-out of Santa holding an AK-47, which he put up the Christmas after 9/11 and sort of misses the idea of Christmas in almost every way but whatever, I guess.

But I am jealous of people who have a true nutcase or two next door. My parents did when they lived in California; they would just turn out the lights and stand in their darkened kitchen and watch the shenanigans next door, where it was like Cops or Jerry Springer every night. Hours and hours of entertainment, seriously, that would go on until the lady couldn't get another cork out of a bottle and would literally fall down for the night after banging into the side of the refrigerator one too many times. They finally moved away to Southern California, where all the crazy people end up anyway.

I do hold out hope for my new back-diagonal neighbors, though. They're circus-folk! Or carnys or something. There's a tightrope in their front yard, about five feet off the ground, and they have people over all the time, odd-looking but interesting (but not midgety or inappropritely-bearded or anything) who all jump up on the wire and start doing stuff. Jumping and looping and hopping and falling off and making jazz hands. They also have a bicycle built for three, which is just enough to start edging into crazy, if you ask me. I sort of want to befriend them because I do have a thing about circus people but I'm afraid if I do, other neighbors will see me and think I'm the craziest person in the neighborhood. Which might be what all this is about, now that I think about it.

Episode 48: How to Be a Vegetarian

2008-08-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

This Episode is brought to you in the interest of fair play. Since I instructed you how to order a delicious, died-for-your-sins steak just one episode ago, I realized that some of you may be toying with the foolish notion of becoming a vegetarian, so here's some advice about that.

I used to work at a natural foods market in Memphis - the Squash Blossom, in case any of you are reading from that god-forsaken city. I worked in the kitchen of the deli, cooking up vegetarian delights for all the no-deodorant-using-hippies in a fifteen-mile radius. This was back in the days before SUV-driving lady-types clogged the aisles of Whole Foods, when the only people at these sorts of markets were unwashed art-school students and that skinny lead singer of R.E.M. Anyway, my boss was this nice lady named Bonnie, who taught me all the vegetarian voodoo lingo - rennent and stevia and Spike and cilantro and tempeh and tofu and tamari - and in almost no time flat she had me being a vegetarian too! Because it was convenient and at hand because I worked there and also because it was basically free - whoops! I made too much vegetarian lasagne! Better box that up! - it was really easy to do. Plus Bonnie was quite evangelical about it. It was sort of hard to ignore her; it was just easier to do what she said than to have to listen to her rattle on about it every day with no apparent end in sight.

So months went by where I pretty much ate shredded kale excelsior and bean sprout gelato and one day I went into the kitchen pantry to get some chickpeas to make fifty-something gallons of hummus and sitting there on a crate of asparagus was Bonnie....stuffing about eleven beef tacos from Taco Bell into her mouth! I pointed a fourteen-inch daikon radish at her and hissed j'accuse! and she mumbled through a beef-taco-stuffed mouth, "Forgive me! I couldn't help it! They were only forty-nine cents a piece!" So I sat down and helped her finish them off. And that was, as they say, the end of that.

Episode 47: How to Order a Steak

2008-08-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

On recent occasion, I found myself "lucky" enough to be spending the night in Dodge City, Kansas. I know what you are thinking, I do! "Gosh, how lucky can one person be?" And you'd be right in thinking that; it is indeed a veritable Garden of Eden, especially if the Garden of Eden is actually where all those nutty Mormons think it is - like in Ohio or something - and also if it had been burned up in a grass fire and/or hit with a meteorite. Other than that...Garden of Eden!

After I had visited the fake Olde West Towne and the fake Ye Olden Photographie Shoppe and Deputy Dawg's Authentique Funnel Cake Factorie, I was vexed about a place to eat; there really were not many options besides Miss Kitty's Jitterbug Dance Hall and Mashed Potato Bar. So I called my friend Chris and he called his father, who I think is from there, and he didn't know, so he called HIS friend who still lived there and then the guy next to me's phone rang, so that was probably him. ANYWAY, I got sent to this little steakhouse and I strolled in and it was as expected until the waiter said "we get our meat from right across the street!" and I looked up and out the window to see a bunch of cows staring at me right as I started to saw with a knife and fork into their distant cousin Phyllis. It did make it a little hard to eat. But! Not impossible. It was a good steak. A strip, which they call a Dodge City strip, though they call it a Kansas City strip in Kansas City and a New York strip everywhere else, but since it came from across the street, Dodge City strip sounded about right, though they really should just go the whole nine yards and call it an Across the Street strip, I guess.

Then the bill came. An Across the Street strip, a baked potato, some corn, a creme brulee, two glasses of red wine ("This Little Penguin cabernet is delicious...I think you'll like it!") and a glass of scotch came to....$34. I almost laughed out loud. I actually said "I don't think I can pay you just this much." I felt especially badly about it since those cows were still looking at me.

So if you're ever in Dodge City, I do recommend Casey's Cowtown Club. Just don't sit near the window.

P.S. Did you know it used to be illegal to put ice cream on cherry pie in Dodge City? WELL IT WAS.

Episode 46: How to Go on Vacation

2008-07-30T09:18:00.001-07:00

Faithful readers, I hope you are all sitting down and I hope you have bomb shelters full of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, Fanta Orange soda and Little Debbie Oatmeal pies, because I have some bad news: The Psychopedia is going on a two-week hiatus. Yes, it seems I have run out of things to tell you to how to do. Hahahahah! No, don't fear! I will never run out of things to tell you to do, trust me. Why just this morning, I felt an uneasy vibration from a general westerly direction while I was in the shower and I was fairly certain that it was caused by someone somewhere putting toilet paper on the holder incorrectly, so right there in my bathroom I wrote "How to Put Toilet Paper on the Thing" on my mirror with toothpaste so as not to forget to write that one up when I got the chance. I don't always come up with them in bars - contrary to popular belief - and when a cocktail napkin isn't readily available, a mirror and toothpaste just have to do.

I'll be visiting the following states: California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, so I should have a lot of How Tos ready for you when I get back. Look for:

How to Not Burn Up in a Forest Fire
How to Visit a Bordello
How to Have Eight Wives
How to Prank Call the Focus on the Family People
How to Not Fall Asleep While Driving
How to Get the Hell Out of Oklahoma as Fast as Possible
and How to Get Out of Arkansas Even Faster

...all when I get back. Feel free to go back into the archives and study up on some of the classics Episodes you might have missed. I would hate to get a bad vibration while on vacation because you boiled an egg incorrectly.

