Who among us doesn't love a good honky tonk

Last week my new friend invited me to go out with her friends for her birthday. I asked where they go in Houston when they go out, and she named several clubs that I had never heard of, but I pretended that I had. Then I admitted that my friends and I go out to very, very divey bars. The places we go are pretty much as close as there is to a modern honky tonk.

Wikipedia says that a Honky Tonks is:
"a type of bar with musical entertainment common in the Southwestern and Southern United States."

But there is so much more to it than that. It also implies dancing and some shady characters, and I don't mean the James Dean type of shady. I mean some old drunk guy in the corner who looks and smells like he hasn't showered in a few days and wants to tell you something in your ear. Also, there might be some women there with questionable dental plans. A long, long time ago a friend was trying to explain what a honky tonk was to her Welsh boyfriend and he said, "so its a bar that says honky tonk on it?" and she so quotably replied, "No, if it says its a honky tonk, it is most definitly not a honky tonk."
I have several favorite honky tonks in Houston, but, due purely to proximity, The Alabama Icehouse is currently my favorite. Not only can I walk home, but I can walk Luigi there. It is as much fun as the dogpark, and it is coming to resemble one.

Luigi was so happy to be going somewhere new that he pulled my mother's arm for the second have of the walk. Then he was doubly excited because Gabby was there. As my father later put it, Luigi must have thought the Gabby had been at the icehouse all that time he didn't see her.

Dogs are great fun, and so is beer, and so is the tamale guy who comes by just when you really, really could go for a tamale, but the highlight of the night was when the band played the greatest country western song ever. We all sang along and loved it. If you don't know this song, look up the lyrics. You never know when you might be called upon to sing it in a bar. Near the end of the song the singer typically stops singing to talk about the song. Well, at Alabama the singer changed the words, "momma, or trains, or trucks" to "trailers, or crystal meth, or incest." Whoa, was that funny! We might be sittin' in a honky tonk, but it's a honky tonk in the middle of Montrose, so we know how to be cheeky about it. HA.

Lizards!

Hot and muggy are the two adjectives most often used to describe Houston weather. While these words have a negative connotation and Houston is not exactly a summer vacation destination, I love Houston summer. I love, love, love Houston summer! It is hot, hot, hot all day long only to cool off around eight pm, all the way down to the low 80's. That's the perfect time to take a walk around the neighborhood, drink a cold beer in the backyard or visit your local icehouse. Most days gully washers, the dramatic thunderstorms that take out trees and momentary knock out the lights, come through around 4pm, leaving a nice heavy mist in the air.

Some people call this condition ninety percent humidity, but I call it the setting for a magical realism story. The style originated in Latin America, but Houston shares the tropical weather pattern of One Hundred Years of Solitude, so why not!
For me, one of the most magical things about Houston is the lizards. Once the rain (or the sprinkler) stops, the sidewalks become alive. When we lived in Westbury, I only saw one type of lizard: it was a cool little chameleon, and there were lots of them. But now I see so many different lizards. It is just blowing my mind. My whole life people have been telling me about lizards that lose their tails when they are scared or attacked, but I never saw one. This summer I have seen all kinds of lizards in the multiple stages of tail regrowing.
There are the unharmed, very, very long tails. And while I don't have a photo of a completely tailess lizard, I have seen them. It turns out it is quite difficult to photograph a lizard. Especially those that have recently had a bad experience with a predator. Who is that predictor you ask. My mother's cat, Driver. He's a killer. But I guess every epic story needs at least one killer.

It's hard out here for a pimp (on a metro bus)

This week, a metro bus in Houston hit a mini van and crashed into a BMW dealership. It happened in the emerging neighborhood of midtown. This story is just a great little metaphor for Houston living.

Oh, how I love weather!

Houston has been especially dry and hot this summer. We a nice big thunderstorm everyday at 4pm, just like Oprah. But, for the past four weeks that didn't happen, resulting in dry, heat that makes evenings outside feel like sitting in a convection oven. The heat has broken records, but the humidity has been low. You sweat profusely, but it doesn't soak your shirt.

