I've only bought a couple of royal wedding things to send home to my mom to be funny (a coffee mug and some magnets, for the record). I think most of it is over the top, and mostly when I see this "william and kate" stuff, i just think about how awkward it must feel to have your face on cheap souvenirs in every shop you walk by. That being said, there are only two pieces of royal wedding memorabilia i want, and would actually purchase if i came across them:
these pez dispensers....i used to collect pez dispensers, and i think these are fantastic.
(unfortunately, they were a charity auction item that sold for around a whopping $13,500 bucks, so i definitely wouldn't purchase them! I'm secretly hoping they produce cheaper versions later on...)
.....and these bizarre tea bags. i just think they are hysterical. in fact, i'd buy them if they were of ANYONE - not just will and kate - because i think it would be fun to have someone kicking it in your tea cup...
but there were other pieces of royal wedding memorabilia that i felt deserved a place in the "greatest hits" of bizarre shit old british ladies will cram into their china cabinets (next to their charles and diana tea set, and charles and camilla dessert plates)
of course there would be collectible royal wedding china. I've seen multiple patterns, but I think this one is the "official" one.....not that being "official" makes it any less tacky, but you get my point...
the William and Kate commemorative fridge. by far the most bizarre thing I've seen that's out there, but I know that somewhere there is someone anxiously awaiting the arrival of their royal refrigerator...and her husband is quietly filing for divorce.
I first saw the commemorative pie in our local Tesco. Bizarre, but cute.
this is another one i'd like to have, but it was produced in such limited quantities, that i don't think i'd ever have a chance of finding it - it's a special commemorative beer called "kiss me kate" - for the record, gene tasted a special royal wedding mead at a beer festival a couple of weekends ago and it tasted like ass.....i like to imagine that the beer tastes much, much better.
cookie tins....not really that strange, but still kind of strange. once again, i'm sure this is a favorite of "little old ladies" around the country.
congrats, will and kate. here's to another few decades of seeing your faces on stuff human faces should never be on.
lots of big things have happened in the last week or so all over the world, and it's only right that I at least give these things a mention in my blog, especially the first of the three I'm about to talk about because, well, it happened here in the UK....
of course, I'm talking about the royal wedding. the moment some people have been waiting for since the day Prince William was born. people had HUGE celebrations! towns had ginormous street parties! there was an extra bank holiday so people could properly get royally crunk! it was ridonkulous...
Kate and William got engaged right before we moved to the UK, and at first, I was all gung ho about fighting my way through crowds in London to be able to tell my hypothetical grandchildren "I was in London for the royal wedding...." stories. however, as the day drew closer, and I started to realize just how crazy the day was going to be, I totally rethought even going anywhere NEAR London that day (honestly, the biggest "I'm not going" decision maker was the fact that I realized how hard it would be to find somewhere to pee, and I pee quite frequently). As it would turn out, I had to work, so I missed even seeing it live on television, but I DID record it, which I was later thankful for because that shit was LOOOOOONG. like, ridiculously long. and the worst part? THEY PRONOUNCED THEM HUSBAND AND WIFE 10 MINUTES INTO THE DAMN THING AND THEN JUST KEPT GOING. what a stupid thing to do, y'all! the whole point of a wedding ceremony is to do all the singing and symbolic shit as a build up to the climactic "I now pronounce you...." part, and these people shot their wad right out of the gate. on top of that, there was no "you may kiss the bride," which I realize is probably considered "tacky" to do at a royal wedding, but what the fuck, dude? and there were SO MANY SONGS. the ceremony was like, an hour an 15 minutes long which is snooze-inducing enough in itself, but you throw in all the boring ass choir antics and kate middleton's brother babbling on about God-knows-what, and I totally check out and my brain shuts off. so you know what I did after they were pronounced man and wife? held down the fast forward button until they got to this:
people can talk shit about william's thinning hair, and how kate is too pretty for him, but I honestly think they are cute, and really seem to dig each other. I think they seem genuinely happy, and this totally staged moment of tenderness did, admittedly, make me go "AWWWWWWWW"
also, can I just say that Kate Middleton is probably the prettiest bride I've ever seen in my life? she was classic and timeless, and every bit a princess. she was totally poised and graceful, and I have no idea how she got through the circus of her wedding without bursting into tears or peeing her pants (dress).
and my very favorite picture from the wedding day: Kate and William leaving their day reception in a car that has the british "L" sticker on it.
for all you americans, here in the UK, it's a huge ordeal and pain in the ass (financially and otherwise) to get your driver's license. they take driving very, very seriously, and if you're still a "learning driver," then you get the fun experience of driving around in your car with a giant "L" sticker on the front and back of your automobile so that people know to watch the fuck out for your sub-par driving ass. i found it so comical that the future king of England, at 29 years old, can fly a rescue helicopter, but he's still a "learning driver," but then again, I guess princes don't really drive themselves much, do they?