Episode 45: How to Choose a Paint Color

2008-07-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

People are always asking me to come help them choose paint colors for the different rooms in their houses. They always say "oh, but your house is so pretty, you MUST come help me choose!" and what they're totally forgetting is that ninety percent of the rooms in my house are painted "Neutral Beige." Seriously. What they're remembering is the fancy green pillows my sister picked out or the artwork on the walls. No one ever remembers that the whole damned house is the color of a day-old biscuit. So I go over to their houses and I choose the most outrageous colors just because I never get to. "Lilac Explosion." "Chartreuse Cocktail." "Camel Toe Camel." And I always choose whichever one based solely on the name of the paint chip, which is how at least one friend ended up with a "Bruised Clavicle" living room. What makes it all funnier is that I'm almost completely color blind. Why do you think all these dumb drawings are in black and white? I can't see red when it's mixed up with green, or vice versa, which makes things interesting at the grocery store. Bag of limes, bag of tomatoes, what's the difference, right? And also I have trouble in the teal/aqua/turquoise department, but that's probably perfectly fine since I'm not decorating the set of Miami Vice anytime soon.

I recently got asked by my friend Carol to help her choose paint colors and stuff and before things got out of hand, my sister stepped in and did a little damage control and the decorating day was saved so to celebrate we all went to a furniture store to look at fabric for a fancy custom ottoman and the salesman who was helping us was very terse and condescending with my sister (who has an interior design degree) and he slammed the sample book shut and said "so, are we done here?" and that was a big mistake, let me tell you. Because whatever happened next was not going to be fun...for him. It's like when my mother gets mad: you know you're in trouble when she starts a response by saying "now you look here...." My sister's "tell" is the raised eyebrow. And when he slammed that sample book shut, her eyebrow shot up so fast it hit a chandelier that was on display far overhead. I think I actually said "uh-oh..." out loud. So all that ended badly and he lost the sale because my sister did some research and found the ottoman elsewhere and cheaper. So there's a lesson for you, somewhere in there.

Episode 44: How to Start a Collection of Something

2008-07-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

Everybody collects something. Dolls, baseball cards, addictions. Whatever, everyone's got something. I once looked at a house for sale that had an entire room turned over to Barbie dolls in their original boxes, stacked on top of each other, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Which is mainly an indicator of a lousy real estate agent if you ask me...those should have been the first things out of that house when they put it on the market.

Anyway. I used to have a friend back in the olden days who killed someone in a drunk driving accident. He was driving too drunk and too fast down a boulevard and clipped someone getting out of their car, and the victim was thrown some crazy long way and died instantly. I know, it's a terrible story. My friend kept driving but someone with a cell phone was following him and called the police and finally the police caught up with him several neighborhoods later. He was yanked out of his yellow Chevrolet Malibu and the car was searched quite thoroughly. When the police pried open the trunk, they were quite interested to see that it was full of serial killer biographies - like fifty of them. Paperback copies of Helter Skelter, the Jeffrey Dahmer story, and Ted Bundy's and Richard Speck's and on and on. And also (to coincidentally tie it together with the first paragraph!) a bunch of doll parts. A big pile of them. Now of course, having serial killer books and dismembered dolls doesn't make you guilty of anything per se, but consider this a cautionary tale. When my friend went to trial, those serial killer books kept coming up as "evidence" of something sinister and in his closing argument, the prosecutor brought them up at least three times and I remain convinced that they affected his sentence (guilty, almost four years, he served the full sentence and was denied parole every time he came up for it). So be careful about what you collect - or more importantly, where you display the collection; it could come back to haunt you and you could end up in the slammer. Think about that the next time you pick up a Precious Moments snow globe.

Episode 43: How to De-Kernel a Corncob

2008-07-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

I KNOW. This is the second corncob-related How To in a month. But corn is everywhere right now...it's in the grocery store, it's in my CSA basket, it's in our gas tanks, even! Gosh! It's practically all I can think about, corn corn corn. Even last night I had a dream about going to Cracker Barrel and seeing corncob dolls smoking corncob pipes. In honor of corn season, I'm including a recipe for corn pudding because it's my grandmother's recipe...though I think she got it out of a Parade Magazine actually, but for women of a certain era I suppose that was pretty much home cooking. Anyway! It has bourbon in it!

Her name was Virginia Speed Strong. She was a schoolteacher. My grandfather called her "Jinx," which is the best girl nickname ever, as far as I'm concerned. "Jinx"! I mean! Doesn't she sound like a World War one fighter pilot? Or pilotrix? I just this very second decided that if I ever get a standard poodle I'm going to name her "Jinx." Not because my grandmother was poodle-like in any way (though she did have Fancy Hair, now that I think about it), but just because I like the name and I've always wanted a standard poodle, so I might as well kill two birds with one stone.

I heard about this de-kernelling method through a friend of a friend and I thought it was some crazy original invention but no: it's all over the internet, so I don't feel guilty about spilling the secret.

So blah blah blah, the corn pudding:

3 large eggs
1 1/8 cup evaporated milk
3 cups canned creamed corn
3 cup fresh corn kernels
3 1/2 T melted butter
3 T brown sugar
3 T cornstarch, mixed with 3 T water
3/4 t fresh grated nutmeg
5 T bourbon (optional - AS IF!) plus a swig for you
1/2 t salt
1/2 t white pepper

Oven at 350°F. Butter a dish. Beat eggs and evaporated milk together. Stir in everything else and add to eggs and milk and dump it in the dish. Drink six or seven fingers of bourbon, neat. Bake 45 minutes; should be slightly brown and a knife should come out clean.

Episode 42: How to Prepare for a Parental Visit

2008-07-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, so my parents are moving back to town after a few years in California. They want to live in my neighborhood, but until they can find a house, they're putting everything in storage and moving in with me. So if you need me, I'll be at the liquor store....I kid! I kid! They'll be at the liquor store too! Because I know I'm not easy to live with. I mean: it takes a long time to adjust to The Way I Do Things. Like for instance, there are three cutting boards in the kitchen, but only one of them is for cutting. The other two are for displaying vegetables and putting the olive oil and balsamic vinegar bottles on. There are two colanders: one is for onions, one is for draining things and you cannot mix them up. There's a knife that has the word TOMATE (it's French! or something!) cut out of the blade, and it must only be used for cutting tomates. No other vegetable. If you write any words on the new chalkboard wall in the kitchen, you must print...no cursive.

I know: the minutiae is overwhelming. But that's how I am. One time I was throwing a Shakespeare dinner party with my friends Beth and Thom and there were like twenty people there and we were all dressed like we were from India (I'll explain one day, if I can work up the energy) and we had spent all day cooking crazy Indian food and I had tracked down this fig ice cream for dessert. Or maybe it was date ice cream. Hmmm. Something Indian anyway. And I almost had a nervous breakdown because I couldn't get everybody back around the table to eat the ice cream because everyone was busy trying to figure out the hookah. Like it made me mad, which makes me think I might be a little bit bossy and controlly. Nobody ever did eat that stupid ice cream. Anyway, it was a fun party. The lead singer of Big Country was there, before he went to Hawaii and committed suicide. But better before than after, I guess.

