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Let’s Talk About Lisa

By on April 25, 2012 in The Couch Potato, The Diva

In some weird, unfortunate twist of fate, we’ve pretty much given up on tv in the last month.

We did sit and watch Rango on Netflix this past weekend as an effort to have A Movie Party. (In Tony Speak: WE SHALL MAKE AND EAT FISTFULS OF POPCORN WHILE SOMETHING IS ON THE TELEVISION.) That .. was a weird movie. Trippy. But my LORD, the animation was stunning. We just kept gasping in awe of how gorgeous the animation was.

Back to the tv: we haven’t seen any of it. I currently have 6 (SIX!) episodes of Real Housewives on DVR, there’s tons of Fringe episodes, and even a lot of random other junk. We just .. well, we’re tired. We have about 45 minutes between the last boy going to bed and our preset bedtime, so we often fill it .. by talking.

The one exception: Celebrity Apprentice.

We are not loyal fans of the series; we can take it or leave it any given season. But this season, for whatever reason, the mix is just right and we’ve been enraptured. And because it’s all I have going on right now, I’d like to talk about something that’s been bugging me pretty consistently.

Let’s talk about Lisa Lampanelli.

For what it’s worth, I was fan of Lisa’s before she was on the show. She was one of the crass women, which immediately endeared her to me. I like women who have a big laugh, a big wit, and a big heart, and although she’s always denying the last one, Lisa fits this bill.

And from the start, she’s been a frontrunner on this season’s Celebrity Apprentice. And she should be! She’s quick, funny, and creative. She’s SMART. It’s clear she’s been doing this for awhile and with great success.

.. but ..

Man, there’s a lot I dislike about Lisa. And .. gah, I hate this .. it mainly boils down to the fact that she acts .. like a girl. Not, you know, like, she owns ovaries and breasts and therefore I dislike her, but .. she’s very much acting like men expect a girl to act in business. There. I said it. I said it, and I own it, and now let me further dig my own grave.

In working with a local political candidate who was running against another female, I implored her to not swing dirty. Don’t sling mud. Don’t “fight fire with fire”. Because right, wrong, or indifferent – the minute that happens, the men start saying ooh, catfight! there’s a catfight over there! look at those girls, fighting like a bunch of cats! and even the best and most powerful message is immediately discounted. I HATE THAT, I TOTALLY DO. And yet, it is the reality of our lives.

Lisa is engaging in the most transparent and .. pathetic.. of catfights with another contestant, Dayana Mendoza. A former Miss Universe. Um, here’s a photograph of Dayana, who I spend a good 34 minutes of each episode mentally tracing the lines of her amazing cheekbones and the outline of her perfect lips. Dayana, in short, is STUNNING.

Dayana is also smart. Maybe not in schooling, but in savvy, most definitely. She knows when to lay low and when to speak up. She is one of the few people who remains quiet in the boardroom and .. GASP! .. listens. I’ve watched her weasel out of being “brought back to the boardroom” no less than EIGHT times because she sees a trainwreck happening around her, and she’s smart enough to get the hell out of dodge.

Lisa does not like Dayana. No one is quite sure why. All of the other celebs, in private interviews, have all quietly questioned what’s behind that venom. And we all have coworkers we don’t like; it’s life, and you’re there for a paycheck, not for friendship. But Lisa? Is .. mean. I mean, not even funny or comedic mean – comedic torture, like roasts, are her schtick and she’s damn good at it – she’s mean and personal and below-the-belt. And .. and when Dayana dares to argue back with her? Lisa cries. Lisa cries and wonders why NO ONE stands up for her. Why is NO ONE STANDING UP FOR HER?

I .. don’t like this behavior. Because in reality, Lisa is insanely talented. She is talented and smart and STRONG, by God, and she can take her own licks. But this one facet of her behavior is derailing all of that. All I can think of when I see her now is Man, she is so cruel to Dayana. I used to think Man, she is one talented lady. And that makes me sad.

Part of it is my moccasins I’ve walked in. There has been a crazy lady to scream at me and then when I quietly respond, the tears flow and the calls for her posse have happened. So that’s part of my stance here. But the other part is that Lisa is genuinely, seriously talented. She has earned her stripes. She doesn’t need TO ACT LIKE A GIRL.