the second thing that happened was that Obama produced his birth certificate which was followed quickly by the third thing that happened: the death of osama bin laden. I don't really want to talk about this much, but I will say that if i learned anything from this, it's that about 65% of my facebook friends need speech filters. They spewed some of the most hateful, appallingly racist, and ill informed stuff as their status updates for 3 or 4 days, making me wonder how i could consider some of these people as "friends" (seriously, I was so surprised/disappointed at some of the ignorant crap coming out of people I typically think of as educated.....), but it was balanced out by the funny shit my OTHER friends would post that would make me laugh, such as:
AND.....
most people celebrated the above mentioned events, but there is at least one person who I'm fairly sure is less than happy about either of these events.
MARIAH CAREY.
like I believe most of the events of her life have been since her career took off in the 90's, it seems to me that Mariah Carey had a very specific plan when it came to when she was going to give birth to her babies - one that would guarantee to give her maximum press and maximum attention. I have a theory that she had the babies months ago and has just been keeping them in hiding until the opportune moment came for maximum "hey look at me!" appeal. seriously? Am I the only one who feels like this woman has been pregnant FOR-EV-ER? like, for YEARS? - I remember seeing her on various talk shows and in magazines in November/December right after we got to the UK, and I assumed she was days away from giving birth because she looked like she was about to BURST, and at that point, if her babies were, in fact, born last week, she would have only been about 3-4 months into her pregnancy. I've seen women (yes, women who were pregnant with twins) in the 3rd/4th month of pregnancy, and they weren't nearly as large as MiMi was...I have a theory that her babies were actually due and born much earlier in the year, but Will and Kate stole her thunder with their engagement, so she and her husband (why is nick cannon famous again? someone please enlighten me...) formulated a plan that would be more than a little "AWWWWWW" worthy - they decided to keep the birth of the babies secret until April 30th, which would not only put their birth a day after the royal wedding (assuring them a spot in like, every magazine published that week along with royal wedding coverage, which would be selling like HOTCAKES), but it would also mean that the twins would be born on their 4TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY! genius! I can almost picture her auditioning rental babies to play the "newborn" twins in preparation for the onslaught of magazine spreads they would be offered and do before they'd publicly announce that they wished to keep the babies "out of the public eye," from then on, and proceed to keep them hidden until they were old enough that people would be less likely to notice the discrepancies in their age ("they sure look big for one week old babies" puts up far more red flags than "they're pretty big for 2 year olds," am I right?)....
and then, in a real "heartbreaker, you got the best of me" moment, they went and killed osama bin laden, stealing her thunder in the biggest, baddest way possible....how selfish. I can almost guarantee this will keep her from contributing to Obama's presidential re-election campaign....
at least she had a back up plan....unfortunately it was the "let's give our son the most fucked up, humiliatingly ignorant name possible" (Moroccan? After THE DECOR OF THE ROOM NICK PROPOSED TO YOU IN? REALLY? you named your kid after a ROOM IN YOUR HOUSE? and honestly, I would have gone with "Kitchen" - "Kitchen" Cannon rolls of the tongue much easier than "Moroccan" Cannon. Plus, if this starts a trend, I'll have to name my kid "river walk")
on the bright side, there's always another nervous breakdown or divorce to fall back on.....
anyone need a good laugh? back when I was in the height of my wedding planning delirium, I started pasting my head on random pictures of girls in wedding dresses for fun. I don't know why this particular dress (worn by lady gaga) came up in my searches, but it did, so naturally, I couldn't resist (and, for whatever reason, i saved it)......
What do we have here, realtors??? Some sort of truce in the war of the signs?
When this is all over, I don't know if I'll be able to stop myself from blaring that "you're the best" song from the karate kid out my windows for the victorious agent who seals the deal.
The house next door is for sale. There are apparently two different agencies trying to sell the house - up until last week, there was a sign in the front yard with a little puppy on it from the haart agency (i'm quite fond of the puppy. i think it's a cute touch that makes the sign memorable...not that it's relevant right now). Over the weekend, a guy from another agency came and removed the haart agencies sign, and replaced it with his own, leaving the haart sign on the ground on the side of the house.
Today, the haart agent came back, and passive aggressively put his sign back up, by literally stapling his sign back on top of the other sign, and I found it to be hysterical...
the sriracha rooster - i find the sauce that he represents to be spicy and delightful. i'm not sure what the rooster has to do with the sauce, but i'm FOR IT. team sriracha rooster!
The Kellog's rooster - a very familiar face from my childhood, this rooster is not overly annoying, and is relatively pleasant to be around. i like that over the years, he's evolved and changed his look multiple times...in fact, i believe in the 80's, he didn't even have a face....but i digress.... i enjoy this rooster's company, because it usually means i'm eating something delicious. with a spoon.