Episode 41: How to Save Money

2008-07-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

First off... avoid Las Vegas like the plague. I've never been anywhere where every single thing visible in between the spot my feet stood and the far horizon was designed to take money out of my wallet. And I didn't even gamble! Unless you count the ten dollars in quarters I spent on the "That Girl" slot machine that featured a giant photograph of Marlo Thomas-Donahue on it, but that wasn't so much gambling as it was giving back to the person who gave so much, right?

But it's hard to blame Las Vegas for making you spend your money; they have so many fun ways to get rid of money, you almost don't notice you're doing it. I went with a group of friends and my sister, ostensibly to surprise another friend for his 40th birthday and the Big Joke Idea was that we were going to go to the very expensive Barry Manilow show at the Las Vegas Hilton. Well, we made the host pay for all the tickets because I mean! BARRY MANILOW!? I like a cheese sandwich but I do have my limits! But I figured what the hell, and we all got dressed up and went to the show and I was all grumbling about it because it was going to be cheesy and awful and luckily there was a bar just for the people who were going to the show called the Copacabana so I had eleventy glasses of wine in about six minutes and then of course three-quarters of an hour later, I was standing on my seat waving my glow-stick over my head, singing all of the words to every song he ever sang, including that one that was the theme to that Goldie Hawn/Chevy Chase movie with the albino, the dwarf and the Pope.

The lady next to me got very excited when he sang the medley of commercial jingles that he'd written (State Farm, Dr Pepper, etc), especially when he got to the I Am Stuck On Band-Aids song and she grabbed my arm and squealed I have Band-Aids in my purse right now! So then when he sang You Deserve a Break Today, I asked her if she had an Egg McMuffin in her pocketbook I might could nibble on.

Episode 40: How to Visit the French Quarter

2008-07-19T20:53:00.001-07:00

Eleven or twelve years ago, I went to New Orleans (after a week in Gulf Shores, AL) with my friends Melissa and Adrienne and Suzy and Frank. It was May but it was already a hundred and sixty-seven degrees, and for some reason now lost to the fuzziness of time and probably also the fact that you can drink liquor drinks all hours of the day even right out on the sidewalks, as we prepared for our evening out on the town, I decided to wear a red bobbed Prince Valiant wig...you know, like one does. This item belonged to Adrienne, who had quite the wig collection, and I suppose she dared me to wear it. She apparently under-estimated both my daringness and my sobriety! But if it's anything to judge by, one girl in the group was wearing a denim ball gown with the Hee Haw logo printed all over it.

So anyway, there we were, the five of us, traipsing up and down ye olden Rues of New Orleans. Being a five-some of not-uncomplicated tastes and needs in food, we did what every tourist in New Orleans does: we ate at an Italian restaurant. Then we went from bar to bar, where I swang high on a swing above a crowd at one bar and also got invited up to be the sexy dancer for a bachelorette party at another, which I'm sure they're all puzzled about when they watch the video nowadays) and then we suddenly found ourselves lost and on the bad end of one of the Rues. Sure enough, some malfeasants accosted us, threatening and demanding and generally making me question my costume selection. Right as we were about to turn all of our worldly goods over, one of them leered at me: "yo dude, why are you wearing a wig?" And you know what? I knew exactly what to do. So I sprang into action! That's right: I lied. "It's because I have cancer and the chemo has made me bald!" I wailed, and then I started crying like Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice.

WELL! Those are the magic words, lemme tell you. Suddenly, the group of guys who had been one millimeter away from robbing us were patting me on the back and telling me it would be okay...and let me tell you, if they give Academy Awards for being able to cry on cue, which I think they might actullly do based on some of the ones they've handed out, they can just put the Oscar in the box and send it to Sunnymeade Drive. I threw in a little Jesus Blah Blah and a little bit of Uninsured Blah Blah and before I knew it, the Crips and/or the Bloods (I never did get who was who) were suddenly not robbing us and were instead walking us back like a security detail to civilization, where tourists throw up in the gutters. Which is not something you read about in stupid old Henry James's travel books, you can be sure of that. Anyway, Lassez le bon temps le blah blah!

Episode 39: How to Choose a Pet

2008-07-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

There are some stories that should never, ever be told. Things happen that should just pass by and never be spoken of again. Never alluded to, never joked about. This is probably one of those stories because every time I tell it my sister says "you know, you should really quit telling that story." So this is the last time!

When I first got my grey tabby cat Fanny from the pound (they had named her Ariel, which I quickly boycotted), she was approximately a year old. I had her at home for a few lovely days of new cat fun when suddenly she started hollering to beat the band and sure enough, turns out Sweet Fanny was in heat. I didn't have a car at the time, so I loaded her up in her cat cage and as she yowled out loud nonstop, I bicycled her over to the vet I had chosen, who turned out to be a hippie voodoo vegetarian veterinarian, who believed rubbing singed rosemary on an elderly cat would heal cat arthritis or whatever. That type of thing. I was into it back then, sort of. So I busted in with my yowling horny cat and said "make it stop! make it stop!" And Dr. Sensitive Manson Family said he wouldn't operate in the middle of a heat cycle, that it would unduly stress out the cat and also it was expensive and since I didn't even have a car, I probably couldn't afford it anyway, so why didn't I just put Sweet Fanny back into her cat cage, peddle home and masturbate her?

(I'll give you a minute here).

Okay, so I KNOW! However you just responded when you read that, multiply it times about fifteen; that's how I responded. I was advised to go purchase a super-nubby oven mitt at the grocery store and to put it on my hand and with the help of mood lighting, the dulcet tones of Natalie Cole and a can of Chicken of the Sea, I was to place my be-oven-mitted hand between Fanny's hind legs and let her, well, um... see, you can just finish thinking about it your own self. This is the part of the story where my sister says I can be a little vague, that people get the picture long before I say the phrase "stimulate your pussy," as the vet put it. I'm not making that up.

So that number-one-on-the-list psychologically shattering life moment came to pass and then when her heat cycle was over about a week later, I pedaled her back to the vet and got all of that ladybusiness taken care of because I threw that oven mitt away toot suite and didn't really want to have to go buy another one anytime soon. I just knew if I went and bought another one, the cashier would know that I was some sort of chronic crazy cat masturbator.

Anyway, now Fanny is a happy spinster cat. I have noticed all these years later, though, that when I'm in the kitchen baking or whathaveyou...anything that requires oven mitts... Fanny - now almost twenty - comes and sits in the kitchen doorway and looks at me with lowered cat eyelids and makes a low purring sound as if to say "you wanna go again, big fella?"

