Sci-Fi Thursday

We just signed up for this.

So, what if, like, 20-25 years from now, there is a small army of Samsons being trained in Morocco to assassinate foreign dictators? Or maybe there'll be a Samson-cyborg hybrid army, created for covert black ops and other scary military lingo projects? Or maybe I'll be on vacation in Vancouver and a barista at Starbucks who bears an uncanny resemblance to my first born son will say to me, "Maybe you'd like a bear claw with that latte, eh?"

The possibilities are endless. And freaky.

Learning how to breath again

I had my first prenatal yoga class at lunch today. I've done yoga a handful of times throughout my life; there was the kundalini yoga class when I was 15 at the rec center. Verdict: it made me fall asleep, and was basically a vehicle for the instructor to sell his goofy relaxation tapes. More recently, one of my coworkers got me to join her for a drop-in class a couple of times last year. Verdict: ouch! Yoga hurts my arms!

This class is all about the breathing and various pelvic stretching. At 19 weeks, I am the least pregnant in the group; most of the women are 30 weeks and up, a few are 26-28 weeks. I was the only one who didn't really need the pile of pillows that were placed at the head of each yoga mat, not that I didn't appreciate them. I was also the only one who could lie on my back for the relaxation portion at the very end of the class. That's when the weirdest thing happened.

The midwife leading the class instructed us to breath in, thinking of all of the good and loving things in our lives. No problem--I've got lots of good and loving. Then she told us to breathe out, pushing out all of the stress, all of the tension, the negativity, the disappointment...and I lost it. I started to cry. I wasn't bawling, in fact I don't think anyone noticed, but I couldn't stop the tears from coming, streaming down the sides of my face into my ears. I'm not one to bottle things up. I cry pretty regularly, I tell my loved ones when I'm bummed out or pissed off, I've always considered myself pretty much fully in touch with my feelings. So why was I so surprised at this outburst? Why did I have this extreme reaction to breathing out the sadness? It was really weird, and caught me totally off guard. I wonder what there is in my life right now, today, that I'm not dealing with?

Somebody please explain this to me

What the hell???

No, seriously, what the hell???

Obscure Dublin

I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but the current Dublin tourism campaign really trips me out. The concept is that you can find anything in you want in Dublin, for instance, Find Your Perfect Dress, or Find Your True Love, or Find Your Parking Place, all leading up to the grand theme, Find Yourself Here. But the strangely cool part is the theme song for this TV/radio/print campaign: You, You, You, You, You by The 6ths, a hauntingly beautiful ukulele-driven melody that been one of my favorites for nearly 7 years. Very hip.

But the really weird thing? Today, the ad campaign was right. At 3:30 pm, just a few hours before Passover began, I was actually able to find matzoh ball mix at a Super Valu grocery store in Churchtown, about a half hour bus ride from my apartment. There they were, tucked into the Kosker Korner section of the store, along with a freezer full of kosher meat (ew). The two shelves of kosher products were very well picked over (I guess Dublin's other 27 Jews got there before I did), but I got the matzoh ball mix which had been deemed by everyone involved to be the most important item, along with a few other Passover goodies. Mission accomplished! Find Your Perfect Last Minute Matzoh Ball Mix.

Bananiculous

I was going to blog about this commercial that I see, oh, about 500 times a day on Irish TV. It's a commercial for a ring tone called "Banana Phone" and it's just plain weird. But as soon as I typed "bananaphone" into my trusty Google deskbar, I learned that I am, sadly, waaaaaay out of the loop.

The best part is the title of this link at the bottom of the article:

"Animation in which a man is driven insane by the song Bananaphone."

Yeah, not hard to believe. Just for the sake of hearing the song (I'm sure the Irish ring tone ad is in no way related to the badgers or robot-banana-thing), here's a link to video using the (weird, weird) song.

Cranium Insanium

So we had some friends over last night for delicious delicious lasagna and a rousing game of Cranium. My team kicked Max's team's ass. Yeah.

But wait! There's more!

We had purchased the Cranium game in Ireland, see, so the questions were all weird and Irish (and English--to be fair, I think it was actually a UK version of the game). I had to act out things like "bubble and squeak"--muh??--which is apparently some kind of food involving mashed potatoes and coleslaw--I repeat, muh??? The questions were all about premiership football and Irish horse racing and where Mick Jagger went to college. Talk about feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Take something that I'm really good at and feel comfortable with--Cranium, for example--and change it just enough so that I feel like I'm playing Cranium but in some weird Taco Bell-induced dream.

Did I mention that my team won? Kicked ass over Max's loser team. Yeah.

Is my inner child having fun yet?

It seems strange to me that an obscure icon of my childhood is anything more than that. I'm not talking about commercially advocated and mass-produced toys or images or pop culture. As far as I'm concerned, My Little Pony, Hyper-Colors T-shirts, and Strawberry Shortcake cereal belong to everybody (especially now that many of us have kids of our own, and the toys of our youth have made quite a come back... but that's a different story entirely.). When some random combination of sights and sounds forms a memorable blip in my emotional and social development, it usually ends up being a fairly personal and introspective affair. Example: when I was a kid (young enough--and lucky enough--to have no real concept of global affairs outside of general poverty and historical wars), the US government held the Iran-Contra hearings. "Iran" and "Contra" were words I would only hear on the car radio when my devoted mother was driving the carpool, or driving me to Hebrew school, or soccer practice, or the orthodontist, or piano lessons...you get the idea. But I would also hear "Contra" on the car radio in the context of Contra-Costa County (a county in the East San Francisco Bay Area, as in "Traffic is moving slowly in Contra-Costa County as you make you way toward the Bay Bridge...I'm John McIntyre in the KGO skycopter--traffic and weather together every ten minutes on the eights."). Slowly but surely, my juvenile brain melded these two contra terms together, and before I knew what was happening, I was convinced that some sort of guerilla-terrorist-hijackers from the east bay were coming to kill us all.

But the thing that's getting me today is the Western Exterminator logo. There's a Western Exterminator building in Burlingame off of highway 101, and it has this huge cartoon-ish statue on top of a man staring down rat, and the man is holding a large mallet behind his back. In my young mind, not yet corrupted by marketing and advertising, I would gleefully exclaim "Popeye!" every time we drove by the building.



Apparently, to me, every cartoon man was Popeye. I know, I know, I was absolutely precious. The disturbing part is this: Popeye does not belong to me--far from it. He has a web page explaining his history, he was a mascot for a Van Halen tour, he even appeared in a Zippy the Pinhead strip (which is actually pretty neat). I know it's not as if some rebel fighters in in South America started calling themselves the Iran-Contra-Costas, but it makes the connection I've had with Popeye all these years a bit less intimate than it had been. Fortunately, I drive right by Popeye twice a day, five days a week. It shouldn't take long for us to rekindle our special bond, the kind of bond that only exist between a girl and her giant advertising statue.