We still earn $0.70 to every $1.00 a man earns. Still, to this day, in 2012. And I want Lisa and Dayana to coexist on this show and prove HOW FRICKIN’ STUPID THAT IS. Instead? Instead, it is being justified.

Comments { 4 }

A Bunch of Non Sequiturs

By on February 1, 2012 in The Couch Potato, The Diva, The Runner

Bryan and I were having a heated conversation this weekend – about what escapes me right now – but he took a sudden diversion and when I tried to bring him back, he said, “It’s a non-starter!”

He clearly meant a non-sequitur, and I corrected him.

Bad form, Sarah.

****

I’ve gone almost a month without discussing any Real Housewives. But did y’all see RHoA last week when they took a girls’ trip to South Africa?

1. Um, OF COURSE THERE WOULD BE DRAMA. That’s what Bravo is banking on.

2. I had no idea South Africa looked like that. The whole episode made me feel ENTIRE uneducated about worlds beyond my own window. Although we do have a dear friend who is from South Africa and they do, indeed, sound like that.

3. Marlo. Marlo Marlo Marlo. Marlo is one of those people who cannot really connect with anyone in a normal way, so she has to feel superior to them in every aspect. My favorite – and most irritating – trait of hers is to give miniature etiquette lessons to the other girls. And while, yes, she was usually spot-on in her corrections of the other girls, it all read like she had just finished a Pretty Pretty Princess class last week, or had an marathon of Pretty Woman viewings. Mostly because: if she was REALLY versed in etiquette, she’d know that the biggest mistake you can make is to openly correct someone else.

4. Points to Sheree for knowing who Emily Post is.

****

I am a sneeze away from being really, really sick. I can feel it in my head, right behind my eyes, and I’m struggling to pretend it’s not there. I’m Neti-ing like a mad woman – lethal brain-eating amoebas be damned – and downing more Vitamin C than is probably healthy. Everyone around me is being felled by this same thing, a weird strain of sinus infection brought on by our unusually warm winter, and I will NOT FOLLOW SUIT.

****

I went running last night.

Not only that, but I went and had my stride analyzed, even though I didn’t want to. Because I was worried that putting off buying shoes would just further my reluctance to JUST RUN ALREADY, I headed out shopping on Monday night. Our local running store was closed, so I headed to Dick’s Sporting Goods to try on shoes. The customer service there was so atrocious that I literally left eight pairs of shoes strewn about and stormed out of the store.

I visited our local Fleet Feet yesterday afternoon, where the guy implored me to have my stride analyzed. I finally relented (“But I did it four years ago!”, I said.), and he gently asked if I was wearing any of the same clothes that very second  that I wore four years ago. Huh. Well. Okay.

The video of my stride shocked me. I turn inward so much on my arches that it looks like .. y’all, forgive me, but it looked like Tony’s Lucky Foot. It did. I mean, it DOES. And while he was getting over the shock of my very severe stride issue, I was internalizing guilt that maybe I passed on some weird gene to Tony that gave him this deformity.

Anyway, it changed what shoe I would be buying, and I ran 2.5 miles last night without a single wince of pain. Huh. Well. Okay.

****

While I was running, Bryan took Tony swimming across the hall for one of his final swim lessons of this round. Um, and it was fate that I did not attend, because it was apparently Dump Children From a Boat day.

Oh, you’ve never heard of it?

They float the children in a raft into the deep end, and then flip the boat. The kids have to figure out what to do.

(They do wear life preservers for this exercise.)

… UM, I COULD NOT HAVE WITNESSED THAT. I don’t care how many lifeguards are around, I cannot watch my child flail in the water. Jesus.

Remarkably, Tony flailed only a couple of seconds, and then started floating. Turns out he’s not a candidate for Darwinism.

****

So it’s been clearly documented here that I have an irrational love for reality tv. It’s mostly because I can turn my brain off for an hour or so, and I’m just a voyeur at heart. One of our favorite shows that Bryan and I will watch together is anything to do with Hoarders.

There is the traditional Hoarders on A&E, which is great. But lately TLC has stepped up their game on Hoarding: Buried Alive with some really, really shocking episodes. This weekend was no different. The episode this week was AH-MAY-ZING. Here’s let’s recap.