Episode 38: How to Select a Parking Space

2008-07-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

Oooooo, parking lots. Is there another public space - other than that hideous WW2 Monument on the Mall in Washington DC - that instigates as much outrage? Between the people driving one mile an hour around and around in a circle until a front space opens up so they don't have to waddle an extra five feet and those stupid RESERVED FOR EXPECTANT MOTHERS signs, I almost lose my mind every time I drive into one. You don't have to obey those signs, you know, the expectant mother ones. It's not a law. And it drives me insane that they would think I would obey them. I mean...I know it's a medical condition and all but so is my hangover and nobody's reserving me a close-up parking space. But I think some mothers (of course, I'm not talking about you) these days are like a whole privileged class, what with the fancy parking spaces and the way everybody gets out of their way when they barrel down the mall hallways with strollers. I make a point to never get out of the way because you know what? I didn't knock them up. It's not my problem. I once even kicked a stroller as it veered too close to me when I was window shopping at the mall and the lady navigating it glared at me and I think she was thinking of saying something smart-alecky but I headed it off and said DON'T EVEN! right out loud and she wasn't expecting that and she scurried off to load little Madison up into her Suburban, no doubt. Which would have been parked in the RESERVED FOR EXPECTANT MOTHERS spot if I hadn't parked there myself. Ha ha ha. Too bad, lady. Maybe if you had saved it for marriage you wouldn't be in this predicament.

Episode 37: How to Take a Nap

2008-07-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm a fully grown adult, I do love a nap. I think the best thing possible to have happen is to finish your job early and then be able to race home and slide into your little envelope of bed-sheets and snooze away for an hour before Access Hollywood comes on. But as a child, I hated napping. I hated it so much I would devise ways to trick time itself: I had noticed that whenever I got up from a nap, my hair was always a mess. So one day when Mom told me to go take my nap, I marched upstairs, messed up my hair and then marched right back downstairs and yelled "I TOOK MY NAP!" and I think I got away with it that one time. I was also suspicious of naps as a child because once my evil little sister tried to kill me while I was mid-nap by beating me in the head with a golf cleat. Now that my sister and I own a house together all these years later, I sleep with one eye open because you never know when she might decide to finish the job she started thirty-seven years ago.

Episode 36: How to Score Bowling

2008-07-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

Knowing how to manually score bowling is truly becoming one of the Lost Arts, like Drunk Driving and Casual Shoplifting. But I think you'll find that all three of those come in handy at one time or another. I do dislike when I go to by local Bowl-a-Rama and there's some fancy automated machine that does all the work for you. I mean! That's like calling a cab just because you've had two bottles of wine in forty-five minutes!

I learned how to score bowling in the 7th grade at Wedgwood Middle in Ft Worth, Texas, during one of those times when you could tell the physical education budgets were being crunched because instead of Baseball or Football, we suddenly had a whole semester of the down-market made-up-sounding sports, like Square Dancing and Hopscotch or, yes, Bowling. I wasn't really good at the actual game at the time, but when it came to the scoring, I was a viking. It clicked in my brain and has stayed there ever since; despite the very nature of this particular blog, it's one of the few things I actually know how to do. I've become a better bowler since then - my family even tried to create a new Christmas tradition by going bowling on Christmas Eve, which only lasted a couple of years because we were all hungover on Christmas morning and that's no fun at all. I bowl a pretty consistent 180-200, which isn't bad considering my form largely consists of throwing the ball as hard as possible to create what I call Maxxxximum Down-Alley Pin Action(®) rather than trying to aim it in any one particular place, which is probably for the best because I've usually had a pitcher of Miller High Life before I even get my rented shoes laced up.

Episode 35: How to Plan a Cross-Country Trip

2008-07-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, you should know that I will stop at the cheesiest, minor-est tourist attraction in the world, especially if there is a giant fiberglass animal used as a mascot in front of it. Giant Bigfoot in Willow Creek, California? Check. Giant Babe the Ox in Klamath? Mmm hmmm. Chicken holding a knife and fork next to the Boobie Bungalow in Elkton, Tennessee? Got it. It doesn't matter what it is or if there is any historical significance at all. I've seen three different World's Largest Ball of Yarns and let me tell you, each one was more satisfying than the last. You show me the exact spot in Napa Valley where Falcon Crest's Angela Channing slapped Melissa Gioberti and I will show you my own personal Lourdes.

I once went on a family trip to the Grand Canyon with my father and mother and sister. We flew into Phoenix and then drove up through the middle of Arizona to Williams, where we then got on another road to the very rim of the Canyon. On the way, we passed a highly cheese-alicious attraction called The Flintstones' Bedrock City and I yelled "STOP! STOP THE CAR!" and started pounding on the window...to no avail. My father had had quite enough of being in the car so I cried and cried and pounded on the back window of the rental car as my dream destination disappeared toward the receding horizon, in a cloud of dust. I would not be calmed. This trip was ruined and no amount of Canyon-staring or donkey-riding or Indian-mound-plundering was going to console me. I cried for a week. I was 35.

Episode 34: How to Experience a Chain Restaurant

2008-07-10T11:36:00.000-07:00

I've worked at a lot of different restaurants in my life but the only one that really resembled a chain was a place in North Carolina called Fitzgerald's. There were only two of them, so maybe that doesn't count. But they were carbon copies of each other, with fake 1920s memorabilia and spats hung on the wall and stupid machine-gunned bullet holes in the wall. Because yeah, nothing sounds more delicious than a filet named after Zelda Fitzgerald, who went insane and died in a fire when her nuthouse burned down. Make mine well done, please!

Anyway, there was this big tall country-assed donkey girl named Mary who worked there and she had a way with the tables, yes she most certainly did! More than once, I'd hear her say something like "Land sakes, you'd think a big fella like you coulda cleared his plate! You can do it, Big Boy" and the guy would be like a full-grown forty-year old. Or "okay, y'all, you got everything? 'Cause I gotta go take a crap so if you need me I'll be in the bathroom..." She got complaints all the time but she never got fired, largely because we were all fairly sure she had a knife in her purse. Which brings me to: you should be nice to your servers, whether they're enslaved at a chain restaurant or a local independent. Because all the stories you hear about server revenge that people say are all exaggerations? They're not. I personally once saw a male server stir a bourbon & Coke with his winky and then serve it to some toothless hillbilly, who I must say totally deserved it for ordering a goddamned bourbon and Coke in the first place. I saw a hamburger bun go down someone's pants...front and back. You can complain about servers, you can even get them fired. But you can't un-eat the food they just clipped their toenails into. I'm just saying.

