The Double-edged Sword of a Beautiful Day

After 4 years of living in Minnesota, where the spring/summer/fall is the most beautiful 4 months the world could possibly produce, and the winters are the most oppressively endless frigid 8 months imaginable, I am loving the weather in St Louis.

Today, it's 60 degrees outside with a warm sun and a flawless blue sky. (Fine, this is admittedly not typical weather, but by this time of year in Rochester, I would have expected to start seeing freeze-dried squirrels in the growing snowbanks on the side of the road, and grocery stores having frozen meat sidewalk sales, and people wearing fleece-lined gortex-coated floor length winter jumpsuits.)

The only drawback? There's a bizarre phenomenon in healthcare in which the warmer the weather is, the more people manage to injure themselves. (No one rides a 100mph motorcycle wearing only Daisy Dukes, a bikini top, flip flops, and no helmet when it's below zero. They reform their whole life plan and stay home and read Tolstoy instead.)

Adding to that, it's New Year's Eve, which is the annual Go Get Drunkity-Drunk And Do Regrettable Stuff holiday.

Adding to that, I'm on-call tonight, so all the Drunky Shenanigans and risky Christmas gifts that lead to OhNoMyEye Emergencies will go straight to me.

Why, for just one day, couldn't the St Louis weather have been more like Minnesota?

Deep thoughts at Christmas

I hereby freely and fully admit that I listen to the all-Christmas-music-all-the-time radio station whenever I'm in the car throughout the entire month of December. I also admit that I shriek painfully and turn off the radio when that Pa-rumpa-pum-pum drummer boy song comes on. Call me a spoilsport, but I am convinced that the last thing anyone would want after giving birth in a frigid cattle barn would be to have a kid come play a snare drum relentlessly.

Likes: Going All In

Hollywood has successfully created a nightmare in my mind: Showing up to a costume party fully dressed up only to find I'm the only one there in costume. (Thanks a lot for making me neurotic about this, Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, Start the Revolution Without Me, Bridget Jones, Groundhog Day...)

But despite the looming threat of shame and humiliation (...maybe because of it?), I still like the feeling of committing to the theme. Sure, there's a chance that I'll be the only person there sporting bunny ears or a pirate costume, but I like going all in. I've now learned that going all in is even better when you bring along someone who's even more committed to the theme than you are. That way, as you walk toward the fateful front door of the party, wondering if you've been set up for shattered dignity, at least you know you won't be embarrassed alone.

The latest example of this starts with a guy named Jamey, who I went on one date with back in July when I first arrived to St Louis. Nothing came of it from the dating standpoint, but he writes one of my new favorite funny blogs so we've kept in touch. (At the very least, you cannot say you've fully lived until you've read this entry about the Dry Cleaning Lady, and this one about True Survival against all odds.)

Jamey hosts an annual Festivus party (a la Seinfeld), and this year he themed it Trashy or Classy, with instructions to wear either your rattiest trashy clothes, your finest gown or tuxedo, or a half-and-half combo of both.

Thanks to Goodwill (which supplied the shirts, suit pants, exclusive country club necktie, and size 8 women's jeans), my mother (who taught me to sew, but probably never envisioned that those skills would be used for evil rather than good), and Silhouette temporary tattoo paper, here's what we wore on Saturday night:

Oh Billy Ray, you mulletted hunk of man. Sadly, even the confidence instilled in me by having Billy's triumphant trailer park salute emblazoned across my back couldn't keep me from worrying that we'd be the only ones dressed up for this party.

We arrived to the door.

We knocked.

We thought about turning back. It wasn't too late to save Dave's bare thigh from public scrutiny. No one would ever have to know how close we came to ruination.

Then we opened the fateful door and went inside.

Oh, the suspense.

Inside the party, delightful levels of classiness and trashiness abounded. To my list of "Likes," I should add that going all in is even better when you meet other people who have likewise committed.

We even learned that Dave has a soul mate.

Do you ever suffer from the "What if I'm the only one in costume" syndrome? Has it ever turned out badly for you?

McDonald's is Creepier in Canada

Last night I had a dream in which I came back to my tinypartment to find that absolutely everything I own had been stolen, right down to the last square of toilet paper, except four business suits which were still hanging neatly in my otherwise barren closet.

In the dream, I was utterly convinced of two things:

1. If the burglar had left me four suits, it must mean I was supposed to wear those as I hunted the culprit to the ends of the earth, and that I only had four days to do so.

2. The whole robbery was related to a deeply sinister plot concocted by The Hamburglar, of McDonald's fame.

Not wanting to just chalk up such a thing as irrational dream gibberish, I've been trying to figure out what exactly prompted me to dream it. I think it must have been a combination of the conversation Dave and I were having a few days back about great snippets from The Onion (follow the link for what may be one of the funniest articles I have ever read), and this picture my friend Val sent me of a road sign in Canada:

If cash levitates out of the trunk of your car whenever you open it, you might want to hide the key a bit better than that. Especially if there are gigantic burglar creeps wearing fedoras prowling around. You can't be too careful, you know.

- - - - - - - -

Putting the two together, it's clearly a recipe for a dream about being robbed blind by a hamburger-enthusiast/costumed criminal who then skips the country to head into the great white north with all my pseudo-valuables. I have no way to explain why the suits were featured in the dream. Maybe Hamburglar figured that if he has to dress up, so should I?

