I'd rate this entry M for "Mature Audiences"

except it's so obviously the product of an extremely immature person.

OK, this is dumb.

But sometimes when I'm bored, or I'm looking for a blog post idea (because I'm a member of Blog365 who has blogged every damned day since January 4th, and sometimes I'm kind of hard up for something to say) I go to a search engine or Amazon or YouTube and type something in--not just to see what I'm supposedly searching for, but the things that are kinda sorta related to what I'm looking for.

It's a sort of six degrees of separation, based, I suppose, on an algorithm that tracks what other people have searched for. So for example, a search for "peace signs" might eventually bring me to a biography of Winston Churchill.


Anyway, tonight I went to YouTube. Where I often find the most amazing things.

My latest YouTube thing is how-to videos. I discovered a link to one on a shopping blog--I clicked on the link, and the next thing I knew, I was watching a video of a woman demonstrating how to get the effect of the latest MAC makeup collection by using what she already had.

I watched this with a sort of amused fascination. I love makeup, and my first on-line community was a bunch of makeup freaks, so I certainly know a lot of women who are even more obsessed with makeup than I am. But we are amateur accumulators rather than quasi-professional makeup collectors or makeup artist wannabes.

I mean, uploading a video of yourself putting on makeup? Who knew anyone did this? And this woman was positively plastering herself with eyeshadow--and seemed very pleased with the effect, even though she ended up looking like a Manga character.

So anyway. Enough with the rambling self-justifications.

Tonight I went to YouTube and typed in "how to walk in high heels."

Well. You wouldn't believe the number of hits. And not just from trannies and fetishists, which of course, you'd expect to see. (There were plenty of them.)

But there were a surprising number of perfectly serious videos that purported to actually teach women how to walk in heels. What's next, how to put on a bra? How to brush your teeth?

And there were videos by people trying to teach fitness classes for women wearing high-heeled shoes. Which I guess would be strippers who need to get back in shape after too many evenings spent swilling "champagne cocktails."

But there were also sub-genres of film-making that I never knew existed. A reasonably sophisticated person could predict the existence of stiletto-wearing women fetish films. And we've all heard of snuff films, right?

But did you know there were snuff films for cell phones that feature stiletto-wearing women?



They seem to be very popular in Germany.

Silly Germans! I hate my cell phone, too, but when I get mad at it, I just let the battery run down until it dies.

The Evolution of the Mommy Blogger

Fueled by this morning's third cup of tea, my brain cells are synapsing furiously, and I've come up with an insight I'd like to share with you.

If your children are too old to call you "Mommy,"¹ they've reached a point in life where their focus is increasingly not on you. And yours, no doubt, has broadened a bit beyond them.

This means that if I blog--and I don't know whether you've noticed, but I do--I am a mother, and a blogger, but not a Mommy Blogger.

I am far beyond the stage of Braxton-Hicks contractions, centimeters dilated, nursing bras, play groups, potty-training, naps, Elmo, Dora, Disney Princesses, super hero pajamas, Junie B. Jones, and A Series of Unfortunate Events.²

This frees a lot of time and energy to pay attention to other issues, like high school, college, and whether I'm going to get any grandchildren out of all this.

So I am not a Mommy Blogger. I am a Housewife Blogger who is trying to become a Grandmommy Blogger. I do this by teaching my children to say "please," "thank you," and reminding them to put on their antiperspirant.

Because everyone knows that to attract the opposite sex long enough to produce offspring, you need to avoid stinking to high heaven. It's true. Case in point: Charles Darwin, father of modern biology, author of The Origin of the Species, and father of 10 children, was supposed³ to have smelled fabulous.

¹ In this household it was spelled MAMY, and I have the poster paint signs to prove it.
² Which? Those books? Were.
³ By me.

Well-rested and ready to rumble

Last night, my husband and I went out to dinner, where we ate and drank delicious food (seared scallops and shrimp risotto) and then went to the ballet where we watched extraordinary fit young people dance around wearing very little clothing--and found ourselves regretting the risotto, not to mention the roll before dinner and the three glasses of wine.

Sobbing with remorse over our carb-ridden, exercise-free bodies, we drove off in a cab to our friends' condo, where we drowned our sorrows in another glass of wine.