Episode 33: How to Make Lemonade

2008-07-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

Being a master horticulturalist, I - like all master horticulturalists - have a Meyer Lemon tree in a pot. In the three years I've had it, I have harvested exactly two lemons off of it. I get lots of blossoms all the time and then you can see the beginnings of a whole mess of lemons but then a rainstorm knocks them off, or heavy wind, or when I get all drunk up on wine and knock the tree over on my way to answer the doorbell that didn't really ring though I swear to god I heard it at least twice. The two lemons I got, I hoarded and kept secret from my sister, who had been eyeing them as well. She noticed they were missing from the tree and asked about them. "Owls," I said. "Owls got them." Then I went on and on about how there is a scurvy problem among the owl population and they have evolved to the point that they crave citrus. Needless to say, she didn't believe me for one second, as this was before I knew How to Lie. Too many details! Drat! I ended up using the two Meyers in a single glass of lemonade and while it was the best lemonade I ever had, I was sad to not have the lemons anymore. BUT I DID WHAT THE NEEDLEPOINTED PILLOWS SAID TO DO! Life gave me lemons and I indeed made lemonade.

As summertime refreshment goes, I like iced tea too, but I don't have a tea tree or a tea bush or a tea whathaveyou, whatever teabags grow on. I'll have to research that and get back to you.

Episode 32: How to Not Vomit

2008-07-08T08:31:00.001-07:00

Many years ago, my friends Andy and Suzy and Frank were invited to a masquerade ball one Halloween. While they were all getting ready, they decided to have a few cups of a homemade punch called Gitchee Gloomee, which was made up of little bits of this and that left over from various parties at Suzy's: Galliano, Pernod, Rum, Apple Schnapps, Bailey's; you know...the things you never know just what to do with. Several cups of this concoction later and they were, as the French say, in their cups.

Late for the party, they jumped into the car and hurried. Andy was the driver (this was back when drunk driving was a legitimate sport) and he was dressed in a traditional skeleton costume. Frank was in the backseat, dressed as Al Capone. In the passenger seat was Suzy, dressed as the Blessed Virgin Mary, right down to a realistically swaddled fake baby. As they zipped drunkenly in and out of traffic down West End Avenue, the Blessed Virgin Mary started to feel a little, uh, less Blessed. She demanded that the skeleton/chauffeur stop the Tercel and just as he did, the Mother of Christ threw the car door open, the Christ child fell into the gutter and the Blessed Virgin Mary threw a quart of neon green Gitchee Gloomee up all over him...right in front of the giant plate glass window of the original Houston's Restaurant. She lifted the blue edge of her headdress and wiped her mouth, looked up at the three dozen forks-frozen-in-place onlookers on the other side of the glass and waved at them as if she had just left a blessing behind and having witnessed this display, they would all now be cured of whatever ailed them. Which, since it was Houston's, was probably a lot of ailing.

Then she sat back upright and closed the door and a skeleton, Al Capone and the Blessed Mother drove off into the night, leaving a vomit-covered Baby Jesus abandoned by the side of the road. And if that's not a useful religious allegory, I don't know what is.

Episode 31: How to Be Mean

2008-07-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

So last Thursday, I was sitting in my Obama-stickered Honda Element in a fancy super-white part of town and a car pulled up next to me. The passenger window rolled down and suddenly there were some sportswear-clad arms waving at me, all bony pink elbows and underarm chicken fat. I could only assume that either my car was on fire or this particular woman wanted to tell me some Very Important News about a sale at Talbot's, so I rolled my window down as quickly as possible, just in time for her to scream "Obama's going to ruin America! OBAMA'S GOING TO RUIN AMERICA!" Now I like intelligent political discourse as much as the next person - especially at a stop-light in the middle of the day - but even I knew this was a lost cause. You can't argue sense into a woman wearing that much costume jewelry from Chico's, that's all I'm saying. So I sighed, smiled, and then very calmly said "oh, why don't you go fuck yourself?"

As I drove away, I thought of a handful of other things to say: "no, dear, that bad haircut you're sporting is what's ruining America!" or "that's perhaps true, but you should really work on those arms." This is called l'esprit d'escalier ("stairway wit")...the perfect riposte thought of a hair too late, on the stairway after a dramatic exit. But no, I had already left the scene, so "why don't you go fuck yourself?" had to stand.

One of these illustrative examples was stolen from the movie Broadcast News. Another is from my old friend Bob Andrews. So just shut up about that already.

Episode 30: How to Be Patriotic

2008-07-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

Once many years ago, my sister and I decided to go downtown to see the big symphony-accompanied July 4th fireworks show. We stopped by Kentucky Fried Chicken and each got a little picnic box (breast, drumstick, mashed potatoes and biscuit) and then we walked the 12 or so blocks from our house to the riverbank, where there were 100,000 other chicken-greased fireworks fans baking in the hot sun. You really had to get there early, so by the time the fireworks started at 9, you were exhausted and you were ready for them to be over like the very second they started so you could just leave.

Anyway, on the blanket next to us were a pair of redneck ladies and after about three hours, their dates showed up, shirtless and drunk and berating everyone within hearing distance for not being patriotic enough because we didn't WOOOOOOOO every time a firework exploded, which was of course every half second or so. And then one of them stood on his cooler and gave everybody the finger. Now that's the scene they should be putting on the back of money, not that Declaration signing, if you ask me. Then one of the ladies said to him "Rupert, these people didn't come down here to watch you act a fool! Sit your ass down!" And then, in unison, everyone around them WOOOOOOOOOOOed at last.

So, la la la, happy 4th of July. You'll just have to imagine that I'm giving you the finger. Which I totally am.

Episode 29: How to Grill Food in the Summertime

2008-07-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

In Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, there's a scene where a character burns to a crisp because she adds lighter fluid to a burning charcoal fire and the flame travels up the stream of fluid and into the can, where it gets all explodey. At least I think that's the book this scene is in; it's either that or Little Women. I always thought this scene was a little bit over-the-top and unbelievable, myself, but didn't really have the energy to fact-check. I'm not The New Yorker.

Until! This one time? At band camp? No, wait; wrong How To. Anyway, once I had a charcoal fire started and it was not doing well, just sort of smoking and not firing up in any sort of possible meat-charring way. Now reader, I will say that I had had two or seven glasses of wine, delicious Stone Creek merlot. That's how long ago this scene took place: so long ago that a person could still drink merlot and not be hooted and hollered at. Surprisingly, through a drunken haze, I remembered that fateful scene from the aforementioned book and knew not to just squirt more fluid on the fire. So I very logically poured it into a styrofoam cup and then threw that directly onto the smoldering briquettes. WELL! All the smoke ignited instantly into a giant ball of flame that engulfed me for one millisecond. And then it disappeared and this is the first time I've ever told anyone this story, I think, probably because it's embarrassing. But not as embarrassing as when my mother borrowed her parents' brand new car and lit up a cigarette (which she was not supposed to be doing anyway, needless to say) and flicked the ashes out the window and they blew back in the rear window and caught the backseat on fire and she was just driving around with flames pouring out of the windows. But I'll save that one for another episode...one that I suspect will be called How to Get In Trouble By Spilling Your Mother's Shameful Secrets to the Entire World.

