Read You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl Online

Authors: Celia Rivenbark

You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl (11 page)

BOOK: You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl
8.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“Arf! Arf! I Just Ate My Own Shit!”
Y
ou have to wonder how Mattel came up with the idea for Puppy Tweets. Dogs using Twitter? That’s the kind of idea that college students get when they’re exceedingly high and everything seems to be the most brilliant idea ever conceived and they’re all going to be the next Bill Gates or Jack Black.
Of course, in the cold light of day, the notion of recycling your dirty bong water to run your car doesn’t seem quite as clever as it did a mere eight hours earlier, but then you also thought your pizza was plotting to kill you along about that same time.
Puppy Tweets sounds like one of those dumb-ass late-night ideas, this quirky invention that allows your dog to communicate with you about his day, his activities, his dreams.
But this time, the dumb-ass idea paid off. Puppy Tweets was a big hit when it was unveiled by Mattel recently. Who can resist a computerized toy that allows your dog to post updates to its very own Twitter page?
And, yes, I’m serious.
How does it work? Magic. No, seriously. Puppy Tweet contains a USB receiver that dog owners then connect to their computer. This allows them to download the necessary Puppy Tweets software and create a Twitter account for their dog.
When the dog moves or barks, a signal is sent from its Puppy Tweets tag to the receiver, which updates the dog’s Twitter page. Owners can then check Twitter to see their dog’s latest posts.
What does all this mean? That’s easy. It means that, one day, it’s quite possible that you’ll be sitting in a very important business meeting with the high muckety-mucks at your company and you will be alerted that your dog has
just licked my balls because I can
.
Truthfully, I doubt that’s one of the preprogrammed five hundred doggie tweets, but it could be.
How often can your dog tweet? Pretty damn often because Puppy Tweets works by tweeting when the sound and motion sensor on the dog collar senses barking or movement.
Which, judging by the dogs in my neighborhood, should pretty much be every minute of every day. I can’t manage to tweet more than once a month and the dog across the street
who’s so dumb he eats his own poo, will be embracing new media like a brand-new chew toy. What is
wrong
with this picture?
Typical tweets, according to an article in the
Los Angeles Times
, include
I bark because I miss you. There. I said it. Now hurry home.
Another?
I finally caught that tail I’ve been chasing and … Ouch!
That’s certainly “awwww”-inducing, but a bit boring, am I right? Wouldn’t it be much more interesting to receive a tweet from your dog that said,
Hey Doofus! You left the gate open again. So what? So this. Let’s just say that Lady across the street is one mighteeeee satisfied Pomeranian.
Or how about,
Yarf! Yarf! I just ate your kid’s baseball socks and have no idea why! Let’s go to the all-night vet and spend more than you make in a month! I call front seat!
The funniest response to the announcement of Puppy Tweets has been that of honest disappointment from some dog owners that the tweets aren’t “real.”
As one whined to the
Times
, it’s entirely possible that even though Bowser tweets that he’s enjoying chasing a ball in the park, he’s really just napping on top of your favorite navy blazer at home.
Uh, yeah. Because, and I hate to break this to some of you, dogs can’t really talk. Except for Fly in the movie
Babe
, of course. She could totally talk, no question. But the others? Not so much.
Once again, I have to wonder why cats get short shrift. I mean if you’re going to just make up stuff, why not make a Kitty Tweets for cat collars?
I’m guessing their tweets will be a bit darker. Something on the order of:
To find out who you are, you ask first what are you not. Then you are left with what you are. Oh, and the loud, slobbery thing just ate another sock. I hate my life
.”
Cats never get the love that dogs do, and this vexes me. Especially in light of a new study that discovered that cats do a lot more than you think when they’re left home alone.
I know what you’re thinking. Cello playing, right? Nooooo, but close.
Thanks to a study by cat scientists (not actual cats as scientists; that would be nuts, besides the fact that they don’t make lab coats that small), we now know that house cats do a lot more than sleep while their humans are away.