Foghorn Leghorn (or, you may know him by his full name: Foghorn J., I say, Foghorn J. Leghorn) - star of very popular cartoons since the late 1940's - he is entertaining and endearing, with his good ol' boy charm. who wouldn't love him? he's adorable.
ceramic rooster. it's colorful. it's not getting in your face. it's not running around all "hey! look at me! look at me!" - it's just doing the job it was put on the earth to do: decorating. probably at someone's grandmother's house, or at some charming country inn in some tiny, southern town (my grandmother had many, many ceramic roosters in HER house, but mostly because i bought them for her as jokes...that's another story completely). the ceramic rooster: harmless.
what do ALL of these roosters have in common?
i've never heard any of these roosters crow. (disclaimer: i have never seen EVERY work that features Foghorn Leghorn, so, for all I know, he probably DID crow at some point, but I only ever recall the dude talking, so i'm still categorizing him as a non-crower. DEAL WITH IT)
why am i even talking about roosters?? because someone in my neighborhood has one. and it crows. ALL DAY LONG. i say it's someone in my neighborhood, but really, i suppose it could be anyone within a mile or two of our house - all i know is that the crowing sounds very, very close, and it's very, very loud. and irritating.
i grew up in the country, in the middle of a farm, but (contrary to common misconceptions) we didn't have chickens and roosters running around. i didn't wake up for school every morning because a rooster perched himself on my windowsill and crowed into my face. i'm not used to roosters, and personally, if this is what roosters are about, then i'm not a fan. today, as i was washing dishes, i opened the window in the kitchen because the weather was so nice, and after the rooster screamed bloody murder for the 25th time, i grumpily slammed the window shut and mumbled "fucking bird" under my breath, along with a quiet promise to hunt him down and kill him. not that i'd ever really kill a rooster just for being loud and obnoxious.....but if he were to, i dunno, say something mean about my mom, i'd obviously have to defend her honor.
anyway, i started thinking about everything i've ever seen or read about roosters, and people would love for you to believe that they only scream their balls off when it's dawn. if that's the case, then someone needs to clue in a certain rooster here in thetford to the fact that he's totally committing a social faux pas repeatedly every day. he crows, on average, once every 90 seconds. that's insanity. almost as insane as the fact that i counted how many times he crowed over a 15 minute period and then averaged it out. WHAT IS THIS ROOSTER'S PROBLEM? is he practicing for some competition that i don't know about? is he having some sort of nervous breakdown? is he confused that there is so much more sunlight recently, and he's just not used to seeing it? does he have the hiccups? does he have multiple personalities? can roosters have tourettes? is someone hurting him? is someone tickling him?
more importantly, WHO HAS A ROOSTER INA RESIDENTIAL AREA?
as i sat here this afternoon, being mad at the rooster, i was reminded of another annoying bird from my past: the andy griffith parakeet.
the second time i moved to orlando, my neighbors in my apartment building had this parakeet that lived in a cage on their balcony. the bird was quiet most of the time, but every morning around 6:30, right before my alarm would go off, the parakeet would start whistling the theme song to the andy griffith show, and whistle it over and over and over for at least an hour and a half (i only know this because he would still be whistling when i would leave for work at 8:00). at first i thought it was cute, and i assumed it was something that only happened rarely (like, maybe his owners just got an andy griffith box set and had a marathon watch party or something, so the bird was obsessed with the song right then), but i lived in that apartment for 4 months, and can't remember a morning that he DIDN'T do his little andy griffith routine (and let me tell you, when you have a hangover, it was ANYTHING but cute). i became very resentful of the bird, and each time i'd walk past the balcony he was on, i'd curse him under my breath, or daydream about knocking his cage over, or throwing things at him.....i think he sensed it, too. maybe that's why he kept whistling.....because deep down he knew I'd never be able to bring myself to actually hurt him, no matter how annoying he was
.....and maybe the rooster keeps crowing because he can sense my hatred for him. Maybe he's rubbing it in my face. But, i'm sure i can't be the only one in this neighborhood or surrounding ones that hears and subsequently hates this rooster....and I'll bet it's safe to say that not everyone is as nice as me.
Muhammad Ali once said "A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he'll never crow" - maybe i can buy the rooster a hoodie and some wayfarers, and he won't realize it's daytime....or maybe i'll tape an umbrella large enough to always block his view of any sunlight to his head....
i guess this is just one more reason i need to get a job.... preferably one that doesn't get me home until the sun has set.