Episode 28: How to Walk in the City

2008-07-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

When I was in college in Memphis, I got to go to New York City on a junior trip. I was in some big fancy building in Midtown and got on an elevator and was suddenly sort of pushed to the back by the crush of people before I could press the button for my floor. So I had to yell "hey, y'all, could y'all mash that number 27 button for me?" After the uppity sniggering at my accent and vocabulary had subsided, I vowed to never again look like a small-town tourist when in the big city. Sidewalk etiquette is where provincialism crops up the most, I think, unless you're German, in which case we all knew you were a tourist anyway because ever single German who has ever left Germany wears weird pants and funny shoes and is thus instantly identifiable. They should just put that on the German flag: Wir tragen seltsame Hosen und Schuhe lustig.*

That same trip, I was out late one night with my fellow travelers (underaged drinking at some Jamaican joint!) and on the way back to our hotel near Lincoln Center, we watched a homeless man drag a grand piano on casters out into the middle of the street, go through the motions of lifting up the tails of his imaginary tuxedo, sit down on his bench and proceed to play some fancy piece of music that my memory says was "Rhapsody in Blue" but was probably something else. At the end, we all applauded. Then he stood up, bowed and picked up the end of the rope attached to the piano and dragged the piano off into the night.

I think this is where I'm supposed to say "and now you know.....the rest of the story!" But I don't so I won't.

*Translation courtesy of iGoogle Translate so don't blame me if I just called you a stinky donkey.

Episode 27: How to Go to a Movie

2008-07-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

One time when my sister was in high school and I was home from college for some reason or other, I tricked her into going to see David Cronenberg's The Fly. That really didn't go over so well; it's really not her type of movie, since there isn't a princess or a maid of honor in it and it doesn't end at a prom. Anyway, the audience was really nervous and fidgety and there were a lot of funny comments from frightened audience members that served to break the tension. All of which crescendoed when Geena Davis had that dream sequence where she gives birth to that giant fly larvae baby thing and the woman behind us said as clearly and loudly as possible, "I don't know why she don't get a can of Raid and put a STOP to that shit!" So even though today's How To advises against talking in movies, you're allowed to if you can be that funny.

I also tricked my sister another time when I made her ride a carnival ride where you twirled upside down and then stopped upside-down in mid-air and her purse flew open. I'll save that one for another time (How to Go to the State Fair...coming in September) but let's just say that the lady carny way way below us got a bunch of free birth control pills. Which from the looks of things, she was probably going to need later that night.

Thanks to world-famous authoress Katharine Weber for suggesting this one.

Episode 26: How to Eat Corn on the Cob

2008-06-27T08:18:00.000-07:00

Summer is finally here and you know what that means! Getting drunk in the afternoon! And also, fresh corn on the cob starts showing up at the local markets. Now if my mother was writing this, right about here is where she'd start going on and on about the variety known as Silver Queen. Silver Queen this and Silver Queen that and ohmygod enough with the Silver Queen already! She's the same way about cantaloupes. "Ambrosia! We can only eat the Ambrosia variety!" she screams over and over at the farmer's market, turning up her nose at all the other varieties and poking everything until all the farmers silently start questioning their career choice. She's right about the cantaloupes, but just between you and me, I don't think Silver Queen is life-changing, especially since I always slather it in enough butter to clog the arteries of people who just look at it.

Which reminds me of the time I drank a big bottle of wine and decided to invent a Butter-sicle (®), which consisted of sugar and butter creamed together and then frozen with a stick in it, like a popsicle. It was absolutely delicious and you'll be happy to know that if you drink a bottle of wine and then eat a frozen butter confectionery, when you throw it all up later, it comes up smooth as silk. Cheers!

Episode 25: How to Hang Pictures Salon-Style

2008-06-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

Home decoration is one of those things that seems subjective, but no, it isn't really. There is a right way and then there are all the ways you do it. There are really only about four ways to arrange a bedroom (four walls = four ways ... unless you have a round bed and if that's the case, you probably aren't really concerned with whether the room is arranged properly since your time is completely eaten up by your stripping lessons and visits to the free clinic) and only one of them is the Right Way.

People get picture-hanging wrong all the time. One little nothing - a Hang in There Baby, Friday's Coming kitten, perhaps - hung way too high. It doesn't look special...it looks sad. Look, unless you have a Franz Kline number just sitting around, you don't need to be putting little things alone on big white walls. But since the chances of you being a billionaire art collector are slim, you probably have a bunch of little tiny things all in mismatched frames. Embrace them! Hang them together salon-style! With a tape measure and a few simple tools, you can have your own miniature Louvre right in the living room! Why just last night, I hung this exact configuration at a friend's house (minus the peanut) and it looks like a million bucks, if I do say so myself. Which I just did.

Episode 24: How to Judge a Book by Its Cover

2008-06-25T11:56:00.001-07:00

I used to know this girl who played this game whenever she'd see a scraggly, possibly available man from a distance. The game was called "Homeless or Flawless?" and the point was for her to guess whether said gentleman was a dirty ugly homeless person or a dirty handsome hipster who probably went to Vanderbilt. It was her game; don't yell at me. She used certain visual cues to make her decision - plaid shirt? Easily available at thrift stores, so: homeless. Cigarette in hand? An expensive hobby, thus: flawless. One of those little knit caps? Uh-oh; it could go either way. The poor dear almost had a nervous breakdown when the Grunge movement gained momentum, and more than once I saw her on a date with a wrong guess, spraying Gloria Vanderbilt's White Shoulders all around her general area so people wouldn't know she chose the smelly guy. All these years later, she's still single so I guess her skills haven't really sharpened up much.

ANYWAY, some things are easier to judge by appearance than others. Restaurants, for one. If there are no cars in the parking lot, go somewhere else. But I chose books to illustrate this concept, because books are easier to draw than cars.

Episode 23: How to Get on My Nerves

2008-06-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

If you've ever hung out for me for like more than three minutes, you know that a lot of things drive me crazy, that's for sure. Things like SUVs (and it's always an SUV) with "W" bumper stickers still on them - seriously, eight years later, how's that working out for you? Neighbors who don't mow their lawn. Those Peptol-Bismol commercials where people chant Nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrahea: Yo! ( Frankly, it's the "Yo!" that bugs me more than the litany of digestive problems.) But what bothers me most of all is people who are passive-aggressive. It just blows my mind that there are grown people who just can't come right out and tell you what they think or want. I have this one friend (or should I say had?) who is like a master at it:

Me: Where would you like to go eat?
She: Oh, anywhere, you know me.... I'm easy!
Me: How about Thai? I know a great Thai place.
She: Ew, no, I hate Thai!
Me: Mexican? It's right down the street.
She: Gross. Immigrant food!
Me: Hmmm...how about a hot bowl of steam and some paste?
She: Perfect!

