Category Everything is Terrible

“Oh, great. I specifically asked not to be seated next to a baby.”

1 Comment read Everything is Terrible

It all started with a baby.

Well, actually, it started a little earlier. My grandparents’ health has been in decline, and it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to travel here for the wedding next year, and as Jason has never met them, we planned a trip to Wisconsin in September. Within twenty minutes of our arrival, grandma pointed to her refrigerator and said “Did you notice my baby? I just love him.”

On the fridge was a photo cut out from the back of Parade magazine of a chubby despondent baby figurine seated on a Green Bay Packers towel with the words “Is it Sunday yet?” written on it. “Oh, he’s just the cutest. I was going to send away for him, but it was just too much money.”

In the mornings, I would wake up (You can’t wake up if you never managed to fall aleep, and, side note, I don’t know where you can buy a bed that’s made of concrete and steel wool but my grandparents evidently either bought or constructed one (Pillows, too! (When grandma finally inquired as to why we both looked so haggard and we told her we haven’t been able to sleep on that bed, she said she had read that a hard bed was good for your back. Up to a point, grandma! Somewhere before the point where it causes back spasms.))). Let’s start over. I would know it was morning when through my desperately tired haze, I would hear grandma in the kitchen talking to the refrigerator baby. “Awww, it’s not Sunday yet, little guy!” Sometime around the 72 hour mark, I broke down, grabbed Jason’s phone, and ordered the baby.

I shortly received an email stating that it would be shipped soon, and in four to six weeks, they’d be sending another baby in the series. OH HELL NO. I didn’t agree to that! What followed was a forty minute hold time waiting to speak to someone in customer service to cancel future emo sports babies. After finally speaking to a human being, I was assured that grandma would only ever receive the one baby. What I wasn’t assured of was what else they would do with my information. As soon as the credit card charge went through, I was signed up for every email list of every company ever associated with The Bradford Exchange. The Ashton-Drake Galleries. The Danbury Mint. Multiple times a day, every day, I was informed of some deal that was too good to miss–lifelike babies, NFL merchandise, beaded crosses, gumpaste jewelry…all of it offically licensed, exclusive to them, and available in easy installments. I tried unsubscribing; the unsubscribe button just seemed to encourage them. I told them they were in violation of the CAN SPAM act and that they must remove me from their lists. They told me it would take 2-3 weeks for the messages to cease. After five weeks, I was still receiving email and it finally stopped when I told them they were still in violation and would begin the process of escalation (reporting and suing if necessary) if they did not cease immediately.

Around this same time, our mailbox began to be flooded with the strangest variety of catalogs, many also offering similar payment plans and credit card offers. At first I figured that my credit had bumped up a spot from “danger, danger” to “bad with money in a way that’s profitable for predators”, but then I noticed all of the catalogs were in Jason’s name. Jason, who never orders diddly squat on the internet unless it’s available via Amazon Prime…except for that damn baby. This flood of catalogs was at least funny for a while (Who would buy a puzzle of cartoon animals in holiday scarves gathered around a bear pooping in an outhouse? Who would buy drawstring pants printed to look like jeans along with “hole” details that make it look like there’s a black hole where your knee should be? Or that have awful printed “patches” and are made to look like your boxers are hanging out?) but we received one this week that was the last straw and the impetus for me to spend another forty minutes on the phone demanding that my address be removed from their records. Far be it for me to suffer alone:

Or, more accurately, there’s still time to make someone weep in terror on Christmas.

Oh creepy. CREEPY. Heartbeat? Breathing? Fancy dildo skin? What kind of nightmare factory are they running here?

Here to fill your desperate need to be needed, a baby who will never stop crying and will never ever leave you unless the dog grabs it and buries it in the backyard (good boy!).

But what happens when you shake it? And why don’t they offer the slightly older, with a firm grasp of language “I hate you” toddler? I thought they were going for accuracy!

If a baby human just won’t do it for you, they also offer horrifying little baby monkeys, also with creepy realistic skin.

A golden idol? I’m pretty sure this was exactly the thing God was pissed about before he passed down his ten commandments. But the more important question is: are there any left?!

Any of these would be hilarious to purchase as a gag gift to sneak into an unsuspecting friend’s home…if only I didn’t have to deal with 80 more minutes of phone calls and a deluge of mail and email afterward. Rest easy, friends. For now.

That’s one way to keep me from eating a chicken fried steak for a while.

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Recently, Napoleon hasn’t been quite himself; fussing and crying and licking at his rear end (more than normal, and fussing, crying, and slurping at his nether regions are his favorite things on Earth, so it may have taken me a while to notice the increase in volume). A week ago, I came home after being out for just a few short hours to find that he’d licked/torn out a patch of fur on his rear end near his tail, and I hauled him immediately to the vet, where I learned something so awful that had I known about it beforehand, it may have put me off dog ownership entirely:

Anal gland squeezing.

Apparently when dogs poo, it squeezes out some fluid from stink glands on either side of their anus…at least, that’s what happens in large dogs. Some small dogs have difficulty squeezing out said fluid, and (lucky me), Napoleon is one of them. I never would have guessed this, because he’s a total professional at all other kinds of fluid and solid excretion, but I suppose no one can be good at everything. So now I have to take him to have his booty squeezed with regularity to prevent the sort of build-up that caused this issue, but in the meanwhile, he had five years of backup in there. In the aftermath of his first squeezing, both the vet and the tech couldn’t use enough descriptive words to convey just how awful it had been. “You see, it’s normally like a clear brownish fluid. This was like…thick, creamy, and chunky, like gravy. Like, you know…chunky.”