And they’re not passively fake tweeting. Using strategically positioned “cat cams,” programmed to take photos every fifteen minutes and attached to the collars of fifty (I’m guessing seriously pissed off) house cats, the cat scientists were able to determine that cats actually only spend about 6 percent of their time sleeping. I have three cats and they’ve basically been asleep since Boy George was popular so this is shocking, to put it mildly.
Cat cameras revealed that cats spent 22 percent of their days looking out the window, 12 percent playing with other pets, and 8 percent climbing on furniture. The rest of the
time, they did things like watch TV (because they believe their leader, Tyra Banks, is speaking to them personally). TV viewing accounted for 6 percent of a typical house cat’s day, the exact same amount as “hiding under a table,” presumably when
The Marriage Ref
was on.
Sometimes, the cats watched DVDs, which is a puzzler. I mean, I get how they can work the remote, but even those of us with opposable thumbs usually pry the case open with so much force that the DVD pops out, sails across the room and under the couch, never to be seen again. I’ve still got the neighbor’s
Slumdog Millionaire
collecting dust bunnies under my couch somewhere, along with some old Disney princess movies and, quite possibly, The Wiggles.
During the very same news cycle, it should be noted, there was a heartwarming story about a dog who alerted his wheelchair-bound owner to the fire raging through their duplex by barking and pulling him to safety.
Firefighters said the dog deserved a commendation for saving the man’s life. Look, I hate to break bad yet again on dogs but why doesn’t anyone ever consider that maybe the fire
started
because of the attention-mongering dog. Maybe it was the
dog
who left that cigarette to smolder in the recliner cushions. Hmm?
Meanwhile, across the way, I’m imagining a cat spending part of its 22 percent of the day staring at the leaping flames and making a sarcastic sad-face at the dog while holding a phone that he has just punched only a nine and a one into.
“Want me to call for help, asshole?” the cat asks. “Oops, too late. Time for my cello lesson. But, no worries. You can tweet someone about it and maybe they can help. Yeah, that’ll work. Did I mention I hate my life?”
Puppy Tweets will probably lead to all sorts of social networking for the dog world. Maybe dogs (and cats) will be on Facebook before too long, “poking” one another, playing silly Mafia Wars, and taking lame-ass quizzes to find out which member of the Village People they are. They’ll send one another imaginary food and drinks, and even sneak around trying to hook up with old lovers. (And they’ll always put pictures of themselves as pups when you know they’re at least 120 in you-know-what years.)
They’ll even post their “Random Twenty-five Facts” about themselves but, because they’re dogs, will probably lose interest after about twelve and go sniff another dog’s ass.
I realize that it’s trendy to put down Facebook (or, as Aunt Sudavee insists on calling it “The Facebook”). And I am nothing if not trendy.
I have a sort of fragile relationship with Facebook. The truth is, my cats would do a better job of keeping up with all their Facebook friends.
Status updates should come naturally to someone who makes her living with, uh, whatchamacallit, words. But, like my documented tweeting problems, updating Facebook is also challenging. I don’t want to be like the dullard who writes simply,
I like grape jelly!
Which would only be interesting if
she added,
in my shoes.
So I worry and fret and end up posting nothing at all rather than risk posting a mediocre status update.
I admire Facebooks friends who are committed to putting it all out there. Face it, some status updates can be wrenchingly poignant. I’m thinking in particular of these: “
My husband of 25 years is in a coma
and
I hear NBC may cancel
Friday Night Lights
again.
And even a Facebooking dog wouldn’t have done the dumb thing I did one time, causing my precious niece, Lucy, to defriend me. Apparently it’s a violation of trust to say things like, “Dude! How drunk
were
you at that sorority party?” with her parents right there at the dinner table.
Awkward silence ensued and Lucy wisely restricted my profile to the utterly useless limits of viewing a few carefully edited photos of her involved in wholesome study sessions and reading about the Facebook environmental groups she had just joined.