And it goes like that every time. Or it did every time I bothered to call her, which stopped about a year ago and now of course I've heard that she talks about me behind my back, says that I never call her. Which - it's true - I don't because between you and me, I am almost never in the mood for a bowl of paste.

Episode 22: How to Use the U-Scan®

2008-06-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

Well I don't know about the grocery store in your neighborhood, but visiting the one in mine is like a trip back in time. Like say to when monkeys ruled the earth and there was only one kind of fruited yogurt. I have no idea what the job requirements are for the various positions at my local bodega, but I am fairly sure the checklist includes the following questions: "Are you fluent in mumble?" "Do you have anything to wear other than the orange jumpsuit with the numbers on it?" "Do you promise to not learn what any vegetables other than potato chips are?" Because once, when I was buying beets? The ~~charming~~ cross-eyed no-doubt seventeen year-old mother of two behind the register asked me "are these for eating or are they for planting?" "Whichever is cheaper," I replied flatly, followed by a solid seven minutes of dumbfounded silence. I don't know what she thought they were....ground apples? Dirt grapes? Over-the-top potatoes?

Anyway. When the U-Scan® arrived at my grocery, I was overwhelmed with excitement at never having to put up with human interaction at the grocery store again! Until I deduced about ten seconds into it that the people in line now using the U-Scan® comprised the very same pool of talent from which the aforementioned employees were drawn. And not a single one of them can follow the instructions that the machines are speaking aloud. So! Be careful what you wish for, or you'll end up behind the guy in the U-Scan® line who can't even operate a blunt spoon, much less this high-tech piece of whatnot.

Special thanks to the, oh, eight different people who suggested this.

Episode 21: How to Order a Pizza

2008-06-23T11:17:00.001-07:00

First off, if you are one of those deep-dish types, or one of those nincompoops who regularly defrosts some Jeno's pizza rolls or - god forbid - one of those idiots that puts pineapple on a pizza, you can just stop reading right now and go on back to whatever white trashy thing you were probably doing before you decided to come here. Secondly, don't clog up the comments with your pizza-related-opinions, either. If I wanted to hear about what YOU like on a pizza, I'd read YOUR blog. Third-wise: enjoy!

Episode 20: How to Avoid a Nervous Breakdown

2008-06-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

Okay, so today I went to a puppet show at the public library. Big deal, I know. But it's this whole big puppet festival with troupes from around the world, all different countries that haven't had the good sense to just ban puppeteering outright. I'm sitting there watching grown people prance around in costume performing The Abduction From the Seraglio with hideous puppets on their hands when suddenly I realize that there are a whole lot of things that make me nervous all going on at the same time in a confined space: puppets, adults in doublets, children and even the library in general. I started to get a little unnerved so I was really glad when it all ended. But then! The menacing puppeteers came out into the audience and waved their puppets right in my face! I almost fainted. Good thing my sister was with me...she knew just what to whisper into my ear: "we'll have a beer at lunch."

Episode 19: How to Cut a Picture Mat

2008-06-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

I used to work part-time at a picture frame shop. Three bossy ladies ran the place, though I suppose they were all nice enough. They listened to NPR constantly, so much so that I almost voted Republican just to spite them. When I say "bossy," what I mean is they hired me and basically threw me downstairs where the frame stuff was and said "go to it!" without much training. So I'd turn the saw on and off and chop little pieces of wood and make hammering noises to make it sound like I was doing something but what I was really doing was reading Jude the Obscure. I'd keep one frame in the right angle clamps at all times so if they clomped downstairs, I'd look like I was doing something. Then at the end of the day I'd say "lawzy! I'm exhausted!" and come upstairs and make stretching gestures, clock out and leave. It wasn't a fun job and one time my bike got stolen from right out in front even though the three bossy ladies were up there right in front of the window gabbing nonstop about whatever the hell it was that NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg was in a tizzy about.

I do like to cut mats, though. I learned how in art school and made a little bit of money on the side cutting them for people who didn't like to do it, which was practically everybody. I mention that you can get a mat cutter for around $125 at an art supply store, and I do recommend it. If you've ever gotten mats cut at a frame shop, you'll see that it pays for itself pretty quickly. When your neighbor brings over that picture of a chicken wearing a wig that they picked up at the flea market, you can say "why I'll mat that for you for twenty-five dollars!" And then later, you can silently and mercilessly judge them while you're in your studio, swiping the exacto blades down the metal guides of your new mat cutter.

Episode 18: How to Pack for a Hike

2008-06-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

Some people are more serious than others when it comes to hiking. There are people who carry a snakebite kit and a doohickey that makes creek water potable and a, you know, sundial or whatever to know what time it is down at some Mayan temple in Eastern Mexiwhathaveyou. I hike light. Sometimes I don't even carry water because the thirstier I am, the more appealing the impending post-hike visit to the Sonic for a cherry limeade becomes.

Once when I was hiking alone in the South Grove at Calaveras Big Trees State Park, I was eating a roast beef sandwich while walking along admiring all of the nature. When suddenly! There was a black bear coming down the wooded slope off to my right! I totally panicked, mainly because I was also listening to Petula Clark sing "Downtown" on my iPod and it was at the part I really like and I really wanted to hear it. I couldn't quite remember what I was supposed to do if I ran into a bear. Punch it in the nose? No, that was a shark, and running into a shark on the western slope of the Sierras seemed unlikely at best. Drop and roll? No, the woods were not on fire. Oh, what was it? Think, think, think! So I just froze in mid-step and let the bear amble down and kind of around me to the creek, though I did get the rest of that roast beef sandwich stuffed into my mouth as quickly as possible. I finished my hike and when I got back to the car, I checked the hiking guidebook to see what it said about bear encounters. "Try to make yourself as tall and loud as possible so the bear thinks you're bigger than he is." It also discouraged - in so many words - the eating of roast beef sandwiches and the use of iPods on the trail. Which is advice you can take or leave; I'm no expert.

Episode 17: How to Get Rid of a Wasp Nest

2008-06-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

You should definitely have your bookmark-finger ready because this How To could be life-saving! Or you could die following my advice - probably from lung cancer because I advise smoking at one point. My own personal experience with this particular traumatic event was that I got to spend a lovely night in the hospital watching "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" starring Barbara Stanwyck and eating a $74 ham sandwich. So...win-win, right? Afterwards, I got my very own personal Epi-pen, which I guess was supposed to make me feel more secure even though there's no way I'm jamming that giant needle into my thigh, I don't care how giant my face swells up. Also, it happened right before 9-11 and then when I was flying on a trip to the Grand Canyon the following October, the people at security confiscated the giant needle. When I protested - "But I'm allergic to bees!" - they deadpanned "Sir, they ain't no bees on the plane." So there I was at the Grand Canyon for four days, terrified of sudden bees. And also turquoise jewelry, which freaks me right out.