At swim camp, we a make-up day once a week, anticipating that the weather will rain (or thunder) out lessons. So far we have had to use all of our Friday makeup days, which sucks because I was planning on using those Friday afternoons to go to Austin and worship at the temple of Barton Springs. Hmm, wait, didn't I just say it hadn't rained? That's right. We have had to close the pool four times in two weeks because a child vomited, requiring the pool to be shocked with a high dose of chlorine. To those of you who think I should be forced to teach lessons in vomit and bleach, sorry, I guess the owners don't want to subject there clients/students to that. And, no, it wasn't even the same child. A summer flu is going around? The fourth time this happened, Ms. Anna cleaned up the vomit she found in the deep end and asked the class who had thrown up. The one child who had been decked from free swim raised his hand. They told him that he couldn't have thrown up in the pool because he wasn't in the pool. Besides learning to call all adults by Ms. and their first name, its hard to say what Montessori school is doing for these children.

So back to the weather already. Last week, the rain finally came. Even my parents, who had been saying that it had been raining for two years solid and we didn't need anymore rain, were welcoming. We had two huge thunderstorms that were pretty awesome. Swim lessons got cancelled and someone gave me a ride home so I didn't have to ride in the rain. When we got to my house she decided that she didn't want to drive home in the thunderstorm so she came in for an hour. We dried off and had a nice little talk. So instead of working all afternoon I made a new friend. How I love Texas weather!

I heart my night guard

I suffer from almost daily severe migraines. It has been speculated by those who share a bed with me that all the things I do with my mouth in the night may contribute to these headaches.

During my year-long yoga teachers' training, many ideas were presented, some crazier than others. But one was that unless you are eating your top teeth should not touch your bottom teeth. This was really helpful for me because I thought if my jaw wasn't clenched I wasn't grinding my teeth, but really even when I thought I was relaxed I was putting pressure on my scull. Learning to not relax during the day definitely improved my head and my mood, but I continued to make weird noises at night.

Mouth guards are like today's fashion. You can get a $1,000 night guard made for your head from a dentist, a couture night guard if you will, a $20 mold yourself guard from Wal Mart, or a $5 hockey players mouth gaud (the H&M of mouth guards). First, I bought the Wal Mart mold your own, and that was worthless; I didn't keep it in my mouth; it didn't fit well; I stopped using it.

My dentist explained that mouth guards not specially made for your mouth actually encourage grinding as you try to hold them in at night. Couture guards snap on and are designed to trigger a mechanism in your jaw that when you bit down on the back it feels bad and you open your mouth. I don't really know how that works. Then he explained all the benefits of not grinding away your teeth in the night.

First, I was in sticker shock. But seriously, I'm on my last set of natural teeth, how much are worth to me? So I got a night guard for the bargain basement price of about $500. Getting it fitted required a session of grinding down on guard through carbon paper, waiting for the marks to be sanded off, and then continuing the grinding. That caused a headache, which I guess is also an investment.

I was pretty excited about my first night with the new guard. It felt really tight, and then I woke up the next morning to find it across the room. Since the guard will only work if it is in my mouth, I'm pretty motivated to keep in there. I've discovered that taking half a muscle relaxer equals not throwing the mouth guard across the room in the night. Also, four drinks the night before also solves this problem. Upon purchase, I thought a clear guard would get kind of funky looking, but it also makes it rather difficult to see on the carpet. I would rather not be a drug addict, but I don't enjoy crawling around on the floor every morning looking for this thing.

With use, the guard is getting less tight, as promised, and I becoming accustomed to wearing it. A few nights ago I went to bed unmedicated and woke up in the night trying to take it out so that I could continue chewing. Man, when you are asleep, chewing feels so good. I don't know what it is, but chewing and grinding my teeth just lights up the pleasure spots in my brain. But, I'm a disciplined girl so I stopped chewing and kept the guard in. This morning bite guard was still in my mouth after a night of drug free, uninterrupted sleep. That was awesome!