1. The hoarders had been evicted, due to the severity of the hoard. It was pretty bad. I have never seen cobwebs like that, ever, in any of our viewings.  The couple just had lost the will to clean.

2. Their 22 year old son was living in the backyard, in a tent. He chose not to go with the rest of the family.

3. The couple – the parents – were living with a friend of the family.

Okay, other than the tent thing, this is really pretty standard. As is the routine, they chose to “expose” a couple of family friends to the house, so that the hoarders can feel the full impact of how society views their living situation. For some reason, the exposure was chosen for the son .. who had only known this way of life .. and he brought over his best friend, Derrick.

Y’ALL, DERRICK WAS AWESOME. Seriously.

While you always see these poor souls walk in and recoil in disgust, Derrick didn’t. He smiled broadly, turned to his best friend and said, “Man, let’s get some of these cans in here to recycle them.” NOTHING phased Derrick. He was not judgmental, instead making LIGHT of the situation. “Man, is that.. is that a CHICKEN? Dude, you have a CHICKEN just sitting in your floor. That is just naaaasty.” I officially want Derrick on every episode of any channel’s shows about hoarding. He is who you want to reveal your family’s skeletons to.

Then the hammer dropped. Just as soon as my heart was lifted by Derrick, we learn the scandalous truth:

3. The couple – the parents – were living with a friend of the family. SAID FRIEND OF FAMILY IS THE LOVER OF THE HUSBAND. CURRENTLY. FOR A LONG TIME. AND APPARENTLY THEY WERE ALL SWINGERS TOGETHER.

HOLY CRAP.

****

Finally, I end with a bunch of pictures of us going to see my company’s new aircraft, which made a visit in our town for its publicity tour. To clarify – in all the stuff that I’ve done for my company, I had absolutely nothing to do with this plane.

Yep, I TOTALLY helped build the ream.

Comments { 12 }

My Happy: Marcel the Shell with Shoes on

By on January 17, 2012 in The Couch Potato

I am WAAAAY late to this party, but MY GOD, when I’m having a crap day and I need something to smile about, I type “Marcel the Shell” into the search on YouTube and this always always always works.

(I have a soft spot for puppetry, yes, but I’m far more simple than that. Really, if you make any inanimate object talk? I’m putty in your hands.)

I just now found out that Marcel has a book out too and I kind of have to get that with a quickness.

Ladies and gentlemen, MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON.

Comments { 3 }

Extreme Cheapskates and Why This Show Made Me Insanely Stabby

By on December 31, 2011 in The Couch Potato

On Wednesday night this week, Twitter was ablaze about a show on TLC called Extreme Cheapskates and people were kind of losing their minds about it. I was all bummed out because we were stuck watching Batman: Arkham City which, while VERY COOL, is not what everyone was talking about.

LUCKY US, TLC RERUNS THEIR SHOWS LIKE THEY HAVE TO MEET A DAILY QUOTA.

Okay, the title SHOULD’VE BEEN Unintelligent Cheapskates That Will Leave You Questioning Why We Let Them Breed.

Sure, there was the guy who retired so he could drive around on his bike and collect loose change all day. And I found a bit of his math to be odd: they routinely go on “financial fasts”, where for a week they spend no money, and they believe they save about $700 every time they do this.

… how many of y’all spend $700 a week? Like, do they not pay any BILLS? If the utilities are due that week, do they just shove them off and say “Yep, saved $200 during that fast!” only to have to pay it the next week? I’m .. I’m just not sure they’re really saving as much as they want to believe.

(Now, they do have some premises that are very sound. They agreed at the start of their life together to set a lifestyle that they liked, and they wouldn’t strive to reach above it. They’re not trying to keep up with the Joneses, and there’s probably a lot to be said for that.)

But when he scrounged for change around town (digging into booths at diners and scraping lint traps and laundromats)(OMG, MY OCD WAS RAAAAGING), he got around $10 that he wanted to spend on a meal for he and his wife. (They were at the end of a weekly financial fast.) So he got what any cheapskate would: two goat heads.

.. goat. HEADS. GOAT HEADS.