Two things I'm not a fan of: owl city (that guy is laughing all the way to the bank. he's being compared to the greatness that is ben gibbard (and i want to slap anyone who actually compares him to postal service or death cab) and really, he's just writing these silly ass, beyond cheesy love songs (with the stupidest titles EVER - "fireflies"...."vanilla twilight"...."strawberry avalanche".....gag) to get legions of girls to drop their panties for him) and taylor swift (though i will admit that i know every word to that song that she sings that talks about romeo and juliet or whatever, but only because it was played on the radio about every 3 minutes when it came out, AND was in like, EVERY movie trailer i saw for any remotely romantic movie for about 6 months)
something I AM a fan of: LOVE
and, if you read any online gossip blog or celebrity magazine website on valentine's day (translation: if you're as bored as I am, and don't have much else to do all day), then you surely saw the story of how the dude from owl city deciphered some "secret" message in the lyrics of a taylor swift song, and decided that the song was about him, and responded by basically putting his heart out there on the line in front of MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. (if you missed it, here's the link to his blog....) Initially i was like "oh, how embarrassing. he's probably totally wrong about the song being about him, and now he looks like more of an asshole than I already think he is" - but as the last few days have gone by, I've found myself keeping an eye out to see if taylor responds (cause she's totally got to, right?)
kind of cute together, right?
anyway, so far, there's nothing from her side of this. my initial stance was "I hope she makes a fool out of him, because that "fireflies" song really, really sucks," but now that i've thought about it, I'm kind of on team owl city here. I hope she's like "hey, owl city guy, I like you, too" and that they get together. he's no jake gyllenhaal, but he's not bad to look at....
plus, i think it will take more than "a thousand hugs from 10,000 lightning bugs" to pull him back from the ledge he'll be on after THAT kind of (very, very public) rejection. or the scathing song she WILL write about him on her next album.
saw this picture on cake wrecks today, and it cracked me up. do you see it? this is what happens when you let someone bitter decorate the v-day cookies.....on top of that, she was apparently so upset that she didn't even use the correct "ho" - NICE.
every single day, someone else is failing at marriage. i see it all over the place. when i talk to people back home, i hear "_____ is getting a divorce" or "_____ broke up" or i'm seeing the constant changing of facebook relationship statuses. it's totally in my face all the time. as a newly married person, it's a little scary.
i realize that not everyone who gets married is going to stay married forever. in a perfect world, yes, people would find their "soulmate" and take that love all the way to the grave. nobody in my family has been divorced, so i always considered us to be the kind of people who "mate for life, and as a result, i take marriage very seriously - on the flip side of that, my husband is previously divorced, but i DO think that he gave it the best shot that he could have. i can't really say that for most people who get divorced. i think a lot of people get married for the wrong reasons, and as a result, set themselves up for eventual failure....some of those reasons (in no particular order):
"it's the next logical step"
WHAT does this even MEAN? it's a lifetime commitment, not a math problem. just because you've been with someone for 3, 5, 10 years....it doesn't necessarily mean that they are the person you are intended to marry. sure, it sucks to think "wow, i spent a lot of time in that relationship for it to have not worked out" but sometimes, that's just the way it goes.
"i really want to get married"
what's missing from this sentence? the words "to him" or "to her" - just really wanting to get married is NOT a reason to actually get married. if you're having wedding fever, hang out around your friends who have been married for a few years and snap back into the reality of what happens AFTER you take off the 10-layers of tulle. i do something similar any time i think i might want to have a baby - i hang out around other people with babies, and come to my senses.
"if i don't marry her, she'll break up with me"
then odds are, if you DO marry her, she'll eventually still break up with you. i don't know why guys have YET to figure out that ultimatums are just thinly veiled hopes that you'll fail at whatever we've challenged you to do, so that when we dump you, it's YOUR fault - not OURS - and you end up looking like the bad guy. if a girl is giving you a time frame in which to marry her, then odds are, she's got one foot out the door already. i'm just saying.....
i guess my point here is that marriage shouldn't be a matter of convenience, or a business deal, or something you do so you're not the only single person at parties, or because "if i don't get married THIS year, that wedding gown won't be in production anymore" or because it's part of your three, five or ten year plan, and you're cutting it close to your time schedule...it's something you should want to do because you are so sickeningly in love with someone, that you are willing and ready to go through hell and back with them (because at some point in your marriage, you will). forever. until one or both of you is dead.
anyway.....
every day i read about 2 or 3 celebrities who have gotten engaged, and immediately follow that up by reading about the most recent couple who is getting divorced. most of them use the good old "irreconcilable differences" excuse, and leave us all going "i wonder what THAT means" - seriously, what DOES it mean? did he never do the dishes or walk the dog? did he buy you the wrong harry winston necklace for your birthday? did he forget to thank you when he received that award? do you not like her new vegan shoes? seriously? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? we may never know what it means, but you can pretty much be certain that at least for the first few weeks after the divorce is announced, there will be enough rumors, speculations and careless tweeting to give us at least a tiny little bit of insight as to what went wrong with these couples in their marriages. marriage is hard enough for ordinary people. it's a lot of work. i've been married less than a year, and i already know that every thing people said to me about marriage being hard is true. it is. i often find myself wondering how celebrities - with all their money and resources - can fail so often at marriage. i mean, statistics tell us that MOST marital issues are centered around money - most celebrities have plenty of it, so that's gotta knock the odds of divorce down at least a little bit, right?