Shortly afterwards I went to bed, to sleep the sleep of the unjust. And woke up this morning--I don't know the time--with one thought on my mind: I DON'T HAVE TO GET UP. So I went back to sleep.

And didn't wake up until 10:30. Whereupon I woke up and starting clicking around my laptop. Only to see something both weird and funny. I'm drafting a response.

Tune in tomorrow when I kick big porn star butt.

Penises

Things are heating up in Iceland. Sigurdur Hjartarson, founder and owner of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, the world's first museum devoted entirely to the penis, has received four offers for the only specimen missing in his collection: the human phallus, or as we like to refer to it when we're not indulging ourselves by writing semi-plagiarized press releases, the one-eyed trouser snake.

That's right. The museum has pretty much every kind of penis you can imagine. Blue whale? check. Hamster? Check. To prove it, here is a picture of Mr. Hjartarson posing next to a stuffed bull elephant's winkydink.


Personally, I can't imagine why someone would start collecting penises in the first place, let alone start an entire Musee du Sausage-fest.

And why Iceland? This seems to me more the sort of thing you'd find in New Orleans. Particularly the French Quarter. Especially during Mardi Gras. I could totally see The Johnson Museum of OMG I Am So Drunk! OMG look at that one!

But wait. The squeals, the pointing, the loud shrieks of laughter? All the exhibits would shrink away to nothing.

So that's why the museum is located in Iceland. The exhibits are shy.

Joy rushes in where angels fear to tread

I've been catching up on the action over at Suburban Correspondent's The More, The Messier, and I saw that she had accepted an assignment: to come up with 10 things that give her a joy rush.

So, because I'm feeling all copy-catty these days, here are mine. Read on to discover what a self-centered idiot I really am:

1. Monday mornings. For you working stiffs, Mondays are the start of your work week. But I am a housewife and the mother of school-aged children, so for me, Mondays are the day when everyone gets out of my face and leaves me in relative peace and quiet for six or seven hours. Mondays are also the day when I don't need to drive anywhere until I take the kids to their 5:30 karate class. And so, to all of you who shout "Thank God It's Friday!" I counter with a quiet whisper of pleasure that everyone is off doing something constructive, leaving me alone to think my little thoughts in peace.

2. A freshly-made pot of piping-hot tea.

3. A short stack of much-desired new books and the chance to sit down and read them. And not be interrupted for a couple of hours.

4. The moment I realize that spring has finally arrived in Chicago. For the record, this was a week ago today.

5. Watching my children perform in their music groups.

6. Having them come watch me perform in mine.

7. Looking at my children's baby pictures. After I look at the first three or four, I start banging on their bedroom doors shouting "Come out here RIGHT NOW and look at these ADORABLE baby pictures. Can you believe HOW CUTE YOU WERE? No, you CAN'T because it's UNBELIEVABLE."

8. Fun times with my huzbin.

9. Making people laugh helplessly. Bonus points if it's my huzbin. More points if it's my children. Even more if it's all three of them.

10. Finding a brand-new way to make an idiot out of myself on the internet, and, I hope, make a few more people laugh helplessly:

Monday, Monday

When you sit down to write something, it's always best to have a point.

But just so you know, I've spent the whole day looking for one, but I haven't found it yet.

And now it's 10:30 p.m., so I figured, shit, I'll have to write a post even though I still don't have a point.

So I'll tell you about my day.

First, I swept the house clean of human life. Except for my husband, who decided to make a 9:00 conference call from home. Just to be nice, I canceled my plans to go into the living room and conduct Wagner's Ring cycle by playing all four operas on CD and waving my arms around while I made soulful faces in the mirror over the fireplace. This is my usual Monday routine, but out of the goodness of my heart, I thought I'd skip it just this once so my husband could make his call.

I also neglected to do the laundry, which is another one of my Monday routines.

I did make the beds, though. And I picked up my daughter's room, which was so messy that wow, someone was going to get her butt spanked! But then I realized that since my daughter was at school, and my husband was busy downstairs blathering away about patent litigation, and mine was the nearest butt, that someone was going to have to be me. I didn't want to get spanked, so I picked up her room.

