Linguistic cartwheels in the stylings of a rant, these are the thoughts that keep me up at night.
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I am a 20 year old female writer residing in Central New Jersey. My influences include the great Dave Barry, Neil Gaiman, George Carlin, and the two greatest editors in the world, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. My webpage can be found at www.homestead.com/foxfyresden and I can be reached at Foxfyre33@aol.com. Happy reading!
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Thursday, December 19, 2002
I'm all about marketing and advertising. It's what I've given several thousand dollars to educations of higher learning (take THAT term with a big grain of salt) to be educated in. However, even I must admit things have gotten a bit out of hand.
While at the mall today with my mother, trying to get some last-minute christmas shopping done, I noticed we were both trying to give a certain kiosk a very wide berth. We'd been to this mall before, and seen the absolute inability of the people within said kiosk's ability to comprehend "no". They were selling hand creme. Strike that, selling is too passive a word. They were pushing it on passerby like lanolin-containing all-natural heroin. For the love of god these people are absolute fanatics. They had branched out like the borg across the hallway, with one pushy salesperson blocking the flow of traffic on each side of the "home base", neatly.
Grandmothers, people in wheelchairs, 4 year olds...no one was safe from the ravages of Mr. and Ms. slender-and-beautiful-with-an-undeterminable-accent. It was like trying to dart between scylla and charibidis....if they had been reject avon salespeople.
I watched them set vulture-like eyes on the slow-moving child-hampered shoppers. Like nervous gazelle, a mother's hands would tighten, knuckles white, on the handles of the stroller. A quick glance over her shoulder...maybe she should go back. No. Bath and body works is there, just beyond the danger zone, and god damn it, she will be returning home with lotion for her neice's christmas stocking. A quick push, and she's off to a good start...maybe she can escape notice...quick quick qu- BAM. A kiosk jackal leaps, in all her long-legged I'm-from-some-stylish-indeterminate-forigen-country glory, and brings the stroller to a screeching halt. Oh, the humanity...no way out...she's cornered! All I see is Ms. Jackal's perfectly postured back as she closes in for the kill. Opportunity! A door closes, a window opens, and I grab my mother's sleeve and drag her quickly past the carnage, staring straight ahead and unspeaking until there is a three-store buffer between us and the horrors we just witnessed.
Shaking, we regain our wits and readjust our coats, and continue on to J.C. Pennys.
We'll be walking outside the mall to get back to the car.
~FoxComment
3:16 PM
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Foundation is a gateway drug.
No, really. I mean, think about it girls. You have an imperfection or two on your face, so you dab a bit of coverup on to become perfect again.
But...wait. Now there's a little discoloration, because no foundation matches your skin color exactly, ever.
Break out the foundation again, and cover up your whole face, especially under the chin to avoid the dreaded "cover-up line".
However, now you look bland. Colorless. Maybe just a little lipstick. There. That will fix it. Damn. Now the cheeks look pale. Just a *little* blush..not too much.
Damn. What about the eyes? They look...unhighlighted. Okay, so a little shadow...that's not too bad. And liner, need liner. And mascara, of course. And clear mascara...can't have the other mascara smudging.
Ooh..let's see, now.
And then you look at the mirror and see Tammy Faye Baker staring back at you.
~FoxComment
8:30 AM
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Yogurt. Simple enough.
Who would have thought such a seemingly harmless bacterial dairy product would become the latest carrier for new societal concepts?
And yet, here I sit, kicked back in my chair, spooning into a little plastic cup of Breyer's new Creme Savers yogurt. Raspberries and Creme. By god is it good. I want more.
When I was a kid, fruit-on-the-bottom was damned near revolutionary to me. It was like, wow..interactive food! I was more than content with that.
Then all of a sudden it started becoming a damned medium for all the newest concepts, not the least of which was that time-to-yourself women's movement that hit consumers as a whole upside the head not too long ago. Before that, back in the early 90's, I believe it was, when earth-awareness was all the rage (and people were actually convinced that we could, in the course of a few frantic years, repair all the fuck-ups we'd committed upon our enviroment) that granola-bespeckled yogurt was all the rage. Then, in the usual healthy-is-boring attitude the great U.S. of A. carries (well, maybe not Cali) we swiftly and fluidly made the switch to crumbled up oreo bits, and excess packaging to hold them. From that point on, bacterial dairy products took a nosedive as far as dignity goes. M&Ms do NOT belong in my daily dose of calcium, thank you.