But the biteguard has more gifts than just protecting my molars and eliminating pain across the sinuses. Last weekend, a group of friends visited Austin and slept at Peggy's all slumber party style. As I was settling in for the night and pulling out my ever so cool night guard, Kelly tells me that she grinds her teeth in the night. My first thought is that she is making fun of me. But then she sees my mouth guard. It turns out we have the same one. It was just like the middle school experience of having the same retainer. I was deprived of this experience by naturally having acceptable teeth. Oh, biteguard, you have given me so much more than I had ever dreamed!

I am enraged

When Michelle Obama "fist bumped" her husband before his acceptance speech for the Democratic Nominee for President of the United States I thought that was the cutest thing I had ever seen in politics. It was demonstrative of her support and publicly showed more intimacy than we are used to seeing in candidates. The Daily News wrote "the fist bump of hope shows them 'silly in love.'"

Since then, Fox News has called that a "terrorist fist jab," which is just plain stupid, but they also showed a banner calling Michelle "Obama's baby mama." I am outraged. I just watched as MSNBC read aloud the definition of "baby mama" from urbandictionary.com and then discussed the meaning.

1.	baby mama
	The mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved.

The implication of the remark is that regardless of any personal or professional achievements, Michelle Obama is still black; regardless of her successful marriage she is no different than the millions of unwed black mothers. To use what in this context is a racial slur on such an admirable, successful woman just outrages in me to an extent I can't even communicate. And to watch the hosts of news programs try to explore what the phrase means and discuss the political consequences without outright calling it racist makes me sad for the American viewing public who apparently haven't come as far as they pretend.

My biggest tv crush since Jordan Catalano

Because I have a lot of time on my hands to enjoy myself and my parents netflix account I put Freaks and Geeks in the Queue. It made its way to the top of the list and by the time it was mailed I forgot why it was even on the list. All I remembered was not really enjoying it when some cable channel did a marathon like five years ago.

Well, the reason it was on the list is because it is the first work referenced in bios of Judd Apatow. He produced it and it stars core group of actors from his movies. Since I keep reading about it I figured I'd give it another chance. What a good move!

While Apatow movies are discussed ad nauseum as stories of men who need women to help them grow up, stop smoking pot all day, get real jobs and ditch their loser friends, Freaks and Geeks is about being in high school where sitting around making gross jokes and smoking pot is socially acceptable. And instead of just being a plot device, the girl on the show is actually the main character, whoa. Lindsey is a fully developed character grappling with the high school choices that seem so important at the time and it makes me wonder why the women in Apatow movies are so lame.

But what I am really watching it for is Nick Andopolis (also known as Jason Segel), who is absolutely adorable, like a big giant puppy dog. I haven't had a crush like this on a tv high schooler since My So-called Life's Jordan Catalano (Veronica Mars' Logan Echols doesn't count, that was something other than a crush. As Peggy once said, "I don't think I will every be in love with a fictional character the way I am in love with Logan"). While Jordan Catalano was beautiful and mysterious, his appeal really lay in the anticipation and the unknown, as Angela said, "how can I be this upset about a guy I never really had?" Nick Andopolis, on the other hand, is just completely a good guy that you would like to be around because he is so nice and happy. If a puppy could verbalize how happy he was and how much you made him happy then he would be Nick. Not only is Nick completely in bliss by his drumset and by Lindsey, he gives advice about how you, too, can be that blissed out. You need to find your drumset, the thing that makes you totally at peace. Yeah, high school, and life, become way easier if you are always looking forward to that thing you really love. Seriously, look how cute he was!

Nothing says, "I don't have shit to do" than spending time with a bunch of boys playing video games. For some reason boys love video games (?). Watching 43 minutes of Freaks and Geeks is like a whole day of video game banter compressed into a single episode. I just highly recommend it for anyone who has an hour to spare and needs a little easy smile.

