whiskey in a teacup . com

We recently rented The Little Mermaid, which came out an astonishing twenty years ago, when I was six.  I feel pretty lucky to have been young during one of Disney’s golden ages, when the animation was hand-drawn and awesome and there were vulgar subliminal messages in every film.   I was a huge fan of The Little Mermaid and owned such items as t-shirts and leggings with Ariel’s picture on them, and little rubber action figures of her and Prince Eric.   Though I saw the movie many times throughout my youth, there were, of course, a few things I didn’t pick up on until seeing it as an adult:

-This is, essentially, a story about being born into the wrong body.  “Oh, that’s just a random part of the plot,” you say, “and clearly not a metaphor for transgendered people.”  Yeahbutt!  A major character in the movie is modeled after Divine, a hero of the LGBT community.   COINCIDENCE?  Yes.

-This is also a story about how, if you want a man to fall in love with you, you should drastically change your physical appearance and lose your ability to speak.

-There’s a weird moment during the Under the Sea montage where the lyrics refer to a “blackfish”, and then a fish who is very obviously supposed to be a black soul singer appears on screen and sings a few notes.  At least it wasn’t a catfish?

-The movie suggests that it’s totally fine for a sixteen year old to get married…to a dude she’s known for less than a week.

-I had always wondered about the mechanics of merpeople sex, but it never occurred to me that along with Ariel’s legs, she must have got a human vagina with a presumably intact hymen.  Considering how little she knew about life above the sea (she used a fork to comb her hair, etc), I think someone was in for a big wedding night surprise!

The other day at work, some of the clients and staff were looking up music videos of a recently deceased pop star (you get a cookie if you can guess which one!).   In the crowded room, I found a place to stand next to my friend, who is in a family way and enjoys hugging and leaning on whoever’s closest.  As we embraced each other, the ode to racial unity “Black or White” cued up on the computer screen.  It bears mentioning at this point that I am, in fact, white and she is, in fact, black, and that it quickly became one of the single cheesiest moments of my entire life.  I made a joke about it, which diffused the tension somewhat…but holy christ was that shit cheesy.

Fun!:  Getting towed by a wheelchair.  You can do this by sitting on a wheeled stool or other wheeled office chair, grabbing the back of someone’s power wheelchair, and letting them pull you down the hallway.

Not Fun!:  Leaning over at precisely the wrong moment and getting a wayward spastic fist to the left breast.  I get punched in the gut now and again, often with enough force to make me double over, and that’s unpleasant but mostly just funny.   However, when a guy accidentally hits you in the tit, it’s just plain embarrassing for all involved.  It also hurts like a mofo but there’s no way to react to the pain other than to make a surprised sort of “Oh!” sound and hope your ribs didn’t break.   To recap:  that is not fun.

Scene: some basement.  A long table is adorned with a row of cupcakes.  Each cupcake has a lone candle stuck in its frosting.  Lighter in hand, I try to ignite each wick one by one, but as soon as a flame appears it is somehow extinguished.  When I get to the end of the row of cupcakes I realize I am at a combination seance/birthday party for Lennon and McCartney and that their spectres are blowing out the candles.

My nervous temperament is not helped in the least by our condo’s various creepy idiosyncracies: the way the kitchen light turns on and off at random, the way certain doors catch a breeze through the window and creak open ever so slowly, the way the neighbor’s porch lamp casts shadows in our bedroom that suggest humanoid forms drifting through the night sky.  As if that weren’t enough, in the past week our printer has gone rogue and, independent of any prompt to print anything at all, has inexplicably produced a copy of our 2008 tax return documents…not once, but twice!  The second time it happened, we were trying to answer the unanswerable question of “What the fuck?” when Jared offered his expert diagnosis, namely that “…maybe it just needs to get it out of its system.”  “What, like a rebelling teen?” I asked.  “Basically,” he replied.

I recently started reading salon.com and I dig the following:

A series of stories about relationships; this one is from a guy whose ex-wife married his brother:

“The thing is that he’s my brother and that coming from a trailer trash background that’s the last thing I felt my kids needed is to have some sort of shit like that go on in their life to affirm to them that they are redneck trailer trash hillbilly fucking hicks and that that’s all they’re ever gonna be. You know?”

