Matt is proud to announce the birth of 1999 Chevrolet Prizm.  Prizm has his father’s headlights and power locks, his father’s automatic transmission, parking brake, glove compartment, and rear-window defroster, and also his father’s air conditioning and AM/FM stereo.  A mutant gene resulted in power windows and a CD player.  The mother declined to identify herself or her contributions, but may have had something to do with Prizm’s 62,000-mile odometer reading.

After a month’s hard labor on Matt’s part, the birth attendants decided to extract Prizm surgically through the checking account.  Fortunately, there were no complications, except for a continued checking-account discharge expected to last up to two years.

This morning, I’m waiting for my advisor to send me my PhD preliminary exam questions, and as I wait, I thought I’d show

a) 4 ways how taking the preliminary exams is like having sex for the first time:

1. There’s a divide between people who’ve gone through with it and those who haven’t. All the advice that the experienced can give you is to “close your eyes and barrel your way through it.”
2. Before, your entire identity can be summed up as someone hasn’t gone through it. On the other side of the fence, people say it’s now just something they did.
3. Every now and then, you come across someone who’s experience was magical. They were fully prepared, had everything sorted out, knew exactly what to expect, and might have even had fun. For most people, it seems to have been torture while they were doing it, but at least went by very quickly.
4. You think you want to be on the other side– very, very badly. When the time is actually close, and the moment is inevitable, you suddenly wish you had just a little while longer.

b) 1 important way that taking the exams is NOT like having sex

1. You try to do it just once in your life.

I often take the #17 bus home from work. It goes down Nicollet, turns right on 24th at the McDonald’s, and over to Hennepin. I don’t know what kind of SuperSized drinks they serve at the McDonald’s on the corner, but this Tuesday made the third time an Extrememly Drunk Guy got on the bus from that particular spot.

There’s no guesswork here — All three, I’m talking weaving down the aisle, shouting, stinking of gin, etc. The 5:30 in the afternoon kind of drunk.

Last time, a Really Drunk Guy sat down between me and another guy, put his arm around him, and struck up a conversation. I was a little miffed. The object of his affections was more traditionally handsome, I suppose, but I have a lot to offer conversation-wise.

Tuesday, a different Extremely Drunk Guy sort of made himself a spot between two women at the very back of the bus by plopping down in between and immediately saying “You’re pretty,” to one of them. The other one got up and walked down the aisle. The pretty woman said “Thank you.” Then he said that he was tired of “all this gangster shit.” The pretty woman said “I’ve had a long day,” and decided to stand the rest of the way home.

“Mother,” he kind of warbled. “I just killed a man.”

Whoa! Me and the people in the back shifted in our seats nervously and shared wide-eyed glances.

“Put a gun up to his head, pulled the trigger, now he’s dead,” he sang.

Wait a minute . . . was that Queen?

“Cause nothing really matters . . . anyone can see . . . nothing reeeaaaly matters . . . to me.”

Definitely singing. Sort of. Definitely “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Everybody likes “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In the back of the bus, we breathed a collective sigh of relief.

The back row he was sitting in was wide open. A woman newcomer with some shopping bags plopped down beside him and looked him over. He was swaying a little bit. She turned to the guy in front of her:

New Woman: I wondered why nobody was sitting back here!

Guy in front: You’ll find out in a minute.

EDG: I’m a king, I’m a king, I’m a motherfuckin’ king.

If only he had stuck with “Bohemian Rhapsody.” By the time he got to “scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango” he would have had us all caught up in a giant bus-shaking singalong, Wayne’s World style.

Come up with a caption for this picture I took while driving around Minneapolis:

Today, September 19, is Talk Like a Pirate Day! This will make some people very happy. Arrr. If you go with it, this could bring you pleasant distraction for at least 3 minutes. To help you facilitate that, try the Pirate Translator. I just plugged in that last sentence and got “Aye, t’ help you facilitate that, try the Pirate Translator. Gar.” but I’m disappointed because pirates don’t say “facilitate.” Oh well. See what results you get.

Ahoy and walk the plank.

