Wherein I hate on oft-used English phrases

I am so over the term, "Like a fish out of water."

I don't know if all of you have had the extensive icthyologous experience that I have, so I'm just gonna tell you: A fish out of water is dead. It's not "like" anything, except maybe something that flops sadly on its side for a few minutes before expiring.

Really, the only way I can see it working as a simile is:  "He was shot in the stomach, and, for a brief moment, as his life flashed before his eyes, he was like a fish out of water. Then, when he died, he was like a fish who had been out of water for too long. Only his eyes weren't so buggy." Morbid, but possibly effective.

Wherein I demand more horse-punching

When you're in the suburbs and it's raining and you're terribly bored, it sometimes seems like a good idea to go to the movies. The magic of Hollywood will amuse and enrapture you, and you will have two or three fewer hours to try desperately to fill. Such was the thinking when I went to see the latest Planet of the Apes movie last weekend:

our scene opens on L and G slouched on the couch in a coma of inactivity
TV: Planet of the Apes! Watch It! This is a preview voiceover!
G: You think?
L: Eh...
The preview shows what looks like a gorilla punching a horse
L: Yeah, I'd watch that.

Birds

I like birds because they always look pissed off:

Harumph

Hrmm

It's like they think someone is always trying to put one over on them.

Well, that was weird

I know that my lovely, wonderful, caring parents understand me because they are always recommending top-notch films and television dramas for my viewing pleasure. They don't just throw out recommendations willy-nilly - they have an exacting, hi-tech, algorithm-filled vetting process that goes a little something like this:
1) Watch.
2) Become confused.
3) Decide the watched thing is weird.
4) Call me and say, "Have you seen this thing? You'd like it - IT'S WEIRD."
 
I am that person in my family.

If my parents were to recommend something to my sister or their friends or the mailman or the dog, they might say, "You'd like it - it's interesting/jentacular/touching/happy-making." But for me, it's just "weird," the subtext being "[like you! You zany kid with your Brooklyn and your ugly gremlin dog!]"

Nobody does it like I do it

Here's how I wanted to start this entry: "I talk to myself more than anybody I know."

This statement is true - in a way. I really do talk to myself A LOT. In fact, I would say I am keeping a conversation running in my head at least 87% of the time that I am awake. [PS: I almost put "alive" there instead of "awake". DO NOT PANIC. It was just a mistype; I am NOT a vampire. I am always alive...at least 87% of the time.]

It's not all color commentary, either. If you looked into my mind, rarely would you see: "And here comes the orange juice into the glass! Glug glug glug! That will be delicious!" Nor is it some sort of long-running inspirational speech to myself. I do not kid myself into thinking that I am my own personal Coach Taylor.



OMG EVERYONE WATCH THIS SHOW RIGHT NOW!

Ahem...

That's funny - you don't LOOK like your picture on the Internet

I don't often buy things online. Mostly, this is because I'm cheap, and I simply do not buy things anywhere, ever, unless they are edible.

Time and the cruel streets of New York had other plans, though. My shoes - trusty since freshman year of college - had gotten so hole-y that my students were beginning to think I was a secret hobo who lived under my desk. And goodness knows you can't trust a secret desk hobo to teach proper sonnet explication.

Oh NO

I used to think that owning an umbrella meant I was a grown-up.

In my defense, it was an extremely rad umbrella: an impressively spring-loaded implement in a mature, steely-gray.  I was a freshman in college, and I wrote a whole essay about it (for fun, by the way, just on my computer one day. Aside from being stupid, I was also a mega-dork. Not like now, when I write in a BLOG which is so very very different from an essay in a Word Doc.). I loved this umbrella so much, that I had a recurring nightmare that it would be taken from me at an airport security gate, robbing me of my very obvious super-adulthood.

Eventually, I realized that when you eat all of your meals in a cafeteria - and two-thirds of said meals consist of cereal and soft-serve ice cream - you are not an adult. But the foolishness did not end there.

I then moved on to thinking that cleaning your own bathroom (occasionally) marked the true gateway to adulthood. I laughed at my former, umbrella-revering self as I swept the tiles of the sorority house bathroom. Of course, that was also the period of my life when I thought that building wizard staffs from cans of cheap beer and then puking into bushes was a great way to spend my Saturday nights. This made me a TOTALLY FUN (well, until the puking) person, but maybe not a particularly grown-up-type person.

Now, though, I think I have cracked the true code of adulthood: I have run out of things to be angry about. The magic of youth, wherein I could rattle off 300 word tirades about a new HORRIBLY STUPID THING THAT SHOULD NEVER EXIST each week, has scattered like a pile of glitter confetti in a windstorm (or some other sad simile...). I have left that magical land behind and zoomed straight to old-crotchety-person-who-complains-about-the-same-thing-over-and-over-again-hood.

And you, dear reader, are left saying, "Yes, Great Auntie Thelaurenbell, we know the New York Times is full of idiots - you told us that 800 times!" and "People are annoying! Especially when they are doing crazy math and somehow 4 of them manage to take up 10 subway seats! Yes! Is it time for your nap?" 

So here's the thing: how to reclaim that halcyon era when, every time I left my house, a new thing so enraged me that I had to scream it to the Internets? Is there a magical fountain of youth anger out there somewhere? Do I just have to start leaving my house more? Or (NO!) reading the Times again (I tried this morning - all I could get out of it was, "The French don't keep statistics on race? Umm...what? That seems silly." Silly! That's the best I could do!)?

This is what it means to be old. The sitcoms tell me that, usually, when people get old and boring, they lose interest in sex and going out to dinner, thus leading to hilarious, half-hour-long standoffs with their significant others. For me, the issue is far more personal, and more grave. Dinner? Sex? PSHAW - where is my righteous indignation?

A Very Special Winter PSA

thelaurenbell crawls from her deep, dank hibernation space to tell you this: please, dear people, cut those stitches that hold the tails of your coats together. Your coat tails are not an extra sleeve, or a wee little headhole for small-headed people who enjoy wearing their coats upside down. They are not a special breathing apparatus hole for when you do that thing where one person sits on another’s shoulders wearing a long coat and they pretend to be one, unusually tall, unusually lumpy person.

No, no, no.

They are tails. They are meant to waggle free in the breeze, like the flowing tail of a fine stallion. They cannot be restrained! To restrain your tail is to restrain your SOUL.

Also, it makes you look dumb.

New Yorkers like to think that they look extra-super-wicked-cool at all times. New York, I tell you this once, and I tell you now: you cannot look extra-super-wicked-cool when your bottoms are unnaturally constrained by stitched-together jacket hems. You look like The Penguin, and he is not even plain old unhyphenated cool.

This nonsense has so distressed me lately, I've started entertaining elaborate fantasies of carrying around tiny (non-threatening!) scissors and just...snipsnip - solving everyone's little rear-binding issues. I would be like a superhero - a modern-day Batman solving this most modern, most pressing of problems, de-Peguinizing people withe the tiniest flick of my leather-gloved wrist. People would greet me with "hurrahs" and tears of joy. This is what goes on in my mind.

But NO! Let us not go there. You must not let the figments of thelaurenbell's overactive imagination come to life and run ramshackle over your fabled streets. New York, you are better than this. You should not NEED a vigilante of tail freedoms. You should be able to handle this yourself. Do not make me be that person with the nail scissors, stalking people's bottoms on the subway (see exhibit a - and please note that I painstakingly wrote those true-to-life sound effects backwards for your benefit, dear readers).

This concludes your very special winter PSA.