Having violated the sanctity of the aunt/niece trust, I now was subjected to reading about a young woman whose college experience was about as exciting as mildew.
A cat would’ve never let such a thing happen. Cats are mysterious creatures who never betray another’s trust. So now I’m officially an asshat in my lovely niece’s eyes. Which looked just a little bloodshot the last time I saw her, just saying.
With Puppy Tweets’ success, I predict more pet owners
will set up blogs for their beloved animals who, I fervently hope, will figure out how to illustrate their blogs with charming photos of humans drinking out of toilets for a change. Don’t you imagine that your pets are sick and tired of all those pictures on your blogs showing them in “hilarious” positions?
A blog, to those of you who are named either Ezra or Zeke, is short for “weblog” which is Latin for “nothing good on TV.” There is even a “blogosphere,” which has replaced Pluto in the solar system and is peopled by many millions of life-forms that want to share endlessly about their lives and emotions. Some of them are scary-good, others read like a dog could’ve written them.
My favorite name for a dog’s blog would be on the lines of “My Name is Fido and I CRAP Excellence.” Yeah, that’s pretty perfect.
Meat’normous? Now That’s Just Wrong
T
his Christmas, while watching that saptastic old movie,
It’s A Wonderful Life
with Duh for the twentieth consecutive year, I was reminded of all the people I’m glad were born. As you know,
Life
is all about showing how one person’s life, no matter how seemingly ordinary, can have extraordinary purpose and impact. I found myself particularly grateful for Dr. Jonas Salk for keeping us healthy and for Eric Clapton for giving us
Layla
and to Papa Murphy for inventing a decent take-and-bake pizza.
The movie, which usually puts me to sleep long before Zuzu gets her wings or whatever, could use some updating to make it more relevant. Blasphemy, you say? Mayhaps. But think of the fun we could have in the casting.
Obviously, our old pal Bernie Madoff would be a perfect
sub for the movie’s miserly cheat, Mr. Potter. He lived to screw the worker bees out of their hard-earned money despite the valiant efforts of sad-sack do-gooder George Bailey, portrayed so memorably by Jimmy Stewart.
I wouldn’t want to recast George because, honestly, when Jimmy Stewart finally snaps and gets his drink on, beats up the newel, yells (rightfully, if you ask me) at his annoying-ass kids, and chews out an innocent schoolteacher on that wacky tin can-and-string telephone, no one could do it better. To put it another way, for someone who’s supposed to be so damn nice and decent, George Bailey goes from zero to complete douche in record time.
Chinless wonder Joe Lieberman could reprise the role of Mr. Gower, the distracted druggist who couldn’t concentrate on uninsured people who need medicine and instead, sent home a nice bag of poison for them to take.
Life
is unwittingly hilarious in places. Every year, I wake up long enough to laugh out loud at the agonized look on George Bailey’s face when he’s told that, because he’d never been born, his beloved Mary was “an old maid, George.”
This is revealed in the same horror-soaked tones as if she had succumbed to leprosy or become a Civil War reenactor. To underscore that, the lovely Donna Reed is given Coke-bottle glasses to wear and stripped of all makeup. Because that’s how all unmarried women looked back before Photoshop, I guess.
The other funny thing—though, again, unintentional—is
the movie’s nutty insistence that Pottersville was somehow inferior to Bedford Falls, a place so relentlessly pristine and virtuous that it would make Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon look like Amesterdam’s fabled weed-and-whores district. Music, dancing, drinking, gambling? The residents of Pottersville appeared to be having, in redneck parlance, “a large time.” Toss in a little Cirque du Soleil and some white tigers and it was practically Vegas.
George Bailey was kind but repressed and lacked balance in life. When his job tanked, thanks to the actions of his weepy, loony-tunes uncle (obviously we are casting Glenn Beck), he went apeshit. If we learn nothing else from the movie, we should learn (1) that you can guilt trip a whole town into rescuing you from financial ruin if you haven’t been too big of a sonovabitch and (2) sometimes you really do need to tell the kid banging on the piano to shut the hell up.
