Sep
8
I remember when we first looked at our house and I was blown away by all the trees and plants in the backyard. Mature landscaping I don’t have to add to, I thought happily. And an honest-to-god orchard! How charming!
It would be far more accurate to say “we have some fruit trees” than “we have an orchard,” but anyway, we have some fruit trees. We sadly lost a beautiful cherry tree last winter in an ice storm, but we have a few apple trees and one pear tree and a plum tree. So charming! Except no. As it it turns out, fruit trees are not charming at all, unless you actually enjoy having the fruit, which I don’t. Our fruit isn’t particularly tasty right off the trees and I haven’t been canning or juicing or whatever-ing with the produce, so basically what we have are several metric tons of rotting fruit all over our yard.
Which wouldn’t be that bad, except for the dog. The dog loves the fruit. The dog will eat an infinite amount of fallen apples. Like, there is no point at which she stops and says to herself, gosh, perhaps I have eaten enough apples for one day. No. She will just walk around gnawing apples forever, CHOMP SLOP CRONCH BLONCH SHLOCK MMMLP, until you drag her back inside.
And that’s how I found myself facing the world’s hugest pile of turds this weekend. It was the apples. The goddamned apples. She’d been eating them all week and we decided to take a family trip to Newport on Saturday and we walked out on a jetty to enjoy the view and she did the thing, you know, the dog thing where they start kind of walking around super fast and their butthole bulges outward and you’re like whew thank goodness I brought a bag and then she humped up in savacrapsanah, the Dog-Shitting Pose, and proceeded to pump out the most enormous amount of feces I have ever seen any creature produce ever. It just kept coming and coming and its GIRTH was unreal and my husband was like “Jesus” and I swear there was a note of pride in his voice and the kids were falling all over the place laughing and ten hours later when she was done I had to try and pick it up with my flimsy little shit-grabbing bag and there was so MUCH of it and I tried to stick it together like Play-Doh but it kept falling apart and there was a family walking towards us so I had to hurry and it was just absolutely indescribable and I could feel the apple pieces through the plastic.
TL;DR: I’m over having fruit trees.
Aug
28
I’ve been thinking about aging lately. Maybe by “lately” I mean “since this morning, when the bright sunlight shining through my bathroom window made me recoil hissing from the mirror like those gross projectile penis-tongue vampires in The Strain,” but anyway I’ve been noticing that in addition to the usual aging suspects — wrinkles, generalized bagginess, and the magical ability to gain ten pounds in one sitting — I have all these weird things going on since I turned 40.
For instance:
• Ridged nails. I read that as you age your nails start losing their ability to retain moisture, which atrophies areas of the “nail matrix” resulting in “longitudinal ridging.” That is some bullshit right there. I mean, I know in the grand scheme of health problems this doesn’t exactly register, but … well, it’s still bullshit. I have wrinkles on my fingernails, you guys.
• Random skin things. I developed this mole-thing on my leg that was a total outlier compared to other moles and I got all scared and went to the dermatologist convinced she was going to tell me it was skin cancer and she was basically like, “Oh, that’s a (term I’ve since forgotten). These can be common as you get older.” Just … yeah, sorry, you’re going to have some lumpy unattractive bullshit here and there, and we could dig it out but it’ll be a bitch since those things run deep so maybe just get used to the new you.
• Inability to sit for extended periods of time. I had my hair colored on Monday and I verified something I’ve been suspecting for a while: I can no longer truly enjoy lengthy salon visits, because sitting for that long in a chair makes my ass and legs fall asleep. BULL. SHIT.
• Face-creases that last all day. You know when you sleep on a pillow crease and you get a line in your cheek? Well, my bullshit pillow-dents now last for hours on end so I look like Inigo fucking Montoya.
• A visible vein that runs vertically down my forehead, connecting the top of my head to the frown-lines between my eyebrows. This is the biggest pile of bullshit of all, because not only do the ever-deepening “elevens” on my forehead make me look like I’m perpetually pissed off about something, the GIANT BLUE VEIN makes it seem like I’m about to have a goddamned stroke from sheer rage. It’s particularly noticeable when I’m laughing, which makes for some attractive photos. My only solace for this new and unwanted development is that Angelina Jolie has one too, so maybe it will eventually become a hot fashion trend and people will start injecting their heads with tinted saline and I’ll be all Hipster Ariel about it, like my forehead looked creepy FIRST.
Meanwhile, my husband’s charming eye-creases and silvering beard pretty much make him look like he just stepped out of a Clint Eastwood movie. So, so, so much bullshit.
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