Cary Tennis’s engrossing advice column; this is his response to a reader who was angry because a stranger had defecated on his car:

“Whales and old men have scars and barnacles. They carry their history on their bodies — things they have brushed up against, parasites that have attached to them, places they shouldn’t have gone but went anyway and got stabbed or shot or just roughed up. An old man will lift his shirt and he’ll have at least one nasty old scar somewhere, from an appendix operation or heart surgery, or a bullet wound or knife wound, or a scar above his eye from a fall or a bad car accident. And if ugly old whales could talk I think they’d say, Here’s where a shark took a chunk out of me off of Port Angeles! Here’s where I got run over by an Evinrude!

If you stick around long enough you’re going to get some scars. You’re going to get your stuff stolen out of your locker or out of your car. Somebody is going to insult you at a party and you’re not going to have a comeback. People are going to shit on the hood of your car.”

Say you’re walking down some grubby street just after twilight, and suddenly you notice a figure in the distance.  It’s someone walking towards you, and they look a little creepy, but they’re too far away to see clearly.   You continue walking and they continue walking and as you near each other you become more and more nervous, and it becomes more and more evident that this person is dangerous and could hurt you.  For whatever reason you don’t cross to the other side of the street, and finally you meet in the middle and the person grabs you by the shoulders and proceeds to shake you violently and scream bloody murder in your face for ninety-nine minutes.  That’s exactly what it’s like to see Drag Me to Hell, or at least to see it on the big screen, where the constant aural assault is enough to set you squirming in your seat and glancing at the ushers to remind yourself that it’s just a movie and you’re just in the theater.

The plot and themes and CG will leave you saying, “Eh, whatevs,” but the frequency and intensity of things jumping out at you while the sound effects team unleashes every lion’s roar mixed with screaming teakettle mixed with metal crushing mixed with violin high notes will leave you saying, “I can’t take this anymore and would like to leave.”  It’s not fear you’ll feel, exactly, but rather a consistent sensation of extreme physical discomfort.  When I left the theater I remarked with relief that it was sheer camp, that it wasn’t the kind of movie that stays with you; it wasn’t like Rosemary’s Baby or Last House on the Left or The Exorcist or any movie that terrifies you with its ideas as much as with its images.  But all week I’ve had trouble sleeping because I keep waiting for the jump cut, for the sudden ear-splitting roar of hellfire to come absolutely out of nowhere and knock me out of bed.  One could say, and indeed I am saying, that this movie gave me Post Traumatic Sound Effects and Editing Disorder.  In any event, I’ve found myself enthusiastically urging others to see it in the theater as soon as possible!

On our second night in Berlin, we had plans to meet friends for dinner and then go to a concert.  After a short ride on the U-Bahn and getting lost in what I guess is the Allston Village of Berlin (if you know Boston then you understand this is a righteous burn), we found and entered the venue.  At once I was confronted with a terrible fact: it’s legal to smoke in clubs in Germany.   The show began and I downed my Astra beer, trying to see the stage over the shoulders of the towering Aryans who were standing in front of us.  Beside us, a young couple who were either high, or just assholes, or a little of each, were dancing exuberantly and knocking into me roughly once every two seconds.  This, combined with the old familiar feeling of being suffocated by other people’s failure to avoid getting addicted to the most disgusting poison on earth, was taking me to a dark place.  Annoyed and queasy, I told my friends I needed to step outside, and Jared and I fled the club.

We went outside to the cool spring night and sat in plastic chairs on a lawn in front of the club.  My frustration with the cigarette smoke increased even as I emptied my lungs into the breezy evening air.  I launched into an epic rant about this fucking country why is it still legal here freedom of choice my ass shoot up if you want just don’t release poison into the goddamn air, it’s so goddamn disgusting what is wrong with people and was reaching a feverish, insane crescendo, about two seconds from making an offensive comparison between voluntarily standing in a smoky club and being herded into a gas chamber, I am a Jew and this is Germany after all!, when there was a rustling in the tree leaves above my head, and somewhere an unseen anal sphincter relaxed, and a gigantic load of bird shit fell from the sky and landed on my arm.