I think I could have slept better without ever hearing that description, but thank you for being a veritable anal juice wordsmith.

Jason wouldn’t let me show gravy fountaining out of a dog’s butt into the bowl, so just be thankful for that.

I’m considering renaming him, but I’m not sure that Campbell’s Chunky Gravy GooBooty will fit on a nametag.

“Oh look what you did! Now I’ll have to go get my cold cream gun.”

3 Comments read Canada, Everything is Terrible, Live Shows, Travel

In July, Jason and I took a trip to Vancouver for IMATS (the international Makeup Artist Trade Show). We had plans to attend the previous month’s event in Los Angeles as LA is by far the bigger show, but it unfortunately fell on the same weekend that Jason was committed to being in a wedding so it didn’t work out. However, the next LA IMATS is in January, which is right around the time that I start losing my mind in the cold, dark Seattle winter, so it will be an ideal time for a trip to a place where the sun peeks through the smog. Vancouver is essentially a cleaner, friendlier Seattle, with better candy AND Plants vs Zombies scratch off tickets!

I wasn’t interested in the push and shove aspect of the trade show floor–I love makeup, and I love discounts, but it has to be a hell of a discount or a product I cannot purchase otherwise to make me want to deal with crowds of people elbowing one another to get the last item–I’d rather pay full price AND shipping and never have to deal with a human being. What I was interested in was the student creature competition, the makeup talks, and the makeup museum. The student competition was broken up over the course of two days, with beauty on Saturday and creature on Sunday; I only attended on Sunday, and I was impressed by the quality of the work I was seeing. I wish self-taught people like myself could compete, but unfortunately it’s only open to makeup school students.

The makeup museum, though small, was also very cool, featuring mostly work by Toby Lindala (keynote speaker, creator of SFX for X-files, Supernatural, and V, among others) and Todd Masters (featured speaker, creator of MastersFX, SFX on Big Trouble In Little China, Predator, Underworld, True Blood, and more). Questionably, however, they also included submissions from various local schools, some of which were so bad that I was embarrassed for the artist and the school. Everyone has to learn somewhere and everyone works to the best of their personal abilities, and hating on someone for trying is the height of uncool…but showcasing pieces that aren’t ready to be shown do a disservice to both the student and the school. It’s why you don’t see macaroni necklaces in the Louvre.

Taking a photograph of a video camera videotaping a video feed. The only thing that could make this better is if someone behind me took a photograph of me taking a photograph of a video camera videotaping a video feed. Both Todd Masters’ group and Toby Lindala struck me as likeable, humble artists with a genuine love for their craft and fascinating stories to tell, and their speaking time went by far too quickly. If MastersFX still had a Seattle studio, I would beat down their door for an opportunity to work there, to observe, to help, to sweep their floors…but sadly, it is no more. The only thing that stuck in my craw about the event in general was that the floor was full of tons of women (and some men, but predominately women), but nearly all of the speakers were men. Where are the women, and why don’t they rise to the top of this craft? More women learn to use makeup than men, so how is it that the most notable figures in the business are men? Is it the glass escalator effect? Surely there are women who are just as talented…so where are they? Halfway through the day, we decided to take a break and head to a nearby pub for lunch rather than suffer through convention food, and there I learned two important things. One, there are vampires actively prowling Vancouver:

and two, I learned an important lesson about Canadian light and how it interacts with steak fibers. At the time, I was on a restrictive diet and could only eat carbohydrates one day a week, so I’d been eating/preparing/ordering a lot of proteins and veggies. I ordered a medium-rare steak with veggies while Jason ordered some carbtacular dish that I remember being insanely jealous of at the time. What I received was a completely well done steak, and even though I’m the sort of person who haaaaates sending anything back to the kitchen, I flagged down the waiter and told him that it was far too well done while apologizing profusely for bothering him. He disappeared with my plate and came back twenty minutes later with….another well-done steak! He disappeared before I could cut into it, and when he came back around again to ask if this one was better and I responded negatively, he said “Oh, I know what your problem is” and grabbed the fork off my plate and poked at the steak. “Yeah, that’s medium rare, I can tell. It’s just that you’re sitting by the window and the light is what makes it look brown. It’s why steakhouses are so dark inside, so you can’t see that the meat is actually brown when you expect it to be red.” HUH. It’s fascinating to learn that the Canadian visible light spectrum is missing the color red! You’d think that I would have heard about that before, read it somewhere, seen it in a documentary…SOMETHING. I didn’t think to look while I was still in Canada, but does this mean that their national flag is actually a brown leaf and they’ve been too (typically Canadian) polite to inform the rest of the full light-spectrumed world that we have it wrong? Because, and I don’t mean to boast, I have cooked and eaten many a steak within the borders of the United States in both darkness and in light, and they’ve always been a varying shade of red inside. So it must be Canadian light, right? I refuse to believe that an actual Canadian could have lied to me just to get me to shut up and eat an overcooked, shoe-leathery piece of meat.

The next time I burn the hell out of dinner, I’m going to tell Jason that we must have had a Canadian air front sweep through the kitchen, but not to worry…even though it looks and tastes burned, that’s just a factor of the air, and it’s actually the most succulent thing he’s ever had in his mouth. Thank you, Canada!