OK, so that was pretty exhausting, so I took a three hour break to read your blogs. And check my email. Where I found an email from a high school classmate to remind me that whoops, I'm old. Shit!

So I went to the supermarket to buy frozen dinners, because what spells youthful joie de vivre like stocking up on frozen dinners for the babysitter to give your kids--the babysitter you have to hire to watch your kids? Because your kids--and by extension, you--are so young? I mean, what's drabber and dowdier than being an empty nester? Right?

Then I put on a lot of makeup, including some red lipstick mixed in with my usual my-lips-but-better shade of pinky-brown, because what projects dewy-fresh naivete like bright red lipstick on your teeth? Nothing, that's what.

Then I drove downtown to have dinner with my husband. I had Alaskan Halibut, because what says "you need to eat more fish and build up your brain?" like this blog?

But then! Then we went to the theater to hear Music of the Baroque. But the joke was on us, because Music of the Baroque wasn't playing tonight. Instead, we walked in on the final dress rehearsal of Chicago Opera Theater's latest production, John Adam's wacky romp The Flowering Tree. Because nothing says "get some fucking reading glasses" like showing up at the theater on Monday for Tuesday night's performance.

And nothing says "I used to be on the board of Chicago Opera Theater " like my tactful refusal to tell the internet what I thought of the performance.

And now we have to do the whole dinner/concert thing over again tomorrow. The good news is that I'll have the opportunity to top off the tank with more fish. Which is good, because as I think I've made clear, an adequate amount of brain-cell-fostering fish has obviously been missing in my diet. And it is SORELY NEEDED, my friends.

Numbers

Yesterday was a momentous day. You know how it's so cool when the car odometer turns over a really big number? Well, this week my Sitemeter went over 100,000.

Which would be kind of impressive, except I've been blogging for almost four years.

Yes, that's right, folks. Back in the stone age when I started blogging on my TRS-80, there was practically no one in the blogosphere. Well, except for early adopters like dooce, finslippy, Jen Lancaster, Melissa Summers, and the Daily Kos.

And now look how crowded the blogosphere has become. According to Technorati, every day the blogosphere (I swear that's the last time I use that word) welcomes 175,000 new blogs. And over 1.6 million posts per day.

It's like a Ponzi scheme of egomaniacal blathering. And yet, even with all this new competition, my hits continue to go up.

Yes, even without the steroid effect BlogExplosion produced when I joined in 2006 (and which completely jacked up my hits what with their Rent-My-Blog and Battle of the Blogs and all the other ways they've devised to get people to visit) more and more of you came by.

And of course, there are the people who are here for Christina Aguileras's butt crack, grotesque acrylic nails, shower dildos, and transvestite giraffes.

But you come. I mean, check out my numbers!

Oh, I know we're not supposed to talk about our hit counts. The same way we don't talk about our weight, bra size, and age, we don't talk about how many hits we get.

Well, "we" don't. But I do. Because basically, I have no shame.

So here you go: 178, 38DDD, and 51. But those numbers are just the beginning of my lack of boundaries! Check out these numbers:

On the last Monday of April, 2008, I had 173 hits.
On the last Monday of April, 2007, I had 74.
On the last Monday of April, 2006, I had 129. (Those are probably BlogExplosion hits.)
On the last Monday of April, 2005? I had four.

Now, am I impressed that it has taken me three years to go from four hits to 173? Of course not. Do I expect you to be impressed? No. But think about it. In the entire month of April, 2005, I got 167 hits. Now I get that in a day. This month I've had over 4,500 visitors.

These aren't "Woot! If I put ads on my blog, I'll sit back and watch the money roll in!" numbers.

But somehow it makes me really happy that I sit here typing in my drivel, and about a hundred and fifty of you show up every day to check it out.

So anyway, thank you. You are wonderful. And you have fabulous taste in on-line "literature." So let me know whether you'd like me to come up with something different--maybe pictures of Angelina's tattoos? Men who wear toenail polish? Just let me know. I've already admitted that I have no boundaries. I'm frank. I'm fearless. I like to think I'm funny. And when it comes to attracting readers? I'm a whore.