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A Number of my readers have been barraging me with requests. Femmephane! they entreat, When Will You Have A Blog That Teaches Us Valuable Life Skills? And if not that then they want to know, When Will You Use Your Far-Reaching, Considerably-Influential, Web-Forum to Help Humanity? Or, they plead, When Will You Take Cue From The Bespectacled AJ and Invite A Lesbian to Write Guest Column Answering Age-Old Questions For Someone’s Benefit?
The time is now, my friends.
For several fortnights I have watched my friends and loved ones gear up for imminent disaster. Hoarding like I’ve never before experienced it. Since I was too young to enjoy the fruits of Midwestern El Niño panics, too late for the Cold War shelters, and too far from California to adequately prepare for Hale-Bopp, I’ve gotten a late start.
But there’s no putting it off any longer. The threat of a Zombie-plague is upon is. Or is it the threat of an alien invasion? The point is: you don’t know either. I have watched as two to four loved ones have maxed out their credit cards stockpiling items they mistook for necessities. For your safety I have compiled a reliable list to prepare you for the possibility of attack. These are things you SHOULD buy and keep in your home in order to save yourself when the time comes.
Tools To Protect Yourself Against Zombies
1. Black-Out Curtains, Barricades. You need to be able to lock yourself into some place. If the zombies see you moving around in there after dark they’re liable to come after you. Think about installing large, rolling, steel doors in your pied-à-terre. Keep some plywood on hand. In a bind, shopping carts can be stacked up to block stair cases. Shopping carts make zombies totally crazy for some reason.
2. Love. There’s no telling if this one will help you or totally fuck you over. But you should get yourself some on the off-chance that your honey will want to pull out of serious peril.
3. A vaccine or a cure. If you can’t find these then you might as well befriend some geneticists. But try to get some really built ones or ones with other skills. Otherwise you’ll be sorry later if you try to ford the river and your scientist dies.
4. Bob Marly. It would be very unrealistic if you didn’t know who Bob Marley was.
Tools to Protect Yourself Against Aliens
1. Rock Music, Water, Oxygen, Homosexuals. The key to aliens is this: aliens have a weakness. You just have to figure out what it is. The best way to figure out the alien weakness is to ask yourself: In this situation am I the protagonist? If you answer yes then you should try to distill your most annoying quality into a weapon. For example: Are you into The Eagles? Are you a former high-school diving champ who’s given up the pool after a tragic accident? Do you indulge in sodomy? If you are the protagonist and you have answered yes to any of the questions, you may already know the alien weakness.
2. A Very Short Introduction to Chaos Theory, Quantum Mechanics, and Post-Colonialism. If the alien weakness isn’t the essence of humanity then it’s bound to be the essence of alienity. If this is the case you will find that their technology will actually be the way to their Achilles heel. Be on the look out for misuse of the golden ratio or the metric system. Consider tearing the conversion chart out of a Five Star five subject notebook so you can have it on hand.
The 5 Most Important Tools Effective Against Both Zombies and Aliens
5. Elaborate Pulley System.
4 . Flamethrower or ample accelerants.
3. Bacon.
2. Flame Thrower.
1. German Shepherd.
FAQ
You may be asking yourselves.
If there was a national emergency, wouldn’t Superman come to save us?
No. And don’t even bother asking about Batman– there’s no way he’d leave his bat-hideout.
But Femmephane, what about a demon invasion?
Good question. I refer my readers to Revelations for the overview on that inevitability.
Are German Shepherds effective against the forces of Skeletor and/or Voldemort?
I’m glad you asked. The answer is 1) Skeletor: If he’s the one from the cartoons, Yes. If you’re dealing with the one from the 1987 film Masters of the Universe, no way Jose. 2) Voldemort: Don’t be naive. Only if the dog’s imbued with the power of your mother’s love.
How do Zombie and Alien invasions intersect with issues of race in America?
It’s so good we have time for this one. Zombie-plague and Alien-Invasion are the true equalizers. Invasions and plagues are color-blind. By that I mean, being undead actually turns everyone pretty chalky and aliens will gestate in any body they can catch. Once you’ve been turned into a zombie or inhabited by an alien, you actually don’t see race anymore because your eyes don’t work in the dark. But this doesn’t mean that racism is dead. Racism will always live on in the hearts of the healthy.
