end times?

I’m guessing that it’s not a good sign when your social life starts to incorporate long hours of lying on a couch watching television in a slanket.

Welcome to life at age 30. I'm impressed this lady makes her slankie look so slutty.
I mean, back in my twenties I used to watch The Sopranos with a group of friends, but that was one hour once a week on Sunday, when I never do anything anyway. What I’m talking about now is a full 24 hours of watching TV with very little conversation apart from what the next snack should be.

The idea was born a few months ago, when my friend C’s genius husband came up with the idea of a Marsathon. At the time, both of us had been spending a lot of alone time watching Veronica Mars DVDs. I watched seasons 1 and 2 over the course of maybe three weeks. I didn’t really realize how dire my situation was until I found myself slipping in episodes on weekday afternoons. Clearly, I was out of control, but I was found that work went much faster with my favorite sassy girl detective in the background.

C’s husband found himself in a similar situation, so it only seemed natural when he asked suggested I join them for a Veronica Mars slumber party last weekend to knock out the whole of season 3.

I knew that great things were brewing when I asked C what I should bring, and she suggested I bring an array of lounge clothes. I showed up at their place in the early afternoon to find C’s husband in pajamas and slippers, eating a butter sandwich and a box of Girl Scout cookies.

It felt like home.

C walked over to the loveseat, picked up this weird blue thing that was draped across it, held it out to me, and said, “Since you’re the guest, you get to use this for the weekend.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Is that a snuggie?” (The snuggie is one of my favorite infomercials.)

As it turns out, it was a slanket, which is pretty much the same thing: a huge blanket with arm holes that you put on like a hospital gown. Once it’s on, you look sort of like a cross between a prone walrus and Harry Potter with a terminal illness.

I donned the slanket after we ordered takeout, around episode 8, and immediately regretted that I hadn’t put it on sooner. As I sat there with a huge pile of Thin Mints perched somewhere in the vicinity of my lap, I thought damn, I’m living the dream.

octopus man vs. stone baby

So my friend A loves The Learning Channel as much as I do (maybe more). I guess she was reading my stone baby post as she was watching a TLC program called “The Octopus Man,” so she alerted me to the madness that was unfolding. Of course, I turned it on immediately.

I was confronted with this man who has what I can only describe as a vagina with gimp legs (and maybe also arms?) protruding from his middle. It had very long hair that was parted right down the middle. As it turns out, it was not a limbed vagina, but the man’s parasitic twin. The tabloid surgeons wanted to cut it off, but the Octopus Man wasn’t sure how he felt about lopping off his stillborn “sibling.”

(Incidentally, it’s always interesting to me how these TLC specials are structured around a single freak of nature, yet somehow they always manage to weave in all these tangential mutants. It’s often unclear that these deformed fringe people have any real relationship with the title freak, other than the obvious fact that there is something very wrong with all of them. [Cf. man-with-one-eye-two-inches-lower-than-his-other-eye in the “Pregnant for 46 Years” special.])

Anyway, then this man walked out into the hospital lobby, where his wife and child were waiting for him. And of all the impossible images that had flashed before me in those three minutes I had been standing in front of my television, the thing that really baked my noodle was that someone fucked this man and his creepy stomach vagina. Vom redux!

For a minute or so longer, I watched in horror as the Octopus Man performed this motion that A later described as “petting” his parasitic twin (is there such a thing as platonic masturbation?) before I did something pretty much unprecedented—i.e., turned off my television. Then the microwave buzzer went off and suddenly I was grateful that I was eating vegan lasagna, because even fake food bore an uncanny resemblance to parasitic twin placenta.

power vom

In this day and age, it’s rare to have a moment when you can definitively say, “That is the most [effed up/strange/sick] thing I have ever seen.” For heaven’s sake, this is America, where we have, like, bum fights on prime time...a country that produced both the Saw franchise and the movie Hostel. And yet, I can now tell you with certainty that I am watching the most disturbing thing I have ever seen.

Just now I was flipping through the channel guide when I came a listing for the program “Pregnant for 46 Years” on The Learning Channel. The title in itself seemed outrageous, which is impressive given that TLC offers a whole spectrum of haunting programming about mutants from all walks of life—obese people who can hardly lift their heads to stuff their gaping maws, dwarfs who could fit in my purse, etc.

But I gasped when I clicked the info button and saw the description: “A 75-year-old woman is diagnosed with an unborn, calcified baby that has grown to full term. The pregnancy had begun in 1955.”

WTF?!?

I have been watching this show for exactly five minutes and have already witnessed the following:

• a surgery wherein “the fetus was cut away from its tomb;”
• a toothless lady talking about how much she loved her stone baby;
• an insane montage showing stone babies from around the world;
• a man who has one eye that is about two inches lower than his other eye.

I’m feeling a little sicky. Oh dear.

triple standard?

UGH. There is a certain amount of bull hockey that a single lady must endure as a citizen of this world. Whether it’s a grody guy in a bar or a stinking alcoholic on the bus, some loser is always ogling your boobs, pressing up against you, or muttering sweet nothings that make you want to go wash your hands. Do they act this way just because they can? Or do we just fundamentally disagree about what’s hot? I guess it’s both.

Creepy strangers are bad enough, but it’s far worse when the creep is a friend of your friends. Last night, when I was out with a group, this married guy got so handsy with me that my friend’s husband had to step in and ask him to stop. He was all hands-on-my-waist and lips-on-my-ear while whistling with his eyes averted, etc.

These situations are especially hard on someone like me who can hardly bear the casual human touch. (I will never forget the time I was at the movies with Z and he gripped my hand during the scary bits, and afterward, when I accused him of being touchy-feely, and he was like, “Actually, I’m not. And the fact that you said that says much more about you than it does about me.” Ha!) And on the sliding scale of uncomfortable touching, there’s nothing worse than acquaintance-touching…much less full-throttle one-sided acquaintance-groping, the whole spectrum of which just makes me want to fucking barf.

Last night, while my actual friends were grossed out, some of the people I didn’t know so well looked askance—not at El Lech, mind you, in all his inappropriate glory—but at me, as though I were some kind of temptress, even as I shrank away from his reeking embrace. As if it wasn’t distasteful enough that this old man felt entitled to grope me just because he’s married, half of his friends were giving me the scarlet-letter stinkeye…as though it was my fault, even as I was cutting him in my mind.

And then, in a stunning act of emo-misdirection, El Lech looked at my girlfriend and said something like, “I know you think I’m stupid and you look down on me.” And while at least half of that statement (charitably) is totally true, I was goofy off three beers and in Truth Telling mode, all like, “Sir, that’s not what [--] thinks. Maybe that’s your own stuff talking?”

But not, evidently, enough of a Truth Teller to say, “PS: Hands off the merchandise.”