Friday Shuffle - Be Careful What You Wish For Edition

I often lament that I need something to shake me out of my routine. I complain that I get into a rut. So what did fate deliver for me this week? My brother's cancer surgery and my gallbladder making an ass of itself.

I need to start getting a little more specific with my wishes.

Other bits:

• A couple days ago Poppy made a blog entry discussing an article she found on CNN.com. And while the theme of the article is stupid, the word itself that it discusses - frenemy - makes me want to claw out my eyes. In fact I'm simply up to my ass in pop culture speak. There's slang and then there's the emergence of faux words and phrases that seem to be there solely for the purpose of integrating themselves into pop culture. To make the speaker seem hip and cool but in essence don't do more than make the speaker look like a sheep following what seems to be the trend of the day.
  
  I don't think I'm going to be able to keep my sanity if I read one more blog where someone tells us that they "heart" something. Let me see if I have this right. Twenty, twenty-five years ago we started to use a symbol to replace a word - in a publicity campaign no less - and now we're using a word to replace the symbol that we used to replace a word. Convolution, anyone? Then we have the word "chillax". We began to use the word "chill" as slang for "relax" but now we've had to tack on the ending of "relax" because it seems that a whole generation of people saying "chill" just wasn't enough to get across the idea of relaxation.
  
  I could perhaps give someone a pass on this if that person were fourteen years old. However if you're old enough to have ever parented a fourteen year old I have to advise that one day you'll look back on your days of hearting something and chillaxing with the same chagrin as you have now when you remember the days you proclaimed something to be "far out" and called someone a "jive turkey". Dyn-O-Mite!
  
  
• I'd been chatting with Darling Mollie online last night and the subject turned to Senator Larry Craig of Idaho and the the troubles he's in for allegedly trolling for love in a public restroom. We'd both listened to the audio of the police officer questioning Senator Craig and speculated that this guy simply isn't a very good liar and that him being a "fairly wide guy" wasn't going to explain why his foot was outside of the perimeters of the bathroom stall and just who picks up toilet paper from a public restroom floor anyway?
  
  About twenty minutes passed after Darling Mollie said goodbye to me so she could leave work and my phone rang. "I just wanted you to know that I went to the restroom and tested Larry Craig's explanation and it doesn't wash. The man would have to be a freakin' acrobat to sit with his "wide stance" and reach behind him to pick up a piece of toilet paper. I even put toilet paper on the ground to see if I could pick it up and it's nearly impossible to reach back in the manner he said he was reaching - and I'm still young and in good shape! I'm not buying his story. He's trying to sell us a shit milkshake and I'm not buying it!"
  
  That's how you know your friends love you. When they know you don't have frequent need of being in a public restroom in which you can test out theories and voluntarily do it for you and then on top of that make a trans-Atlantic call to you to report the findings.
  
  
• I've simply got to find a way to turn off my voice mailbox. I seldom have a need for it and the times when its inconvenience often outweighs the times it makes life easier. Example: Last night while talking with Darling Mollie on the phone the call got cut off. I was blathering on about something when the call cut out so I didn't realize at first what had happened. In the meantime Darling Mollie had called back and the call went straight to voice mail which sort of freaked her out since the message is in German only and Mollie knows just enough German to stand on the Ku'damm in Berlin and ask where the Chanel store is. She called back once again, our conversation was completed and that was that. Until this morning.
  
  As soon as 8:00am rolled around the voice mailbox called to inform me that I had a message. Let me just say that I recognize 8:00am for three reasons only - to get to a medical appointment, to catch a plane and to attend church. If it's for something else, leave me the hell alone. I was as pissed as when someone unexpectedly rings my doorbell and they're not holding a box from Amazon.com in their hands.
  
  
• Even after being rudely awakened by my nagging voice mailbox my day has still been wonderful. I had to go to the American foods section of the grocery store that's in the basement of Karstadt and what was there? Hellmann's mayonnaise. Tiny, overpriced squeeze bottles of yummy mayonnaise love. They haven't had Hellmann's there in years. Thank you, Karstadt for taking pity on a Hellmann's freak.
  

Bixente the iPod, a pop icon himself, may be occasionally carried by the whims of popular culture but there's nary a whiff of scandal around him. And he's as well loved as Hellmann's. Time to shuffle.

1. Shades of Blue - Karl Shuman Band
2. Sea Of No Cares - Great Big Sea
3. Call It Love - Poco
4. Paradise - Meat Puppets
5. I've Been To Memphis - Lyle Lovett
6. Radio Free Europe - REM
7. Friday I'm In Love - The Cure
8. Love On A Farmboy's Wages - XTC
9. You Belong To Me - Dean Martin
10. Los Rancheros - Adam Ant

Have a good weekend. And keep your wide stance out of trouble.