Now, not only are they deviating from my traditional Strawberry with banana? now that's daring! flavors and tapping into the likes of mango and pineapple, but now they're toying with the heart and soul of my yogurt - the viscosity!
Yoplait recently introduced their "Whips" line...basically taking aforementioned overly-daring flavors of yogurt and cool-whipping them into a non-dairy dessert-topping consistency. Yes, consumers are indeed paying more money for less product, I kid you not. Considerably more, depending on where one shops. And Dannon brings to the area La Crème yogurt. Yes, that is a french accent. Though unless La Crème is french for "ridiculously-overpriced-thick-yogurt-in-tiny-flat-containers", I'm willing to bet they're merely cashing in on this era's pointed need to appear classy.
And the kids. Nothing is sacred. What IS this go-gurt monstrosity? Good lord. I was first introduced to this horrific concept babysitting a year or so ago. Yogurt in a TUBE? Even that idea is semi-acceptable, but the damned *flavors*. Christ. It's like a joke a friend of mine used to have...that anything fruit-flavored and aimed at children *had* to have a alliterative psychological disorder. You know, like "Crazy Cherry", "Wild Watermelon" and "Bipolar Blueberry". They have those allright, but joining the ranks are things like cotton candy and bubble gum. Blegh. And how do they push it like drugs to the pre-pubescent masses? By making a glow-in-the-dark lightsaber tube just in time for the tie-in to episode 2. I'm not kidding. Look it up.
My poor yogurt. What have they done to you? Yet even in my sorrows, I am a traitor of the worst kind.
If treason tasted like raspberries and creme, democracy would be in big trouble.
~FoxComment
8:56 AM
Boy, dating sure has changed.
I just realized how completely cyberized my entire romantic life really is. I mean, I put numbers in my cell phone, names in my buddy list, and info in my palm pilot.
I profile-check my potentials. I scan their webpages for signs of lingering exes. I do profile searches with their screen names to see if some ex-who-can't-let-go is still crushing on them.
"Googling" has become a phenomenon, wherein the potential's full name is put in at google.com and the entire web is searched for incriminating bits of digital information. I have personals ads up on three different sites, and they're all cross referenced by location, location, location.
An intimate dinner is reduced to a scheduling logistic via email, and a man is judged on the size of his font. I schedule p.d.a.'s IN my PDA. Meeting someone out of town? The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and that line is drawn by mapblast, complete with estimated arrival time.
Does he know grammar? Does he punctuate? Sure. But how's his voice? Here it is now, issuing forth from my speakers on a yahoo-reigned medium. And how's his presence? There it is, on my screen in a little framed window.
Everything is reduced to code. My men are becoming more html programming and less flesh-and-blood. I can spell-check them, photo-shop them, edit them accordingly. "He didn't have enough content" becomes the modern-day coffee-with-the-office-gals putdown.
When my server crashes...
Am I going to have a midlife crisis?
~FoxComment
8:40 AM
I woke up this morning with this thought: Why is it called "Making Up"?
I mean, when you make up something, what do you do? Lie. So, you have a fight with someone, stew for awhile, and then go and lie to them? Cause let's face it, you're usually not sorry at all.
All mending of feelings and reparations of situations are classified under a term that means "to lie".
So when a girl forgives a guy, and they have the token sex afterwards...
...does she have to fake it?
~Fox Comment
8:38 AM
Today is the first day of the rest of my Blog.
Sometimes I write things that are a reasonable semblence of intelligence, much to my surprise. Sometimes I even manage a bit of well-timed humor. This is a place for just such instances.
Please read on, and let me know your thoughts, and also any re-publishing queries! I can be reached at Foxfyre33@aol.com. Thanks!
~Fox Mackenzie Comment
8:35 AM
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