the most recent "hey, we're divorcing" couple is Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz. never mind the fact that the pairing of these two made me gag in the first place (i remember thinking "what the hell is HE doing with HER" - don't get me wrong, she's a nice looking gal, but her i'm pretty sure her music is the kind that is the bane of his existence. they seemed a little oil and water to me....), but after a while i got used to seeing them in magazines and crap together. they had a really cute alice in wonderland themed wedding. i started to think they were a cute, tolerable couple, and i kind of dug the way i saw them interacting with each other and their kid. despite being in tabloids from time to time, they really seemed to be more of the types of celebrities who tried to keep to themselves. they weren't all in our faces ALL the time, and i appreciated that about them. it seemed mature and sensible, like they respected their personal lives enough not to whore themselves out to the media and become a giant spectacle. i really did think "these two people are probably going to make it" i mean, in my head, any two human beings who would agree to name their child something as stupid as Bronx Mowgli just HAD to stay together forever......
just in the past few weeks, i'd noticed an increase in the number of times i saw their pictures in magazines, or on online gossip blogs - pictures of them having coffee, pictures of her heinous new haircut, pictures of them pushing their kid in a swing - so i kind of felt like something was coming. i was hoping ashlee would drop some horrible single (L-O, L-O, L-O, L-O-V-E!) but instead, today, we got the news that she was divorcing pete after less than 3 years of marriage.
LESS THAN 3 YEARS.
why? oh, you guys had some irreconcilable differences. OF COURSE!
first off: 3 YEARS? are you serious? you didn't even give your marriage a CHANCE to succeed, much less figure out that you HAVE differences SO monumental that they are unable to be reconciled. i'm only 7 months into this, and i can already tell you that it's going to take me at LEAST three years to get fully adjusted to being someone's wife. unless there was an abusive situation, infidelity, or some other heinous crime committed (like, he snuck into your bedroom in the middle of the night and did that to your hair), staying married for 3 years and then giving up is pretty much a slap in the face to the institution of marriage. i don't personally know mr. and (the soon to be former) mrs. wentz, so i don't know if they fall into the abuse/infidelity pile, but something tells me that they don't. something tells me that they just had some normal issues that everyone has, and things stopped being fun 100% of the time, and they thought "well, we're certainly too young, rich and pretty to put up with THIS shit"
in my wedding vows, after i said "til death do us part" i threw in "...or until ashlee and pete get divorced" - THAT'S how much i believed in these two. with that said, i'll be filing for my own divorce citing "pete and ashlee's irreconcilable differences"
i don't watch football. i don't like it. i never have. it's slow, and when it's on t.v., there are too many commercials, thus making it EVEN SLOWER - i don't like that 4 minutes of a football game can last half an hour, and there's hardly any movement most of the time. just a bunch of dudes knocking a bunch of other dudes down. i don't like the looks i get when i admit that i hate football, or the fact that most of my life i was made to feel like an asshole by my family because i would have rather been ANYWHERE doing ANYTHING than sitting in front of a television all day on thanksgiving (or christmas, or new year's day...) watching one football game after another.... maybe that makes me un-american, but i can't help it.
in high school, i went to football games because that's what you were supposed to do. you go, you socialize, and on the way home you finally ask "did we win??" - senior year, when i was a cheerleader, i ALMOST started to enjoy football games, but i think that's only because my friends were on the team, and when they got knocked down, i took that shit personally. in college, i went to football games because, just like high school, that's what you were supposed to do. i only tailgated because it meant getting almost drunk enough before the game to be too liquored up to care that i was so bored. i never paid attention, and only thought about getting out of the stadium and back to a fraternity house to drink with my friends. at least at the fraternity house, there would be a BAND! woo!
because i hate football, it goes without saying that i don't care about the super bowl. at all. i don't even care about super bowl parties, even though this is the first year in recent memory that i didn't actually GO to one. i only really ever went to super bowl parties for the social aspect - there was ALWAYS awesome junk food, always lots of booze, and usually at least 2 or 3 other girls who cared more about the commercials than the game who i could sit with and chit chat about whatever.