ALMOST TEN DOLLARS. Goat heads? You’re an idiot. You can buy three fryer hens. You can buy MANY MANY boxes of mac and cheese. I just .. if I was his wife, I’d have decked him.

But what riled me most was this family in the clip below. She repeated – and repeated, and repeated, to echo it about four times through their segment – that they were a middle-class family with a very good income. I don’t know why she felt the need to say it that many times, but she did. They had six kids, noting that not many families opt for that many children anymore. Okay, true. It helps that they don’t pay daycare for the six kids, but hey! Six kids is still not cheap!

Then she showed the first “extreme cheapskate” method:

Um, okay. So .. homemade, reusable toilet paper. Which … okaaaaay. But y’all, toilet paper is not THAT expensive, and when you have a bucket of used ass-wipes just ripening in each bathroom, it kind of skeeves me out. And a clip was shown of the kids helping to fold said “toilet paper” and there were (not surprisingly!) skid marks ALL OVER THEM. That’s just NASTY.

But even THAT is not what riled me. What riled me is that (again, I don’t know that I understand the math) they are part of a babysitting group where a couple of families take all the kids one night and they rotate families each time. They said they saved .. I don’t remember the exact amount correctly, but .. something like $450 a month doing this. JEEBUS, Y’ALL. Maybe I underpay my babysitters (I don’t), but .. that seems like a lot. (Then again, it might be the six kid issue.)

Okay, I’m getting there.

It’s worth the wait, because you will be riled too.

How she “affords” to pay for her rotation (on their middle-class, really good income) is that they shop at a local thrift mart, where the food is steeply discounted. It is steeply discounted because it is expired.

Like, WAAAAAY expired.

She bought cheese and sauce to make pizzas for the kids, and the cheese was two years expired. TWO YEARS. 2009. She shrugged, but tossed it in the cart. Then they went and pulled greens out of a local park to make a salad for the kids. While pulling, a kid stepped in dog poo, so .. it was a dog-friendly park.

Now, I might be willing to let the whole “here, honey, wipe your ass with this washcloth that they’ve been using on THEIR asses for five years” thing slide if I dropped my kids off there for the night. But if I found out – after the fact – that she fed my children food that was TWO YEARS EXPIRED? KNOWINGLY?

OH, I AM RILED YET AGAIN.

Look, you already have six kids. The two extra kids dropped off for this evening’s festivities SURELY could’ve warranted a trip to a Publix. Or hell! A Kroger! It’s one thing if you choose to feed expired food to your own kids (and OMG, I hope she NEVER lives that down), but feeding it to other children? OH I HATE HER MIDDLE-CLASS REALLY GOOD INCOME FAMILY SO HARD.

Hey, also, HAPPY 2012!

Comments { 6 }

The Virgin Diaries: Can We Discuss This?

By on December 12, 2011 in The Couch Potato

First and foremost: I did not watch this show. It premiered last week, I believe, and I only knew it existed because I do watch Sister Wives (so help me) and although I typically fast-forward through commercial breaks, sometimes I’m doing my nails and they’re too wet to bother pressing buttons.

That is how I happened upon this:

Nowwww.. look, y’all. I understand that I watch Sister Wives, and maybe that renders me unable to hold any credibility in a situation like this, but can I just honestly say WHAT IN THE HELL?

I can understand applying a Biblical or untouched nature to your hoohah. I can. But to make your first kiss ever .. the wedding kiss? No one has a nice wedding kiss. It’s ALWAYS awkward. Mostly because 200 people are looking at you. Also, you’re starving and half-drunk. (.. just me?) I’m just saying; I worked for a photographer for a couple of years, assisting in LOTS AND LOTS OF WEDDINGS and it’s typically at least a smidgen awful.

BUT THIS.

Oh, this.

I have a problem with fish. They’re pretty, from a distance, in a tank that is not in my home. But up close, the eyes and the gaping mouths and the soul-less gasping for breath/life is just NOT my bag. And this – this promo for a show – makes me so incredibly nauseous.

I can’t even hold respect for “saving the first kiss”. I find it LUDICROUS.

(yes, I am a close-minded blowhard.)

The best part of writing a blog is opening this up: who here watched it? Thoughts?

Comments { 16 }
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