My annual viewing of
It’s A Wonderful Life
reminds me why Christmas is, like the song says, the most wonderful time for a beer. Three days before Christmas, I was once again doing the whole buying-and-wrapping-at-the-last-minute thing.
My friend, Claire, informed me that she’d finished shopping back in August.
“I did everything online,” she chirped. Of course, I was too kind to point out that except for the homebound elderly who have no choice, no one should ever give every single person on their gift list a fleece hoodie from Lands’ End. Where’s the creativity in that? Still, I have to admit that it was smart to
surf and click and smugly await deliveries at normal, non-Sopranos-like freight costs. Smart, but boring!
I wanted Claire to wait in line with me at Walmart, where there was a line of a couple dozen people smelling of cigarette smoke, fried fish, and desperation. Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much what it would smell like if you could
bottle
my twenties. Starter marriage, small town, long story, you get the idea.
And it never fails that when you finally get to the cashier, you’re behind yet another grown adult who is slowly and laboriously writing out a check that is decorated with Disney characters. They must then fish out a couple of forms of ID while, once again, I scratch my noggin and wonder why they don’t just use a debit card.
To these fellow travelers on life’s journey, may I just say that I totally get that someone told you that someone told them that someone else told their cousin who once worked as a security guard at a bank that debit cards aren’t safe and that there are hordes of crooks out there waiting to get ahold of your PIN and steal your identity. But trust me, nobody really wants to be you. If you think about it, it’s pretty egotistical of you to think so.
Face it. You’re a woman in your fifties and you have Disney princesses parading across your antique legal tender. If somebody’s going to get her ID stolen, it’s probably somebody way cooler than you.
Back in August, when I should’ve begun my shopping, the
merchandise selection was probably better. Those purple leopard-print UGGs the Princess was pining for somehow morphed into black vinyl closed-toe bedroom shoes with a nifty red-plaid lining. And, yes, she was pissed. It didn’t even help that I’d scrawled “Team Edward” on one toe and “Team Jacob” on the other. Nothing could quite eliminate that nursing home vibe. I was so busted.
For Duh there was, of course, only one choice by the time I got around to doing my Christmas shopping: Burger King’s new Flame meat-scented cologne was a steal at just $3.99 plus tax. The silver spray bottle embossed with a red heart is perfect for any man who wants to wear, as Burger King brags, “the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat.” I swear I am not making this up.
You might wonder why Burger King is getting into the fragrance business, but I say why not? It’s not like the whole fast-food thing has worked out that well for them.
Besides, Celine Dion and David Beckham sell their cheap smell’um at Walmart, so why not the ubiquitous and somewhat pervy Burger King? And Flame is a whole lot easier to say than something classy that has inserts in fancy magazines like Acqua Di Gio Pour Homme, which, if my high school French is correct, and I’m fairly certain it is, means “Water of God for My Homies.” Yeah, I’m bilingus.
Burger King saved my 98-percent-fat bacon by rolling out Flame in time for the holidays.
The commercial featured the comically big-headed,
spray-tanned King peddling his cologne while wearing only a crown and a faux fur loincloth as Barry White-ish music plays in the background. Nah, none of that is weird.
And while some have said this cologne gig was just a clever Christmas marketing gimmick for BK, others actually like the smell of Flame. None other than The Honorable Kathie Lee Gifford herself squealed her approval after spritzing a reluctant cameraman with Flame on her
After the Real Today Show, The Part That No One Watches
. It’s only a matter of time before Frank Gifford introduces his new signature scent for the holidays: Old Man’s Stinky Football Jersey.