"moving to england" got a check mark in the "pro" column yesterday when i realized i wouldn't be forced to watch the super bowl - it showed live, which means that it came on at a pretty unreasonable hour, and since most americans here have jobs that mean staying up until 3 a.m. to watch a football game really isn't an option. the husband didn't have to go into work until later this afternoon, so he had a friend over to watch the game, and i went upstairs and watched my own version of the super bowl (twilight, season 2 of footballers wives and donnie darko). i checked facebook from time to time, and got a good chuckle out of the way people reacted to christina aguilera's butchering of the national anthem (i watched it on youtube later and was embarrassed FOR her), and then when the halftime show began, i read a few comments that made me run downstairs to catch a few minutes of it. i was horrified.
i'm no fan of the black eyed peas, and that's not a secret to anyone who knows me. if i walk in a room and a black eyed peas song is playing, i'm probably going to find a reason to leave until it's over. i don't have a specific reason for hating them - i don't like their music. i don't think their lyrics are funny or clever. mostly i just find them to be irritating, and had them (and i meant ANYTHING by them, featuring them or from their solo stuff...) banned from being played at my wedding....so as you can probably guess, i didn't really expect to enjoy the half time show. i figured they'd come out, dressed as idiots (man, was i right about THAT), do something that, in their heads was going to be beyond awesome, and end up half assing it.....last night, they didn't even reach HALF assed.
i only saw about half of it live, but i watched videos of it for the same reason people slow down when they are driving by a horrific car crash - because i couldn't NOT watch it. as i watched, i had some thoughts:
first of all: slash? you're an incredible musician. nobody can dispute that you are exceptional at what you do, but, what you did last night was unacceptable. why didn't you just pull out a copy of appetite for destruction and take a dump on it on national television? that would have at least been a LITTLE more tolerable than watching the the look come across your face the moment you realized "this was probably a bad idea...." while you had the "f to the e-r-g the i the e" grinding all up on you - were you seriously THAT hard up for work? well, buddy, that trend is probably going to continue because i for one never want to see your gigantic mass of curls under a top hat ever, EVER again, no matter how well you shred on a guitar, and i'm pretty sure most of america shares my feelings right about now. from now on, when you're mentioned, people won't think of the incredible moments of your career - instead, they will instantly cringe at the memory of you playing the super bowl halftime show with the black eyed peas, because that image is something so awful, that it's permanently burned into their brain. you're dead to me, which is really irrelevant since i'm pretty certain that after he cleaned the glass and blood off his face from putting it through a closed window to try to get the noise to stop, axl rose took out a hit on you last night.
(side note: does slash ALWAYS have to enter the stage from underneath? is this his "thing"? i've seen him do this a lot - it's like he's afraid of stairs or something.)
and fergie (if that was, in fact, fergie - because honestly, the person singing BUTCHERING that rock classic last night sounded more like a coked-up drag queen inpersonating fergie...poorly) took that microphone in her hand and aurally raped millions of people. someone arrest her. not only was it just random and seemingly pointless for slash to have even made an appearance, but her singing wailing was BAD karaoke - the kind where you do your friend a favor and pull her drunk ass off the mini stage in the bar to save her further embarrassment. way to leave your girl hanging out there, other black eyed peas.
and that one guy (who i think is that will.i.am person) and his LEGO hair? i just don't have words for the lego hair, really...aside from stupid. he was auto-tuned the ENTIRE time, and the only thing i dislike more than the black eyed peas (when it comes to music) is excessive use of auto-tune. also, lego hair auto-tune guy tried to get all political and used one of their, um, "hits" to send out a message to our president:
"In America we need to get things straight / Obama, let's get these kids educated / Create jobs so the country stays stimulated." - lego hair auto-tune guy
if you want to be passionate about politics, or have a strong stance, or send a message, go for it, but i don't think the super bowl halftime show is really the "place" for it - people are watching for the funny commercials, and to just relax and watch a game of football - and i'm pretty sure that your little lyrical switch up was lost on pretty much everyone, especially considering that by that time, almost everyone had either changed the channel, muted the t.v., impaled their ear drums with sharp objects or gotten up to go pee because they just couldn't take it anymore. maybe you should just stick to what you know, which is apparently auto-tune, rhyming words with "maggot" and fun vinyl suits that light up.
the only saving grace of that whole painful 15 minutes was the almost 2 minutes that usher was on stage. i hope they sent him a giant bouquet of flowers or something to say "thanks for helping us suck a little less"
i also have a bone to pick with them - one where they ripped off MY idea. i can't find a picture of them, but at the end of their performance debacle, these robots with box heads came out to dance and whatnot. if you saw the halftime show, you know what i'm talking about. you couldn't miss them. the thing is, a few months ago, i was at work doing THIS:
looks suspiciously familiar, no???
the positive thing that came out of the halftime show? everyone forgot how badly christina aguilera botched the national anthem ("What so proudly we watched at the twilight's last reaming?"). at least for a little while......SHE should probably send the black eyed peas a "thanks for sucking as much as you did" bottle of champagne.
I promise that pretty soon, I'm going to write some sort of serious update about settling in here, but right now, I can't focus on anything but what I'm about to talk about....