This blogger also loves Jason Segel and has a beautiful page detailing her love for him over his career. It is undeniable that he has stayed pretty adorable over the years. I do love How I Met Your Mother (a great show with a terrible premise) and Forgetting Sarah Marshal (I'm so glad that my favorite actresses are getting work after their shows are cancelled.) You need to check out this page just for the youtube clips. (It's easier for you to just click than for me to upload video, seriously.) My love for Jason Segel has moved backward chronologically, as I have just now found his early work, but I am totally glad I did.

More thoughts on SatC

Lately, opinions of Sex and the City have been coming up more than usual. And by opinions, I mean value judgments on the characters' life choices.

All this talk reminds me of one of Frank's friends in LA. He was sleeping with a woman who had all the shows on DVD and liked to watch them. At one point, he was living with her, and so he would watch tv with her. He said that he was really getting into the show.

"You know, we watch the show and they have all that sex, and then we have sex. So it really gets me in the mood. The ladies: they like Mr. Big, but we can like the show for all the sex."

It's good to know that some men have an open mind about what might just be the biggest chick show and movie ever.

The best review of SatC, yet

My Great Aunt MaryAnn is my father's favorite Aunt, and a window in her 70s. She saw the Sex and the City movie yesterday with my dad's cousin's wife and her two daughters, who are both a bit younger than Peggy and me

MaryAnn's review of the movie was, "I don't know very much, but I do know the difference between soft core and hard core pornography, and that movie had some hard core pornography in it."

She also reported that my cousins cried during the movie and she thought that that was pretty stupid. MaryAnn thought that there were some sad parts, but nothing worth crying over.

So my assignment for the week is to go and see the movie and learn what hard core pornography is really all about.

Welcome, Summer, Ouch!

I have a great, new product that I want to tell all of you about. It is this Bull Frog Sport Spray Quik Gel, and it is just fantastic. You just spray it on and don't touch your skin for like 30 seconds. It is already a bit sticky when it hits your skin, so you couldn't rub it in even if you wanted to.

I demonstrated this technique to Peggy and Lauren who both said that they thought it would result in a blochy burn. But thankfully they were wrong. No burn at all. And others, who used inferior products, did get burned. So it wasn't just a good day for a tan.

I did, however, get a sunburn this week in Galveston after leaving my great new product in Austin with Peggy, who asked, "Do you really want me to mail this to you?" Well, fine, I don't. But I also didn't want to get a small triangle burned into my back in the very center where I just barely didn't reach with my "special for my face" sunscreen. But what are you gonna do? It's Houston in the summer.

What I'm going to do now is go and buy some more Bull Frog and then get some Burt's Bees Chemical Free Sunblock. I just read that chemical sunscreens have to be reapplied every hour, but that they might not even protect you for that long. Zinc, however hard it is to rub in, will protect all day. Zinc forms a physical barrier. That just sounds better to me.

I do worry that in 20 years they will discover that they chemicals in sunscreen are really bad for us. I also think that a complete block will do a better job of stopping the invisible skin damage that will lead to signs of aging later. Do I have any support for this? No, but has that ever stopped me in the past.

So, swimming lessons start this Monday. I will report back on the Burt's next week. You, on the other hand, should start preparing yourself for summer, and for avoiding an uncomfortable and unsightly burn. Really people, no one looks good in red this summer.

Oh, how great are online polls?

On Tuesday, Barack Obama officially became the Democratic Nominee for President of the United States. Way to go, Democratic party!

Also on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton gave a powerful speech in New York praising the Obama campaign so much that it seemed she might be asking for VP. Right up until the point where she didn't concede. Wait, what? You lost lady. Continuing the campaign won't change that.

Instead of conceding, she told her supporters that this was their campaign and that she would do what they wanted. (There were many suggestions yelled at the tv at my house.)

How would she know what her supporters wanted her to do? Well, they can tell her at HillaryClinton.com.

But when you go to the site, there is only one possible thing to tell Hillary. "I'm with you Hillary, and I'm proud of everything we are fighting for." If you want to tell her this, then you can leave additional comments.

So, in the spirit of democracy, I, too, am asking for you comments. On the left of the page, you can now vote about how you feel about Gutterballer. I welcome your input, gentle reader.