I just bought some M & Ms, which I don’t think I’ve done since I was… Well, I don’t ever remember buying myself a bag of M & Ms, but I assume I have before. I mean, a small bag of M & Ms for myself, not some giant bag I throw into a bowl for a party and never look at again, except when I mindlessly stick my hand in it later and insert the M & Ms into my mouth without looking at them or remembering I did it. On those rare occasions, I could be throwing a handful of chocolate-covered ants into my mouth and wouldn’t really notice.

No, I’m saying that I bought my OWN bag, and slowly ate them, and really looked at them before I put them in my mouth. And what I want to say is, as tasty as they were (and they were), they were alarming.

What’s with the colors? And why don’t more people talk about this? They are the brightest, brashest purples and greens and blues and yellows I’ve ever seen a food item be. Food isn’t those colors. The only thing that’s any of those colors and edible is… M & Ms. Why is this? It felt like I was eating tasty Fisher Price toys, or very yummy legos.

And I could get used to this–I like bright colors a lot, and chocolate even more. But it seems so unnatural. That part’s obvious, but it got me wondering if I could somehow connect crass-looking, overly colored American candies to American culture. Yeah, that’s where I’m going with this…

I also want to be  sure everyone knows that M & Ms are actually a rip-off of Smarties, which is a Canadian, I mean originally English candy. A member of the Mars family saw some English solders eating Smarties (apparently ‘melts in your mouth, not in your hands’ was a helpful war tool) and proceeded to lift the idea. I ate Smarties in Canada when I was a kid and missed them when I couldn’t find them in the U.S. years later.

Come to think of it, Smarties were obnoxious colors too. So I guess that blows my “crass America” concept. Well, insofar as being able to use candy as the symbol, anyway.

Yesterday, waiting for my ride, I stood on the corner of La Salle and 9th Street in downtown Minneapolis and played with my new camera cell phone doodad. I’ve never had one before last week and I’m enthralled with the instant gratification of snapping and there’s your picture (better than polaroid!) — I can spend hours taking pixelated pictures of my foot, the wall, the carpet, etc.

I was looking skyward, framing a particularly boring shot of the top of a building, when 2 women and a man walked by. One of the women stopped beside me and looked up where I was looking. Then she said, “You can take a picture much better from this angle,” squatted low to the ground, and thrust her widish bottom waaay out towards my crotch.

She was about an inch and a half away from molesting me.

She stood up and laughed and walked off, and her friends laughed, and I laughed. I wish now that I had taken a picture of her ass. But that might have been me harrassing her (no pun intended). More importantly, though, taking her picture might have led to more interaction or conversation with a woman who was obviously insane. And then, too, I would have had a picture of her butt on my cell phone. Nobody wants that.

I felt kinda dirty afterward. But I was asking for it. You should have seen the tight jeans I was wearing.

A few friends of mine recently started a food club of sorts—a casual excuse to get together and investigate Latin American restaurants in the Twin Cities. One of them actually came up with a great title for the collective: Friends of Latin American Nourishment or FLAN. My husband and I went to the first “meeting” at the Puerto Rican restaurant Puerta Azul in St. Paul (great title—I think it means Blue Gateway) and though the food itself was a little disappointing, it reminded me, as eating out always does, what a complex beast food can be.

The chicken was dry, true. But even as we must value taste most when it comes to food, surely a good meal appeals also to our eyes, our sense of smell, and the texture of it on our lips? The beautiful plates that the food at Puerto Azul came on, the wonderful sensation of a liquid mango salsa on a meatier chicken breast, the chatter of forks and knives touching their plates all around me—all these added to the sense of the meal.

What occurs to me more and more is my growing anxiety about food. Not in the calorie counting way, which obviously has taken over the world, but more in the “what does food mean to me” sort of way. I love to cook, and I love eating, and even my moniker is really a sort of rice dish (the source, by the way, of the subsequently bastardized “rice pilaf”). But I often wonder, what should I cook? How should I make it? When I have friends over to dinner, am I obligated to cook Indian food? When friends ask me for a recipe for something I’ve just cooked and hasn’t followed a set of instructions itself, and I give said recipe to them, am I then responsible for what unfolds in their kitchen?