Luckily, the arm in question was wearing a cardigan, which was promptly removed and carried to the outdoor bar, where without even bothering to try to communicate in German I said, “A bird shit on me!” and the bartender laughed and helped me clean it up.  It was impossible to continue bitching after that, (impossible, really, to do anything but laugh) and soon the show ended.   While standing near the entrance to intercept our friends, a nearby girl said “Darf ich? and moved my hair aside to read the tattoo on my back and then said “Prima!” which made me feel like Germany loved me after all.  We managed to find our friends in the swarm of clubgoers, and the four of us scuttled back to the train station (where I removed my high heels and unloaded a playground’s worth of gravel and rocks that had been cutting into my feet) and went back to the hotel for tea.  On a subsequent rainy morning Jared and I visited the nearby Schnell & Sauber laundromat to wash the smoke and shit out of our clothes, and then the rain stopped and we continued on our way.

Sometime last night or this morning, the site done got hacked and subsequently my account was disabled.  The process of fixing it was remarkably easy, thanks to the nice folks at my hosting company and my nice husband who I married primarily because 1) he’s cute and 2) I don’t ever, ever want to need to know what the fuck the nice folks at the hosting company are talking about.

During my first phone call to the tech support department, the guy was telling me about upgrades that needed to be installed and permissions that needed to be changed, and he was talking all fast and I was saying, “Mmhm.  Mmhm,” and then I perceived a very slight hesitation in his voice.  It was the exact same thing that happened many times in Germany when I would ask a gramatically simple question like “Which direction is Invalidenstrasse?” and the response would be this barrage of rapid, colloquial German that was several orders of magnitude above my level of comprehension; each time I would stand there blank-faced saying, “Ja.  Ja,” trying to pick out some word or phrase from the well-meaning Aryan, and after a moment they would say, “Oh, you speak English?” and shame me by showing off their impeccable bilinguality.

So basically the same thing happened with the tech support guy, and after a moment’s pause he spelled the word A-T-O-M for me and I said, “Right,” and he said, “I don’t think you’re an idiot or anything,” and I said, “I’m just writing down what you’re saying so my husband can help me,” and he immediately switched to a remedial lanuage of less-technical jargon that mere proles like me are able to understand.

I had to call back after “we” had made all the updates and changes they ordered, and I had to verify my identity by verbalizing my account password, which is based on a private joke and is really really stupid when said out loud , and then the tech person had to pull up the site to see if it was back online, and of course the first post on the page is about condom catheters.  I can only imagine how embarrasing that exchange would be if instead of a personal website about your stupid dorky life that is tediously named after a song lyric you ran some kind of weird fetish site with a graphic domain name and photos of you doing stuff you shouldn’t do with the Tivo remote.  Actually, it would probably be no more embarrassing than what I went through this morning.

Let it henceforth be known that I strongly dislike condom catheters!

A condom catheter is exactly what it sounds like: a condom attached to a long tube that drains into a leg bag.  The upside is that you don’t have to insert anything into the urethra, which decreases the risk of urinary tract infection and is theoretically more comfortable.  Another upside is that it’s much easier for everyone involved to just empty urine from a leg bag than to, say, disconnect a G-tube, remove a wheelchair tray, perform a manual or Hoyer lift transfer, and then change a wet brief every few hours.  The downside is that they fucking blow.

One problem is that they never seem to stay on.  They come off and before you know it, the poor guy is sitting there with urine-soaked pants.  To combat this problem, most brands come with adhesive inside the condom to help them stick to the penis.  Since these things have to be changed frequently, this means you’re constantly applying and removing a very sticky item to a very sensitive area, which leads to the next problem: skin breakdown.  This can range from mild redness to ulcerated areas with bleeding.

The third problem is that they’re frustrating to apply.  As a woman, most of my pre-healthcare penile experience involved penises that were in operational mode.  The first time I found myself with a patient’s penis in one hand and a condom catheter in the other, I thought, “Oh, this seems familiar enough.  I know what this is all about.”  But the thing is, when you apply a condom catheter you’re applying it to a flaccid penis, and you swiftly realize, “Hm.  This is not the same.  This is not the same at all.”  Trying to apply a short, sticky sheath to a wriggly, wiggly penis can be a Sisyphean task, especially when you know the damn thing is just going to come flying off anyway.

They serve a purpose, to be sure, and some guys really seem to prefer them, but I for one do not like condom catheters.