For about 3 weeks, we lived in this house with no television. I hate admitting that i'm one of those people who is addicted to t.v., but i am - it's an escape, and more importantly, it's background noise - even if i'm not sitting and watching it, i just like HEARING it - it makes me feel less alone or something - anyway, before we got a t.v., I would spend hours every day (and tons of $$$) downloading t.v. shows off of itunes to keep myself occupied, or running back and forth every other day to the base library to rent movies to watch, and i'd sit here in front of my computer screen (which seemed plenty large enough until I began relying on it as pretty much my sole source of entertainment) huddled under a blanket with headphones on, longing for the day that i could pick up a remote control again and flip through channels.
about two weeks ago, we made significant progress when we actually purchased a t.v. - i never thought it would feel like such a significant step to just OWN one, but just hanging it on the wall (luckily, the tenant before us left the brackets up, AND the place is fully wired for surround sound) and having the ability to watch dvds was a vast improvement...
then, two days ago, the satellite guy came.
british t.v. is so different, and yet so similar to t.v. back home....there are some obvious differences (lots of channels strictly dedicated to soccer, entertainment shows that talk about celebrities i'm still not really familiar with, lots of cursing), there are some comical similarities...i can tell what part of american culture they find the most interesting based on the shows they play of ours, and i don't know if i should be worried that these are the examples they see most of americans, or if i should put my trust in the fact that they HAVE to realize that these things aren't examples of ALL americans...like....
*sally jessy raphael: there is a channel that seriously plays an episode of sally every other hour. it's insane. and i'm talking OLD sally jessy - like, giant red glasses and shoulder pads sally jessy. like high drama sally jessie - and when this channel isn't playing SJR episodes, it's playing episodes of Maury.... and silly me - i thought leaving america meant never having to hear "you ARE the father" ever, ever again...
*fat people: they love documentaries about morbidly obese people. i didn't find this particularly odd (since there's a lot of shows about this in america as well) until i realized that all the shows i've seen so far, except for ONE (Britain's Fattest Man), featured morbidly obese AMERICAN people....GREAT!
*the jersey shore: snookie and all her guido pals are as big here as they are in america, much to my dismay. i wasn't a big jersey shore fan back home (i totally admit to watching the first season, but it wasn't enough to keep my attention beyond that), but i can find the humor in the episodes i HAVE seen - it's just worrisome to me that people in the UK may watch shows like the jersey shore and think that all americans are all about the "GTL" and poufing their hair.....they love ALL things jersey for that matter - they play episodes of jerseylicious 3 times a day, and even that show called jersey couture gets airtime!
they DO show lots of reruns of american shows that i love: Gilmore Girls, friends, sex and the city - and they don't really censor anything - i almost choked on the water i was drinking last night when i heard the word "fuck" come out of my television. it was alarming and glorious at the same time....but there are things that are kind of confusing like how they have Comedy Central here, but all they show on it is episodes of fraiser, friends, and how i met your mother....
but the BEST part of having the t.v. again? THE TECHNOLOGY - see, i'm admittedly WAY behind everyone else when it comes to t.v. stuff - i've never had HD anything or a freaking TiVo, but we went all out this time - our television is glorious in it's own right, but when i realized that i could do things with this t.v. that i've never done with t.v. before - i don't know really how to explain it - it's like what happens when someone who spent years fighting against buying an iPhone finally breaks down and buys one...it's like "how did i ever function WITHOUT this?" - i almost fully expect to come home one night to find my television in the kitchen making me dinner....okay, not really.....
anyway, i can record things! i can fast forward through commercials! last night, i was convinced i saw someone playing a "dead person" blink, and i could rewind it to try to prove it! it's glorious! i feel like i've been living in another century! why didn't any of you tell me it was THIS GOOD???
the only really bad part about it so far that i can see is that as far as shows i watch regularly and am familiar with, they are at least a season or two behind whatever is showing in america (Kristen JUST came back to the Hills, if you know what i mean), but with 500+ channels, i guess i can deal.....
so, a month has practically gone by (actually, almost exactly a month!), and i haven't posted anything on here. i guess i've been busy.....here's the cliffs notes version of what the hell has been going on.
Gene got home very late on the night of the 15th of January (i guess technically it was the morning of the 16th....), and things have just sort of been busy since then. I took an entire week off of work so that we could spend some time together and get re-adjusted or whatever, but to be honest, we were fine as soon as we saw each other at the airport. I didn't feel any of the awkwardness or uncertainty that I'd sort of previously feared, and I'm pretty sure the feeling was mutual. we were both just kind of instantly back where we left off, and everything just went pretty easily and naturally.
the first week he was home basically consisted of him being in a weird sleeping pattern and us eating at restaurants that he'd missed since he'd been gone. we went shopping quite a bit, spent some time with keira, went to see my parents......it was a busy week, basically.....