Have you ever had a bizarro dream but actually been able to explain what seeded it?

Arch Rivals in the City

My friend Dar, who's toiling along through plastic surgery residency in Cincinnatti, had an extremely rare weekend off so she came to visit. After relentlessly shaming me for being a St Louis resident but never having been up to the top of the St Louis Arch, we spent most of Saturday afternoon there.

Allow me to specify how "most of Saturday afternoon" breaks down:

- 20 minutes in the arch itself

- 2 hours jumping/cartwheeling/yoga-posing/handstanding on the grass in the park at the base of the arch while fiddling around with the timer on the camera in search of the ultimate shot

- 10 minutes (summed) telling innocent bystanders that we weren't crazy people and denying that we'd been there jumping/cartwheeling/yoga-posing/handstanding for the past 2 hours.

After that, we ate dinner at a sidewalk cafe then went to the venerated, classy, upscale, grown-up St Louis landmark known as City Museum. Picture the best playground from your childhood dreams, build it out of found objects and junkyard steel with questionable engineering tactics, install a 10-story spiral slide, a pipe organ, a live herd of turtles and a gutted airplane, then charge admission and serve pizza. Voila! City Museum! From the bowels of said museum comes a montage I like to call, "Hey Dar, you should try crawling through that."

To which she replied, "Hey Sarah, you found another inanimate boyfriend." (Wow! Printer Man, Wooden Doorstop Man, and Crosswalk Reminder Guy will be so jealous!)

War Paint

It seems like it's been so long since the Krispy Kreme Challenge. Luckily, there are other equally ridiculous things to do around here: bring on the Warrior Dash!

And now, an exclusive and irrelevant interview about the experience:

How excited was I?

Excited enough to entice me into wearing that very special spandex-and-socks combo in public again.

Excited enough to jump up and down a lot.

Excited enough to render me incapable of preventing the Dork Smile from being captured on film.

How did I train for it?

Um.... good intentions. And zero actual training. In retrospect, that may not have been the strongest regimen.

My friends Justin and Katie ran the Warrior Dash in Minnesota a few months ago amidst their training for much more serious/lengthy races. They were in shape. Oh, so wise.

Are the spandex and socks flammable?

The world may never know.

Did I slip gracelessly into a mud pit and crawl through it on all fours, even though everyone else managed to cross it in a bipedal manner pretty well?

Why yes. Yes, I did.

How did I get clean afterwards?

Bathed publicly with a fire hose while surrounded by throngs of total strangers. Naturally.

Please don't Rhwe in public

I just stumbled across an awesome little article listing words with no English equivalent.

They describe concepts that we're familiar with, but lack word for.

(On that note, please oh please oh please someday let the newly approved words of the year be gender-ambiguous 3rd person singular pronouns meaning him/her, and he/she. We need a singular "they." Please.)

Here's the list, for your enjoyment and new wordification:

1. Shemomedjamo (Georgian)

You know when you’re really full, but your meal is just so delicious, you can’t stop eating it? The Georgians feel your pain. This word means, “I accidentally ate the whole thing.”

2. Pelinti (Buli, Ghana)Your friend bites into a piece of piping hot pizza, then opens his mouth and sort of tilts his head around while making an “aaaarrrahh” noise. The Ghanaians have a word for that. More specifically, it means “to move hot food around in your mouth.”

3. Layogenic (Tagalog)

Remember in Clueless when Cher describes someone as “a full-on Monet…from far away, it’s OK, but up close it’s a big old mess”? That’s exactly what this word means.

4. Rhwe (Tsonga, South Africa)

College kids, relax. There’s actually a word for “to sleep on the floor without a mat, while drunk and naked.”

5. Zeg (Georgian)

It means “the day after tomorrow.” Seriously, why don’t we have a word for that in English?

6. Pålegg (Norweigian)

Sandwich Artists unite! The Norwegians have a non-specific descriptor for anything – ham, cheese, jam, Nutella, mustard, herring, pickles, Doritos, you name it – you might consider putting into a sandwich.

7. Lagom (Swedish)

Maybe Goldilocks was Swedish? This slippery little word is hard to define, but means something like, “Not too much, and not too little, but juuuuust right.”

8. Tartle (Scots)

The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember.

9. Koi No Yokan (Japanese)

The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall into love.

10. Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego)

This word captures that special look shared between two people, when both are wishing that the other would do something that they both want, but neither want to do.

11. Fremdschämen (German); Myötähäpeä (Finnish)

The kindler, gentler cousins of Schadenfreude, both these words mean something akin to “vicarious embarrassment.” Or, in other words, that-feeling-you-get-when-you-watch-Meet the Parents.

12. Cafune (Brazilian Portuguese)

Leave it to the Brazilians to come up with a word for “tenderly running your fingers through your lover’s hair.”

13. Greng-jai (Thai)

That feeling you get when you don’t want someone to do something for you because it would be a pain for them.

14. Kaelling (Danish)

You know that woman who stands on her doorstep (or in line at the supermarket, or at the park, or in a restaurant) cursing at her children? The Danes know her, too.