Who would the Zombies support in the primaries? What about the Aliens? Do Zombies and Aliens caucus? Do they have opinions on superdelegates?
I wish I could say. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that we would probably be Republicans or Libertarians before we could arm sufficiently to prepare for either scenario.
Purebred dogs are expensive and I’m allergic to animals with fur. Can I get a Shepherdoodle from the shelter instead?
It’s your funeral, man.
Is it true that Stevie Nicks is the universal alien kryptonite?
It’s hard to say. If I were going to make an alien movie about Fleetwood Mac I would cast Drew Barrymore to play Stevie, Steve Buschemi, Jennifer Tilly, Tilde Swinton, Matt Damon, and Macaulay Culkin. In the end I would probably have the Aliens win–No, the humans–No, Alan Rickman–Oh, I don’t know.
In the past week I’ve ____, ____, ___, and ____. And before that, babysat for a real live child. She was long-haired and clever with a whole notebook of cute pictures she has taken (arranged in order of cuteness). She pulls her mother’s article proofs out of the waste basket and adds her own editorial marks. I resusitated my second grade bunny drawing skills and taught her how to draw a bunny. J taught her pig-latin–and, I’m afraid, perhaps a little real latin as well. Before J and I got there she said to m.o.m:
“Quick, remind me of their names? Max and Ruby?”
Terrifying, I know. As I have already been Max, this time I got to play Ruby in the live version.
I later found out Max and Ruby are animated bunnies. Wiki provides a brief description of the program:
Each episode consists of three self-contained vignettes. Within each, Ruby is typically engaged in some sort of project or activity, while Max has a particular mania of his own which either runs counter to his sister’s or distracts her. Amusingly, Max’s dialog within each story is usually limited to just one word or a two-word phrase, which he repeats periodically. For example, “Tow truck!” or “Jellyballs!” By the end of the story, Max’s passion often dovetails with Ruby’s in some way, to her benefit and delight.
At dinner she informed us that when her friend comes over,
“We usually put one noodle on the floor.”
“Why,” I asked.
“Uh, because it’s funny?!”
I’ll refrain from identifying with a child or saying anything about wisdom from the mouths of babes. Both would be utterly specious and only accessible cliche. It would be more accurate to cite wiki for the accidental insight.
“I put you in a short story.”
“Really?” Once in a while Gina brought treats to her shrink because they made her so visibly delighted.
“Sure. Hey, you’re almost as excited as you get about dreams. You called me suggestible.” Gina didn’t give her therapist time to answer because she wanted to distract her with the rest of the story, more to test out the plot than create a diversion from what it might mean to self-diagnose as clinically suggestible.
“It was about how this woman takes up astrology as a kitschy hobby because it seems like a good organizational scheme. She gets home from her lover’s house and reads her horoscope online without checking the date and it tells her she’s feeling creative so she writes a thousand words. Then she refreshes her email and there’s another horoscope there and it tells her it’s a good day to clean up her personal space so she scrubs out the bathroom and soaks her blinds. And then she refreshes it again, and this time checks the date because, after all she’s received a three in one day. The last one tells her she’s feeling impulsive so she gets her nipples pierced.” Gina’s therapist had been smiling since “soak her blinds” and Gina wondered if she had inadvertently made a sexual entendre.
“I decided to put in the whole cleaning thing because I did just do those things and it seemed a waste that no one would notice. But anyway, then she goes to therapy and tells her shrink about everything and her shrink tells her she sounds less impulsive and more suggestible.”
“Are you trying to convince yourself that your anxiety is waning?”
“Oh,” Gina paused, she liked her therapist because she was smart, especially in the last seven minutes of a fifty minute hour. And because she was still analytic enough to blame the revelatory grand finale on Gina, “I don’t know.”
“How’s your hand? Are you going to be alright this weekend?” She looked directly at Gina’s burned and bandaged hand which Gina had dramatically overwrapped for her session but was still blistered beyond dexterity two weeks after the accident.