A lot of people find the King completely creepy but Burger King is loyal to its mascot and even exploits his royal weirdness. When he’s not dousing himself in Flame and offering to “set the mood no matter what mood you’re in the mood for” (say whaaaat?), the King is at the center of a breakfast menu ad campaign that includes, or did I just dream this, a commercial in which he crawls into bed with a startled young man and cheerfully offers him a “Meat’normous” sandwich.
Pass.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the odd ad campaign, given an earlier one for Whopper Virgins, in which real-life Thai villagers, rural Romanian farmers, and tundra-dwellers from Greenland are asked to compare the Whopper to a Big Mac from McDonald’s.
The commercials make me feel mildly uncomfortable, rather like the painful moments on
Survivor
when the air-headed
contestants try to look honestly interested during the obligatory segment when they must interact with island natives and visit holy shrines and stuff.
In the BK commercials, the bemused villagers prefer the Whopper (duh) but I think that’s probably only because somebody threw in a few cases of Flame.
So, Christmas was kind of a bust in the present department this year. Duh wasn’t nearly as taken with the ironic nature of his gift as I thought he would be. And the Princess is still pouting over her nursing home-slash-vampire shoes.
As we gathered around the TV to watch
Life
yet again on Christmas night, I reminded both of them that Christmas isn’t about presents. It’s about being together as a family to celebrate Jesus’ birth and to remember the true spirit of the season. Of course, this didn’t go over as well as you might imagine, since I was, at that selfsame moment, absentmindedly twirling my present,
a just over one full carat diamond eternity ring
(Score! At last!) on my left ring finger. When I opened it on Christmas morning, the first thing I said to Duh, because we’d just seen the movie
Blood Diamond
and had discussed its globally and socially responsible message, was “Is this a blood diamond? Because I want to make absolutely sure that this is 100 percent cruelty-free before I put it on my hand.” Duh looked real confused. Apparently he’d forgotten all about the movie in the week and a half since we’d seen it.
“I-I-I-’m not really sure … . I guess so … . I hope so … .” He looked downright scared.
I let him twist in the wind for another second or so before I busted out laughing.
“Oh, honey, I’m just messin’ wid ya. I don’t care if you had to cut off Leo DiCaprio’s
head
to get this thing, it’s
FREAKIN’ GORGEOUS!!!”
Duh beamed and the smell of flame-broiled meat filled the living room. I’m pretty sure we can all agree on one thing: It’s a wonderful thing that Duh was born.
Now, because I do want to give something to all y’all, I’m going to share my Can’t Miss Christmas Morning Breakfast Strata recipe. Y’all know me: It’s super good and super easy.
CHRISTMAS MORNING BREAKFAST STRATA-GY
6 cups cubed French bread (1 loaf, usually)
1 pound sausage (I like Jimmy Dean sage but you can
use any flavor you prefer), cooked and drained
2 cups shredded sharp cheddar (just buy it pre-shredded; it’s Christmas. Don’t you have a bike to assemble or something?)
2 green onions, chopped (yes, tops, too)
1 quart half-and-half
9 large eggs
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon salt
Pepper, hot sauce and/or Worcestershire sauce to taste
 
Grease a good-size rectangular casserole dish with butter. Spread bread cubes evenly in the dish. Top with (in order) sausage, cheese, and chopped onions, sprinkling each evenly over bread cubes.
Lightly mix together half-and-half, eggs, mustard, salt, and spices. Pour liquid mixture over bread/sausage/cheese, cover with foil and let sit in fridge overnight. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and bake, lightly covered with foil, for about 45 minutes. Cut into squares and serve with fruit (I like those big bowls of presliced fruit from Costco) and store-bought miniature cinnamon muffins. Low effort, big raves, trust me.
 
Serves 8-10
BOOK: You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl
8.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Loving Grace by Eve Asbury
Progeny by E. H. Reinhard
I Won't Let You Go by Dyson, Ketaki Kushari, Tagore, Rabindranath
Trusting Jack by Hale, Beth
Morning Noon & Night by Sidney Sheldon