In some ways, these anxieties remind me of my mother. For a period of about seven months, my father was in England, my brother had just started college in Mississippi, and my mother and I were by ourselves in Delhi. Many mornings, my mother’s first question to me would be what I wanted for dinner. I laughed at her then for making me think about meals so far in advance, and now I ask my husband Kris days ahead of time what he might want for dinner, and find myself sorting out leftovers in my mind, and mentally organizing ingredients in my pantry and fridge into meals.

Two other things about food:

A) There’s a great story by Kazuo Ishiguro called “The Family Supper” (listen to it here) that not only makes food literally an issue of life and death, and not in the obvious food-is-nourishment sort of way, but also has it stand in for cultural alienation, sibling rivalry, and other good socio-psychological stuff.

B) There’s a word for an attitude like mine. This is from OED:

foodism, n.

orig. U.S. Brit. /fudz()m/, U.S. /fudz()m/ [< FOOD n. + -ISM. Cf. FOODIST n.]

A keen or exaggerated interest in food, esp. in the minute details of the preparation, presentation, and consumption of food.

Some things have to be shared because your brain, by itself, doesn’t know what to do with the information… I discovered a site called CaddyChicks today, thanks to Wendy at Metroblogging Minneapolis:

The gist? Golfers can hire hot little college girls looking for money to be their golf caddy. When applying to be a caddy, it lets potential golf bag carriers designate how much they charge per round, how comfortable they are with the sport, and whether they prefer to walk or drive a golf cart. Golfers get to check out their height, weight, and eye color before choosing which one they like the best…. Their tagline? “Who’s Your Caddy?”

Hilarious. Cheesy. Depressing. Inevitable. It is really funny though. 

Let’s try to connect CaddyChicks to politics in Connecticut, which must also be discussed today because as we know, today is the Democratic primary in Connecticut. And WE ALL WANT JOE LIEBERMAN to lose. Not only that, we want Ned Lamont to win. 

The reason I want Joe Lieberman to lose, besides the fact that he’s a Republican in denial, votes with conservatives more than his own party, and supported a baseless war, is that he’s a cruel, clueless idiot when it comes to women’s basic rights. I don’t understand why the Lamont supporters endlessly talk about the war when they could hammer the other point home so easily. 

Yep, Lieberman supports hospitals’ rights to deny contraceptives to rape victims. Joementum doesn’t just think it’s ok to deny women contraceptives, he thinks it’s ok for hospitals to keep them from rape victims if they want to. His quote: 

“In Connecticut, it shouldn’t take more than a short ride to get to another hospital.” 

You’ve probably heard that before, but since I don’t hear Lamont supporters (and everyone) saying it over and over and over the way I think they should, I’m saying it again here. Please oh please, get Joe Lieberman out of the Senate and out of the Democratic party. Let today end with a Ned Lamont victory. 

Oh yeah, let’s connect CaddyChicks and Connecticut…. If you can pick a caddy that way, why not a candidate? We could get rid of paid ads, corruption, lobbyists and the entire campaign trail if we nominated and voted for candidates with a Web form. They list their views, you pick the best match. 

But the most American way to adapt the CaddyChicks logic would be the good-looking premium, on everything. Want your dinner served to you by a good-looking waiter? Pay the good-looking tax! Want the good-looking bartender, bank teller, doctor? Pay up. 

Hey, what about a competency tax? I’d pay for that.

That’s how much sleep, roughly, I’ve gotten over the past year.

I know because I have a machine by my bedside that records how long I sleep and, more to its purpose, blows air down my throat — a CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure), which is a treatment for sleep apnea.

With sleep apnea, my throat closes up every once in a while as I breathe at night, waking me up and, before my CPAP, making me drowsy all day. (Besides sleepiness during the day, I knew something was wrong because I snored like a freight train. We’re talking epic, myth-inspiring, rattling the neighbors’ windows snoring. And that’s all you probably need / want to know about that).

But it keeps track of how many hours I sleep a night. So I did the math. I get an average of 6.3 hours of sleep a night.

What could be more interesting to you then how much sleep I get? Maybe if I give you a play by play of my dream where I go to the supermarket and buy baby carrots . . .

How much do you sleep at night? (According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average American sleeps 6.8 hours a night and, apparently, getting less than 7 hours or more than 8 is linked to high blood pressure — good luck!)