“Sure, Jill’s staying with me,” she lied and immediately began hoping that it wouldn’t, somehow, become the truth…
<the rest is in my pocket with all the topless ordinaces you could ever dream about>
Last night J and I had dinner/drinks with the illustrious same-sex lovers Sara Seinberg and Ginger Robinson. They were both still fuming– or at least markedly frothy– over some vociferous man-type person who had been muttering to himself all through the produce department in a distinctly pay-attention-to-my-impo(r)tant-innerlife way. And the indispensable analysis he was offering to our fair protaganists? White corn is a gimmick.
Ginger, a long-haired southern Butch, deteriorates into pure genius whenever confronted with idiocy and/or grandstanding: “There are 300 varieties of corn. And he’s decided white corn is a gimmick?! Please. ‘Oh, I’m not gonna buy that blue corn, that’s a gimmick.’”
In honor of the men who take up too much space another tale. This, my own, from trying to study just once in Providence while young and attractive. I moved outside to the bench where I thought J still had a good view of me, not realizing that I was effectively blocked out by the edge of the building. I was not much more comfortable out there but decided that at least with the time constraint and the lack of distraction, I could get through a few more lines.
“Hey,” the man saw me sitting, innocently, absolutely absorbed in something very difficult on the bench, “we don’t have to be back right away. Let’s sit down for a bit.”
His friend looked at me and then looked over at his BMW M3 (1998) parked a full four feet from the curb, requiring traffic to swerve around him, and then followed him to the bench. He sat down a few inches from me and it became immediately clear that his companion was a dyke and he was the kind of man that thinks that the right way to talk to dykes is by acting like an asshole. Or possibly he was just an asshole.
“I can make girls’ skirts blow up just by thinking about it,” also the type who didn’t require a second person in order to have a conversation, “yeah, it’s true. I sort of think of it like my gift to men. Sometimes I’m waiting for the bus or something and I see a girl and I just make the wind blow her skirt up as sort of a public service for all the guys around me,” also the type who has probably never been to a bus stop. Read the rest of this entry »
Condition: Fake Allergies (Type I) see also “Food Allergies as a Lifestyle Choice”
- Most common faux allergies: Gluten, soy, wheat, refined sugars, nuts, dairy, alcohol, pesticides.
- Symptoms: Reported but rarely seen symptoms including rash, hives, sneezing, congestion, migraine, stomach cramps, gas. Sufferers may complain of specific food-related anguishes that mysteriously disappear or become less severe when the sufferer is confronted with a version of the supposedly noxious food that they really, really like. Sufferers hijack dinner plans, complain loudly and/or divert conversation to topic of their limited lifestyle, and can miraculously discover the allergy is over if they accidentally consume the food. They are also well known for using the phrase “I can eat a little bit of it.”
- Causes: Telling waitstaff to hold the offending product because “[you're] allergic” so many times that now you think it’s true. Heavily interpolated interest in a specific and discredited fad diets of the 1990s. Obsession with weight. Fussiness, middle-child-syndrome, center-of-attention-complex, desire to be quirky. Residual attachment to environmental illness and word “toxins” combined with awareness of stigmatization.
- Correlations: Requires a certain amount of access to Three P’s (Power, Privilege, and Gourmet Natural Foods) and willingness to talk about oneself. Oft-encountered in supporters of the Yoga Industrial Complex.
- Treatment: See Lysistrata— don’t sleep with them, they’ll never learn
Famously Fake Allergic: Madonna, Yoko Ono, Pontius Pilate (unconfirmed.)
Condition: Hysterically-inflected Faux Allergies (Type II)
- Symptoms: Psychosomatic symptoms including rash, hives, sneezing, congestion, migraines, sore throat, shock, hyperventilation, bruising, and heart palpitations. Sufferers believe it so hard it becomes true. They are quieter about their faux-allergies and pine for the days when they didn’t break into hives when they ate certain things.
- Causes: Admirably complex psychopathology. Nervousness. Anxiety-disorders.
- Correlations: Strong imagination. Contested correlation: A Womb.