The post-it always sticks twice.

That is the title of probably the best ever Sex and the City episode. An episode from the first half of the last season after Carrie's relationship with Berger has failed because they just aren't capable of having healthy relationships. Its very, very sad. He breaks up with her on a post-it, she goes to a great club to cheer up and embarrasses herself in front of his friends. But, like all episodes of SatC, in the end it's ok because she gets high on the street with her friends, and doesn't get arrested because they cop empathizes with her personal life. The episode could have been the end of the series. It was becoming apparent that the characters were going to keep fighting the same battles and after 35 no one needs to watch a character self-destruct.

So what is my point? This is a totally different story about people acting crazy with their lives and Post-its. This woman got a note from a foster parent that the parent's husband had a dream that she needed to adopt this sick child. And then she did adopt him. How crazy is that!

What would you do if someone told that they dreamed you needed a baby and they had a very very sick baby available?

I'm sure that they don't regret adopting this kid. Some people just have faith in the universe and faith that they will be strong enough to love in the most difficult cases. It's like a book my mother's book club would read.

I am so in love with Barton Springs it hurts

Butch Cassidy: What's the matter with you?
Sundance Kid: I can't swim.
Butch Cassidy: Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill you.

How many of y'all knew that Robert Redford learned how to swim at Barton Springs?

Well, he did. I guess it's not the bottom of a waterfall in Bolivia but you can still put that on your list of things that I find super impressive and admirable about Robert Redord. Seriously, people, that is a cold few moments of holding on to the wall and not going anywhere if you don't already know how to swim around and warm up.

And how did I learn this about ole' Sundance? There is a new movie playing at the Angelica in Houston about Barton Springs and the property owners "rights" to pollute in the 90s, The Unforeseen. Go see it.

Neiman Marcus at the COOP

As I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite times in my life was the summer I lived at the coop and spent my nights biking to Barton Springs, swimming, and biking back. Its hard to say if the Barton Springs trek is what made that summer so great, or if it was the coffee machine and the endless supply of cookies.

A cooperative is something where people share the costs and benefits. I am a strong believer in coops, because spending time with other people is really what makes us happy. A co-op in New York is an apartment. But the housing coop where I lived was more like a really great dorm. We didn't pay rent, but dues that were as high as rent, and we had meetings where we determined how to spend those dues. There was a main office that was paid by the dues and those "employees" did a very good job of acting like the adults or parents to the coopers.

The Coop had something like 22 meals served a week, and members cooked and cleaned. In the summer time many of the students went home, so, in order for everything to run, the number of hours of "labor" each member had to provide was increased 50%. This was really high, under the assumption that most people would leave for the summer and those who stayed would be unreliable because it was summer. When I was there more people stayed and so we had a glut of labor.

This resulted in the position of the Cookie Monster, yum, yum. My sister was the cookie monster and she was great at it. One of the first things she did was to print out the recipe for Neiman Marcus $250 cookies. They are the best.

The name is the product of an urban legend. A River Oaks wife was at Neiman Marcus and her arms were full of the day's booty from the Galleria. She stopped by the NM bakery for a bit of sustenance to make it home. What she found was the most delicious cookie she had ever tasted. She immediately asked for the recipe and they told her costed two fifty. (Keep in mind this was over twenty years ago. So prices have inflated. Also, I would love to say that she pulled out her black AmEx, but sadly, those didn't exist yet). She pulled out her DinnersClub (maybe :)) and said, "Charge it!"

When she got her bill a month later she saw that they had charged her Two Hundred Fifty Dollars, not Two Dollars and Fifty Cents. She was enraged and when they didn't refund her money, or at least give her store credit, she did what any well positioned Texan lady would do, she went viral. She gave copies of the recipe to everyone she knew and told them to pass it on.

Now, I'm not sure that this really did harm to NM. The recipe is somewhat labor intensive, and my guess is that, initially, all it did was really tax the domestic help of Houston and create a demand for the already baked cookies at the NM bakery. But by the time the recipe made it to my mother in Westbury I'm sure there were women who would never would have dreamed of buying a cookie at NM (because they never went into NM, baking away.

