Wendy and I have posted some more chats, so if you’d given up on our tumblr, um, please un-give up on it.
Author Archive | Alison Rosen
what we talk about when we talk about salmon
Here’s what I’m wondering: You know on food labels where they list all the ingredients and occasionally there will be some info in parenthesis about what one ingredient does? How is it determined which ingredients they gloss, if you will? Because, for example, on the back of this box of Gorton’s Grilled Salmon fillets I’ve come to learn that Sodium Tripolyphosphate is added “to retain fish moisture” (mmm… fish lube!) and Sodium Laurel Sulfate is added for lather, but it’s not like I know why Disodium Inosinate or Disodium Guanylate are in there. But Propyl Gallate is added to protect flavor. Probably from flavonoids!
Propyl Gallate is a good name for something which protects something. It’s very gallant. It’s like the “Lance” of the food label world.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go barf from thinking about the phrase fish lube.
Ginny, if you are reading this, I’m sure that:
a) it freaks you out that I just mentioned your name, and
b) fish lube isn’t as disgusting a phrase as fish moisture
The good thing about this berry splash air freshener…
which I just sprayed in my apartment because I’m embracing spring? Now my whole apartment smells like a bathroom, not just the bathroom!
At the gym
Well, here we are again. Me: on the recumbent bike even though my ass is smarting. You, reading my blog. I suppose it should be awkward but it isn’t really. I think enough time has passed and frankly I don’t think about that thing you did anymore, even though it’s still all over the internet. Oh, you KNOW what I’m talking about so let’s dispense with the innocent act. Let’s also dispense with the charade and the parade because while I love a parade, it’s quite winky out and the blooms aren’t sticking to the float in the way I’d hoped and it’s not reflecting well on the dirigibles industry. Not well at all!
So then, it’s come to my attention that I said it’s not winky out in the above heartfelt note and obviously I meant windy. Although winky weather is terrible for a parade too. The ticker tape goes everywhere. And I hardly think I’m alone in saying I’ve never had a good batch of nachos when it’s winky out. Oh hey also I’m going to be appearing on chelsea lately may 23. As it gets closer I’ll update the tv thing on the right, or you know maybe I’ll do it tomorrow, but for now it’s just a little extra special treat for the people who actually read this stuff. Maybe I’ll tuck a treat into the end of each post! Ooh, fun! How shall we do this? Should you guys make a request and I’ll try to work it into the post? Nah, that sounds too hard. Well, I’m open to suggestions.
Oh and P.S. I almost forgot I’m working on my allen wrenches, my flugelhorns and my geodes.
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Poor Tobey
Today is a momentous day for poor Tobey, as he’s growing up and become less of a man. I kind of hate this, and I know my parents who are taking him to the vet today feel conflicted about it too, however pet people across the board say neutering is the humane thing to do. Easy for them to say, they’re human. Still, since Tobey isn’t going to sire little Tobeys (puppies, not the other thing. He’ll keep doing that) it probably makes sense. Plus, he’s been making sweet love to the computer chair.
Have I told you the story about when I took my rabbit, Eliot, to get neutered? Eliot was the rabbit I had in college and for a few years after college. Eliot’s death was traumatic in a Daniel kind of way, except that I called a friend and through tears said “my rabbit died” on his answering machine which then cracked me up since if this were the forties, that would mean I was pregnant. Fifties? Sixties? When were they using rabbits in pregnancy tests, if that isn’t apocryphal? Anyway, and I think I’ve already told this story here, my mom and I dropped Eliot off to get neutered and I burst into tears and my mom asked if I was sure I could go through with it and I said yes, it’s more humane, etc., and then we got home and the vet had called and Eliot was a she! Who knew? Not I! Unfortunately they discovered this after they anesthetized her which still pisses me off. So I drove back and picked up a very drowsy but non-operated on rabbit (I didn’t get her spayed). Then years later she died. This was a horrible post, I’m sorry. Also, I went to this horrible HORRIBLE summer camp when I was 10 and they had this class in a farmhouse where they taught us the names of all the castrated animals. I swear to you. Not that it hasn’t come in handy as a neat parlor trick. Ask me anything! Geldings? Steer? Capon? They also taught us how to hypnotize chickens. I am not making this up.
Back to Tobey though… poor Tobey!