- Treatment: Because they cause real symptoms, you should avoid the foods you are hysterically-inflected faux allergic to. Go to therapy. Try not to get upset when people with Fake Allergies (Type I) give you their advice which will probably include suggestions to meditate and participate in the Yoga Industrial Complex. Don’t engage them in conversations about the colonization of Buddhism and Hinduism by New Agers.
Famous Hysterics: Dora, Ms. EM, Emily Dickinson.
Condition: Feline-Intruder-Related “Fake” Cat-Allergy (Type II.b)
- Prognosis: trouble in paradise.
- Symptoms: Skin problems, sinus problems, sore throat, watery eyes, discomfort, headaches.
- Causes: Justified hatred of cats. General interest in keeping a clean/dust&hair free household, commitment to staying independent of the house, distaste for Litterbox.
- Correlations: Otherwise good character, preference for dogs or petlessness, reticence to talk about allergy with lesbi-friends.
- Treatment: OTC medications can mitigate effects of FIR allergies although there is no real cure. Also, Benadryl can’t outsmart your hysteria and so you can’t hope for a normal life unless you live in a cat-free environment.
Ms EM cooked us a lovely dinner last night and we had a long talk on her porch. I met some new root vegetables– beets mixed with carrots, which tasted just like carrots but had the same exotic appeal as blood oranges. Anyway who doesn’t like to eat blood-colored things? Answer me that. I don’t need to recap the talk because Nora, currently traveling through the South reportedly topless, told me that her first discovery on the road is that there are only six topics of conversation: gossip, confusion, racism, sex, consumption (see wiki for disambiguation as always), and mechanics. I would hate to disprove her hypothesis so early on.
Ms EM and I kept it mostly to two of the six: racism and what Minohla Dargis and A.O. Scott described in the NYT as “girls, an altogether different chamber of secrets.”* Because I’ve been spending a lot of time between the gym and my bed, I’ve had a lot of time to come up with various ethical dilemmas, inane questions, cute and corny straight lines, and saucy retorts to inflict upon the stationary and tipsy. All my best questions were thwarted, however, when, after giving a long preamble-anticipatory-excuse to a straight-forward question that I wanted EM to take the immoral/unethical/better/easier side on, I opened up my first beer to be jeered with “Lies are slippery, like eels” printed on the lid.
I didn’t know beer was in the habit of giving advice these days. What happened to the Magic 8 Ball, Ouiji, and the all-knowing Snapple? All legitimate but out-moded forms of divination?
The old stand-by, word of the day got me but good anyway.
presential, adj.
Now rare. 1. Of or relating to presence; having or implying actual presence with a person or in a place; present. 2. Having presence of mind; attentive to the matter in hand, alert; = PRESENT adj. 4. Obs. 3. a. Grammar. Relating or having reference to the present tense.
DERIVATIVES
presentialist n. Obs. nonce-wd. a believer in the Real Presence; see REAL adj.2 2b.
San Francisco in just a handful of days. Will be happy to have the world mock me in a new, cooler, time zone.
“Harry Potter and the Four Directors.” New York Times, July 15, 2007.
missing: canadian produce for my mother
Originally uploaded by femmefare
Should you see homeless, irradiated produce, in the area, someone misses it. I sympathize, remembering a similar instance of a thrice mislaid brisket in a winter downpour. High holy days, NYC. Fortunately, I got to stay nestled in bed watching the cinematic stylings of Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal in the ingenious disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, while N donned a series of even more oversized overcoats and searched the streets in the pouring sleet, eventual success prevailed– for twice the price. It doesn’t escape me that N and Jake look not unalike, especially with all the extra overcoating. (See also: Greenhouse Effect, Eerie Convergence of Events/ Actor Lookalikes Unbeknownst, Dress your Family to Check Wunderground.com Before They Go A-Shopping.)
We lay flat in cool grass. Above the tops of the trees shapes were turning, the vast shark-like bodies of bomber jets prowling the sky. They reminded me of something, so at last I had a story to tell: My parents had a fish tank, and one night they came home to find the plecostomus sucking the angelfish. A week later the angelfish was dead, and the plecostomus went back to his job of cleaning the slime from the walls of the tank.
What the hell kind of story is that, when we are lying here terrified of bombs, my friends cried. It’s a true story, I replied.
-prose poem by Sarah Fran Wisby