Thanks to Margaret Littman for suggesting this one.

Episode 16: How to Exact Revenge

2008-06-17T08:07:00.000-07:00

Oh, I know, I know. You are thinking to yourself "how can you advise about being happy one day and then turn around and advise about dishing out revenge on the next?" Well, let me tell you...IT'S EASY because they frequently go hand-in-hand! Nothing makes you happier than seeing an enemy put in their place! Trust me! For example, let's say a neighbor, hmmmmm, across the street doesn't quite take care of their yard enough for your tastes and indeed might perhaps re-locate a toilet into their front yard during a renovation and they then "accidentally" forget for weeks on end to put said toilet into the construction dumpster. You have two choices: you can sit on your own immaculate porch and wait and see exactly what petunia-pansy-lantana combination they have planned for this avant-garde planter or you can just call codes and complain! Flowers make you happy, but they die. Seeing a city official with a clipboard knocking on an undesirable neighbor's door is a gift that lasts forever.

I hear.

Episode 15: How to Be Happy

2008-06-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

Frankly, the few suggestions I give in this How To installment are all on the sugary-sweet, naïve side of advice-giving. Because I did all three of them today and they worked, instant mood-lifters. I admit there are some other days where these sort of Pollyanna-type activities would have no effect on my mood at all. In fact, on dark days such as those, I find that the only thing that can make me even the slightest bit happier is to Google old high-school or college enemies to see if they turned out more successful than me. If I'm lucky, their names pop up on mandatory sex-offender registries. If I'm really lucky, their names don't show up at all! And that is one happy day, let me tell you. I'm beaming just thinking about it.

Episode 14: How to Get Film Developed

2008-06-13T08:18:00.001-07:00

God. Trying to get a roll of film developed these days is like looking for one of those things you used to put in the middle of 45 RPM records to make them play on a turntable. Or looking for an actual turntable, now that I think about it. Everything's digital digital digital. I'm fine with digital, though I notice that I never print prints taken with my digital camera; all of my memories live unrealized on little unlabeled silver discs in a box I bought at TJ Maxx that lives on a shelf in the closet.

I recently went on a camping trip, though, that involved whitewater rafting, so I had to use an old-timey waterproof camera that utilized something called "film." When the camping trip was all over, I had to go to five different drugstores to get it developed and even that took three days because every single machine in a fifty-mile radius was broken. Or so the extremely nice and extremely little person behind the counter at the last Rite-Aid told me. And when I say "little person," I mean it. She was a genuine midget - she even had a key ring that had a little rubber medallion that said "WATCH MIDGET PORN: IT MAKES YOU LOOK HUGE" dangling from it. Her name was Frieda and she also had a tattoo of a shrimp on her arm. I thought she was a very unusual hire for a Rite-Aid, but what the hell do I know? After all, she was the only person in five different "one-hour" film-developing drug stores that could help me. Lesson learned!

Episode 13: How to Visit Readerville.com

2008-06-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

Readerville.com, an online community based around books and reading to which I've belonged from the beginning, is celebrating its eighth anniversary today. That's a long time for an online group! There's new book-related content every day and a vibrant forum component full of people who will alternately make your day or make you crazy. We've already had a Readerville marriage and at least two moving-in-togethers, so you never know what will happen, other than that books you wanted but have no memory of ever ordering magically appear in your mailbox, because it turns out someone at Readerville had a copy and sent it to you.

I've befriended quite a few Readervillians in person: I've hiked into the Grand Canyon with one, I've sipped a crawfish-garnished Bloody Mary with another, and I witnessed yet another one hurl a martini shaker into a poison oak-lined ravine in the redwoods, where it remains to this day, a rusty shell still holding half a margarita. I spent a magical afternoon watching the sun set over a Napa vineyard (after it was closed to the public!) with three others, all of us sipping wine and eating cheese. Needless to say, I can no longer keep track of how many I've been hung over with.

I highly recommend you stop by and look around. I'm sure you'll find something - or someone - that engages you. Anyway, here's a little cheat sheet to help you get started. Feel free to print it out and laminate it.

Episode 12: How to Work a Crossword Puzzle

2008-06-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, so don't even TALK to me about that stupid sudoku. It's the stupidest thing ever invented, with the possible exception of those Kinoki pads you put on your feet to draw all the toxins out. Which I totally hope work! No, in my opinion, the best way to while away fifteen minutes or so is to work on a crossword puzzle. I usually enjoy a glass of wine while I'm doing it, which explains why sometimes the letters don't ever make it to the exact little square they probably should and it maybe looks like I was just making words up to finish the puzzle, but I know I knew the answer. It's not my fault YOU don't know that an Indonesian marmoset is called a "gwyminnet."

Episode 11: How to Change the Litter Pan

2008-06-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a particular How To will come into my mind as a reflection of what kind of day I have had. For example, if you visit this site and see How to Smile at Everyone, you can assume I have had a good day. If you see How to Fall Down While Inexplicably Wearing a Tube Top, you can probably assume I was drinking at lunch. So today you get How to Change the Litter Pan because it was a bad day, one that was partially full of crap. And also because it was easier to draw than How to Serial Kill.

Episode 10: How to Make a Chicago-Style Hot Dog

2008-06-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

I give you this How To for one good reason: you'll need to know it if you ever meet a person from Chicago who goes on and on about how they have the only real kind of hot dog and trust me: THEY ALL WILL. It's like some disease they all have, this urgent need to tell you that the way you like your hot dog is wrong wrong wrong, so then they'll go into excruciating detail about all this folderol they put on a hot dog and then they have a near-death experience if you tell them you don't have any poppyseed buns at your local grocery store. It's sort of like if you try to give me "beef BBQ" (as if such a thing even exists!) and then you get a fifteen-minute lecture about the Divine Providence of North Carolina pork BBQ.

Anyway! By the time you go round up all of these crazy ingredients, you'll have spent the equivalent of a Southwest airline ticket to Chicago Midway, so you might as well just do that and de-plane and go get one of these damned things in the concourse and then just get back on the plane and go home.

Episode 9: How to RSVP

2008-06-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

Now, it occurs to me that some of you will never need to know how to do this particular thing. You know who you are - you spend so much time reading blogs, you simply must be a shut-in who never gets invited anywhere. But! You just never know when you'll be called upon to attend a social gathering, like say when your half-sister-by-third-marriage gets her leg brace off, or perhaps your cousin Wayne is being released from a minimum-security facility and would like to share the evening repast with you and yours down at the Morrison's Cafeteria. These are the times when it's absolutely crucial to know How to RSVP correctly. Otherwise, they'll think you're coming, which of course you are not going to do.