It is an amazing cookie and Peggy made quite a few as Cookie Monster. What made them even better was that we also replaced the coffee machine with a far superior method of caffeine dispersion. On the way out was one of those big industrial drip machines that drips into a thermos, like they have at most coffeshops. The problem with it was that you had to actually make the coffee, and then you had to make an entire thermos full. All that coffee would surely be consumed, but then you never knew how long it would take When you wanted some you never know how long that coffee had been sitting there, so it was always a good idea to just make a new "pot." This system was replaced with a coffee "subscription" and a new machine, a weird set up that included a box of liquid "coffee concentrate" that was reconstituted with hot water. The effect was that all you had to do for a cup of coffee was walk up and put your mug in the slot and press a button. It was the number one coffee of Europe and we had our machine set to the strongest cup o' joe of any place in Austin. We had never been so buzzed in our lives, and these were serious drug abusers that we are talking about here.

Lately, I've been drinking a lot of brewed coffee and really missing those cookies. The problem is that if you live with 50 people and there are 112 cookies, and you have all been biking and swimming in really cold water, 112 cookies is a fun cookie party. If you are staying with your parents who are at work all day, 112 cookies is one step away from either being Cathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes or a pass to Weight Watchers, or both.

So for one of my feats this summer, I will collect enough people to have a fun cookie party. Or, I will make a batch and then take them to swim lessons, which is always a fun, cookie party. (Watch out for the nuts!)

I will warn you, NM is well aware of the cookies' infamy and the recipe on the NM website may be the less labor intensive cookie that they now serve, but it is not the $250 cookie recipe.

This is the real recipe. Get some friends together, go swimming (which you will want to do after baking cookies in the oven in the middle of summer) and chow down.

Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe

(Recipe may be halved):
2 cups butter
4 cups flour
2 tsp. soda
2 cups sugar
5 cups blended oatmeal**
24 oz. chocolate chips
2 cups brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 8 oz. Hershey Bar (grated)
4 eggs
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. vanilla
3 cups chopped nuts (your choice)

** Measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla; mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey Bar and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet.

Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies.

Well at least I'm better off than Hillary

Since graduating from college, my high anxiety nightmare of being a senior in high school and not having any artwork hours before my senior show has been replaced by my high anxiety nightmare that I am teaching high school. In this dream, sometimes I have no lesson plan, sometimes I am being evaluated, and sometimes the kids just won't behave. Really, the nightmare is really very close to the actual experience, which explains why most teachers gain 10 pounds of stress weight during the year. The need to spend the summer relaxing and exercising to loose this weight may be the most powerful case for summer vacation.

So last night I have a dream that I am teaching the algebra 2 class that I had when I taught in the Valley. I am collecting work and none of them have done any of it (again, these dreams are so real because this probably did happen). So I am trying to explain to them that this is 2/15 of the final grade, but I am struggling to turn this fraction into a decimal on the chalkboard (this part never happened, thank goodness) to tell them the percentage of their grade that they lost.

Then I am in the teachers lounge with a few other teachers and Hillary Clinton. She doesn't have any discipline problems with her classes and they always turn in work on time. She looks a little down at me, like the fact that my juniors, who were forced to take math as an elective when they all know they don't need it to graduate, don't do the (challenging to them) work assigned is my fault.

When she leaves I look at the other teachers and say, well she may be able to discipline her classes but her career is a total mess since she has alienated her constituents by playing dirty politics in an attempt to get a nomination that she lost months ago. So really, those kids might not have turned in their work, but I am way better off than Hillary Clinton.

I woke up and thought, "Well, I guess I should be grateful that I got my suicide mission job out of the way before I was old enough for it to really affect my career." Also, can you image what a great high school teacher that Hillary Clinton would be to a group of juvenile delinquents. She would scare the crap out of those kids. Maybe I see a future for you yet, ole' HRC.