The Cheeseblog

First, good things:

Next week, Scrubs will be back in its regular timeslot. I love Scrubs.

Also: (The Search for) America’s Next Top Model is coming back in January! Thanks to Michael! for letting me know.

Now, the bad thing:

The only thing worse than the poorly singing children of strangers (because, of course, the ones you know are cute, no matter how poorly they sing) is poor harmony. It burns me up inside like a habanero pepper! Currently, on CBC radio AM with Rick Cluff, and all day, if you’re reading this later, there is an excellent cause being celebrated. It’s Food Bank Day! You can go to the kiosk at Pacific Centre Mall in Vancouver (or to the Food Bank, in whatever city you’re in. Or town.) and donate. It’s good. CBC AM will be broadcasting live from there all day.

Earlier this morning I turned the radio off because what was coming out of it caused me pain. 7 am is too early to listen to choirs and pan flutes, unless it’s Christmas Morning. At 8, my over-zealous and ever-hopeful husband turned the radio back on to hear the news. Then he left for work, leaving the radio on and I was subjected to a shameful massacre of O Holy Night – a duet of unspeakable tunelessness, showing a zealous disregard for each of the following definitions of harmony:

a. Agreement in feeling or opinion; accord: live in harmony.
b. A pleasing combination of elements in a whole: color harmony; the order and harmony of the universe.
c. Music.
1. The study of the structure, progression, and relation of chords.
2. Simultaneous combination of notes in a chord.
3. The structure of a work or passage as considered from the point of view of its chordal characteristics and
relationships.
4. A combination of sounds considered pleasing to the ear.

I’m still shivering. I like O Holy Night. I like it in English, in French, in Latin, in Italian, sung by choirs, sung by opera singers, sung by little castratos, sung by churches full of people on Christmas eve; it’s a likeable song. Unless it’s being sung by people who don’t like it. Hey, duet people? What did O Holy Night ever do to you?

Another good thing:
Gary of the Miniature Zoo (it sells miniature animals – no, not real ones) said I could use the picture of his chickens for my error page.

And yesterday I finally got to a count of 20,000 words for the novel I’m working on. The trick appears to be in quantifying exactly how much I need to write within a specific time period. The “write an hour a day” thing doesn’t work, but “write 1,000 words a day” does, even though writing 1,000 words takes roughly an hour. My mind is a capricious beastie.

Just plain fucked up
I really think you should go check out Santa’s Prayer. I always thought Santa was God. Why did I never consider that he might be a faithful servant of God?

In retrospect, it is so obvious; the ability to be in several malls…er…places at once; being a foreign invader of the airspace and soil of the United States (AKA: Fearers of God,) but never being shot down or arrested and detained for an indefinite amount of time under suspicion of being a terrorist; being allowed to proceed freely from house to house, breaking, entering, stealing cookies and kisses (and who knows what else!) from housewives. And that beard. That’s a God-sanctioned beard, y’all.

I think I just heard someone on the radio say “over-redundant.”

Woman “nearly drives off the road” when her son tells her his first grade teacher told him there is no Santa Claus. Santa will be making a special trip to the boy’s school in Florida to prove he exists. And to lay a smackdown on that teacher.

I have a lot of CDs. None of them interests me lately. Call it pox consumeris if you like. So I found a site called Radio Locator which is how I came across Alex and Tony & the Bluegrass Special. At first I thought Alex, who is a 13 year old boy, was some hopped-up-on-helium Tennessee chipmunk. Then I thought his accent was for sure fake. East Tennessee or no. But now that I’ve seen his picture, I suspect the accent is real and he mentioned that he has a cold, which explains part of it.

I went to Winners today because it’s upstairs from the grocery store and the commercials all said “you should go”. I was halfway through the clearance bin of size 12 pants, all of which were ugly because everyone is a size 12, so all the nice pants are gone. I suddenly noticed what I was listening to: John Mayer. My first reaction was anger, because I don’t like John Mayer. But then I thought: No! I must be happy! It is not XMAS MUSAK!

Winners has their own CD, apparently, which intersperses XMAS MUSAK with regular ‘ol comfort rock. Hot damn, I said out loud. But no one heard.

Apparently, I have lost my (small, but there) ability to keep my mouth shut in public when I’m alone. When I’m with other people, of course, we make snotty comments. That’s part of the fun of shopping. But today,as mentioned, I was at Winners, alone. I was staring blankly at the wall of atrocity that they claimed was the size 10 shoe section, when one of the aforementioned musical intersepersities came on. It was a crappy XMAS song with some woman wailing on about a christmas prayer, ya ya ya, christmas prayer. Then these children started singing! I have mentioned in these pages how much I hate children singing. But at least could we find children who can carry a tune if we’re going to record them?

The point of the story is not that I hate singing children. This has been established. The point is, I can no longer just think, “Goddamn it I hate singing children” and then remember to tell someone later. No, I have taken to verbalizing my frowned-upon-in-polite-society-particularly-among-the-rich-grannies-at-winners opinions. The woman who was standing back-to-back with me, staring at the abundant and beautiful selection of size 7 shoes, turned and stared at me and I totally understand why. It’s rude to say what I said. But it makes me wonder – if I live to be 85, what the hell am I going to do? I’ll just be walking around saying “my butt hurts! get the hell out of my way you punk ass! never seen a wrinkle before? goddamn it why are there still posters of jean chretien up here? sell me some good cheese, I know you’ve got it hiding in the back. and slice it thin, with paper betweent the slices. GO!”

We do become what we most fear becoming and what we most hate.

But I found a great shirt for $5.00. You should go.

Ahoy! The Dymunds are having a baby! Read Sarah’s baby blog for witty observations and reportage.

Do it….you know you want to.