Duuuuude
I’m at the gym working on my rutabagas, bugles and fire irons and I’m feeling less jaunty than usual because when I got here all the recumbent bikes, which are my bikes of choice because they’re the closest to lying prone in a bed other than I guess the bench press and let’s get serious, I’m a girl and a weak smushy nearly translucent skinned one at that so I’m likely not going to be pumping iron (considered and promptly vetoed a curling iron joke. Too schticky). Anyway, I had to pedal on the upright stationary bike which apparently uses a whole set of muscles I don’t regularly use and so I had to hang on for dear life while time slowed to a torturous trickle and the commercial breaks in jeopardy which I was watching were an eternity. It reminded me of the feeling one gets about three minutes which feel like hours after smoking pot when the novelty has gone away and you are just bored. But, like, so bored you don’t know how you will ever get through it. So bored you consider doing something risky like returning some phone calls because the element of danger might make you feel alive and you feel so bored you feel like a little kid who’s awake long after everyone has gone to sleep. So bored you think, fuckit, I’ll stare at myself in the mirror so you do that for awhile which is alternately disorienting and horrifying and then you look at the clock and realize it’s only four minutes later. So bored that you begin to wonder if maybe life is this boring and the pot is just opening you up to the myriad ways reality drags on in a crushing pageant of banality, so bored it’s as if you are in the fourth hour of a flight from nyc to ca which is usually when I’m pretty sure I’m going to freak the fuck out if I have to stay on this plane anymore. Not that I’ve ever smoked pot. So bored that, and I can’t really explain this one other than the onset of light level psychosis, but you begin to wonder if you’re even stoned. How would you know? Then you laugh for two hours or thirty seconds. But that’s how that bike felt, so after twenty seven minutes that felt like years, I switched to the recumbent bike and now I’m recumbing quite beautifully. Wait I had something else to say. Hmm. Oh yeah, has anyone read the book Singularity by william sleater? It’s a kids science fiction book that I loved though it chilled me when I was young. When I woke up this morning wanting a bird I was also thinking about kids books, first The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles and then Singularity. Time is all out of whack in Singularity, which is why I bring it up. And I should say that if I’d ever smoked pot it hasn’t been in years, years I say, so if you’re my parents, please don’t worry. I realized I prefer heroin.
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Have I said too much? Let me say too much
I woke up this morning thinking that I should get a pet bird. This was after this really long horrible epic of a nightmare that culminated in my crying over a pet rat I’d fallen in love with named Daniel. Poor Daniel went tits up and got rigor mortis, along with two other sickly hamsters that flipped over and kind of instantly calcified into frogs, which is interesting in a reverse fairy tale kind of way. There was also an infant, danger and a fleet of EMTs. And a bank of people on telephones, telethon style. I mean, frankly it was hard to move around in an apartment stuffed with all these people which is why my beloved Daniel nibbled at the poison which I only discovered after I retrieved him from under the refrigerator.
And they say dreams are only interesting to the people who have them!
Off to the gym my lovelies.
But one more thing about this dream: if I think about it even now, about how I felt when I realized Daniel was gone because I hadn’t acted fast enough, tears still spring to my eyes.
Truly
Sometimes I like to check my own blog… to see if I’ve posted anything new.
An important note about dictionaries
On Friday’s Red Eye I may have besmirched The American Heritage dictionary. In fact, I know I did. We were talking about a study that said that brainy girls have more difficulty in the bedroom than their dumber counterparts because they are always thinking. I said this was true, and that I was known to read a dictionary while with a suitor but that since switching from Merriam Webster to The American Heritage dictionary, which I said was the dumber dictionary, magic has happened.
Now see, I feel I unfairly maligned American Heritage. It’s the dictionary I grew up on and it’s the dictionary I actually own—though in this day and age it’s rare that I actually open a dictionary because all that stuff is online. Also, my dictionary is packed in a box somewhere along with my lady parts, incidentally, but I think I covered that sufficiently in another post. But Merriam Webster is the dictionary most magazines use as the authority, hence my thinking it’s probably got an edge. In fact, one of my first edit notes at TONY said “check Web10” and I tried to go to that website but there was nothing there. How foolish was I! Web10 was sitting on my desk. Webster’s 10th edition. Now they’re on Web11 I think. Anyway, fuck those dictionaries, both of which are child’s play compared to the OED, you know?
Behind on sleep
I kind of lost track of time on the bike. If my behind were any more asleep I'd have to rename it Rip Van Winklebutt and read it a newspaper.
Butt Van Winkle? Ass Van Winkle? There is humor in there somewhere, I'm sure of it!
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