last weekend we went to dallas (technically frisco) to Ikea and bought some furniture, which was an absolutely mind-boggling experience - i'm obsessed with ikea, and while i realize that their stuff is mostly not going to last me for the next decade, i'm okay with it because its so affordable that i can buy it and when it gets scratched or breaks in half in 5 years, i won't cry about it. not to mention that if our tastes change in the next 2-3 years, we won't have any of that "WHAT THE HELL WERE WE THINKING" buyers remorse over our stuff, cause we can just toss it or move it to a spare room/sell it/toss it in a dumpster/leave it in somebody's yard as a weird prank and not feel any pain over it - anyway, we ended up with some awesome stuff, but let me tell you this: if you haven't been to an ikea store, and you ever plan on going to one, you need to make sure you have an entire day to devote to it - i'm serious - i thought "how long could this possibly take? 1 hour? 2 hours?" try 4 HOURS. four fucking hours to pick out 5 things. it was insane. i like to compare it to disneyworld, actually - for grown ups - its like, there's all this hype, and as you walk into this gigantic building, you feel your heart race....like a dream coming true....in fact, as we were eating breakfast (yeah, ikea has its own little restaurant), i got so excited i was bouncing in my chair, and staring at gene as if to say "PLEASE HURRY UP AND EAT THAT BACON!" - and then you're off - and it starts off all fast and furious, and everything is awesome and amazing, and you want to stop and look at and touch EVERYTHING, but then, an hour or so in, your knees start throbbing, your head starts spinning, and you're trying not to let the person you're with see you checking out the routes to the nearest exits.....
not to mention the drive to and from frisco isn't that fantastic (gene and i are both admittedly not into "long car trips")......
let see, what else has happened in the last month....
i finally (after a MONTH) got my engagement ring back - it had to be sent off to be resized, and i almost had my very first (okay, second) bridezilla moment over it....
we went to the races at oaklawn with my family last weekend....it was.....we'll say interesting.....
i've gotten FOUR snow days off of work, which is absolutely unbelievable and insane to me.
....i think those are all the highlights......
so now that gene is back and we're all settled into a normal routine again, i have to get back into wedding planning mode - i was SO far ahead at one point, but now i'm behind. I have to order more save the dates and get the ones i already have out by the end of this month - i gotta get bridesmaids dresses ordered, make gene pick out a suit for the guys, start looking for shoes, meet with the museum people again, start making decisions about the reception menu.....and thats just the top of the list - i don't know what i'd do without my mom - she's taken on so much of this responsibility, and i know that she's already got so much on her plate right now - hopefully neither one of us will implode between now and june 26th!
so that's the last month in a giant, confusing, mixed up shell. hopefully my next entry won't be so all over the place.
so i mentioned previously something about sending care packages to gene all the time, and i did, but i guess i feel like i should mention all the nice things he did for me while he was deployed - for instance, the giant fortune cookie in the picture above - this was delivered to me last week, and it was seriously freaking HUGE and so cool and sweet......then, he contacted Cupcakes on Kavanaugh and special ordered these cupcakes for my birthday, and had my friend (thanks, kim killingsworth!) deliver them to me:
Breakfast of champions!!!!
he also sent a LOT of flowers - in fact, there is a joke around work that i don't have to buy flowers for the wedding because during his deployment, gene has sent me enough floral arrangements to cover the entire ceremony. every girl loves flowers, and i'm no exception - they would come at random, unexpected times - sometimes more than once a week - and while i hate that he's been deployed, i can honestly say that i will miss getting flowers when he comes back (because, lets face it, while i DO get flowers when he's here, they are pretty few and far between)
i always took pictures of them so that i could email them to him so he could see what he sent, so with the end of his deployment fast approaching, i kind of wanted to post an ode to my flowers...someone cue up some nat king cole music or something:
it's crazy to me that i have found someone who does so many thoughtful and sweet things for me. i know that these are all just "things," but the effort that they take (especially for someone in his position right now) are constant reminders of how lucky i am, and how much i truly am loved.
I was born and raised in a smaller than small town on the Mississippi Delta. My parents made sure I was well traveled and well rounded, but I never really desired to live further than a three hour plane ride from "Home" (Dorothy was right...there's no place like it!). Then, in just under 3 years, I managed to sort of accidentally do a gaggle of things I swore to myself I never would: met and fell in love with a military man, married him, and uprooted my life - leaving my family, friends, and everything I've known and loved for almost three decades behind - to follow him overseas. Over 5 years and 2 kids later, I'm still trying to figure it all out. I'm living proof that Mick Jagger was right about not always getting what you want, but getting what you need. I'm adjusting, and life is constantly changing, but every day is a new adventure.
I curse a lot, rant a lot, sometimes get too deep, write a lot of entries and delete them, and spend a lot of time laughing at myself. Please feel free to laugh with me....or AT me....whatever feels most natural....
