Archive for ‘Journal’


You know what’s awful?

October 29th, 2003 by Oskar Kennedy

  My birthday is tomorrow. For a moment, I honestly could not remember how old I’m going to be. I had to resort to the actual subtraction. This is a disturbing state of affairs, and I’m not sure if it’s attributable to honest absent-mindedness, or some kind of subconscious denial. Either way, it’s disconcerting.
  Thought for the day: Cellphones make us stupid. (Before you get all huffy, Huffy McHufferton, I said us. I too have one of these little demon boxes, and it’s slowly eroding my cognitive functions.)
  Now, stay with me here. This isn’t some kind of rant about how rude it is to sustain a cellphone conversation while conducting a retail transaction. That burns my ass, but that’s annoyance. No, I’m talking about a genuinely anxious feeling that overuse of a modern convenience is making me noticeably dumber.
  My basic fear is that having access to otherwise unavailable information is allowing people to cede reasoning in favor of instant communication. Consider this scenario. You go to the video store to rent a romantic comedy for your girlfriend, because you’re a sweet guy, who isn’t above doing a nice thing to increase your odds of nookie. You get to the store, and the movie that your snugglebunny wants to see has been rented to extinction. What do you do?
  Before the cellphone, you had to make a decision. You had to figure, based on your knowledge of your partner’s taste, the type of movie, the recognizable actors, the available titles, and how serious you were about that nookie, what movie to choose as an alternative. At the very least, you had to have planned ahead with a list of acceptable substitutes. Now, in the age of connectedness, you can just call home and ask. Ain’t nobody got to do any cogitatin’ at all.
  It’s the same thing at the grocery store. They don’t have regular Oreos? Don’t worry! You don’t have to sweat, wondering if Double Stuffs are a good go-to cookie. (Yes they are, FYI.) You can just call and ask! Did you get separated from your friends in line for the big music festival? Don’t bother trying to figure out where they’d be likely to congregate. Call and ask! Don’t surprise your roommate with an after-work snack that might not be her favorite. Call and ask! Don’t ever, ever make an independent judgement or decision without checking with someone first. Don’t bother to learn anyone’s tastes, or try to puzzle out what they’d do in your shoes. Don’t take responsibility for anything! CALL AND ASK! *pant pant pant*
  I’m sure this sounds like neo-Luddite nonsense, a badge of my advancing fogey-hood. I’ll admit, I’m not exactly riding the edge of the emerging technology curve. Hell, I didn’t send my first cellphone text message until last November. But I do use my cellphone, and it often is invaluable for making life more convenient, safer, and a little easier. Still, whenever I find myself calling instead of thinking, I can’t help but wonder if I’m surrendering a bit of my mental capacity in favor of the lazy brain’s information express.
  Hang on while I call and ask my girlfriend.

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Domesticity ensues.

November 25th, 2003 by Oskar Kennedy

  Amy and are I having Thanksgiving dinner together in our apartment this year. She’s making (off the top of my head; there’s probably something I’m forgetting) Cornish game hens, sweet potatoes, green beans, stuffing, cheese and sausage appetizers, and an apple cranberry crisp. I’m making mashed potatoes.
  Amy is by far the more accomplished domestic half of this relationship. She knows how to sew things, and clean things, and she has a knack for decorating that I couldn’t aspire to after a 72-hour Trading Spaces marathon. In the culinary arena, however, she runs rings around me that would impress the Iron Chef judges.
  I’ve admitted before to a distinct lack of cooking acumen. I can follow a recipe with a map and a tour guide, but Amy has mad kitchen skillz. She collects cookbooks, buys spices and, when she’s feeling saucy (bad pun intended), she’ll just take ingredients that I would eat by themselves and combine them to make something more fabulous than the yum of its parts.
  I feel like I should be contributing more to our first big home holiday, but the truth is I’m kind of intimidated by her calm, composed intention to charge headlong into this most formidable of special occasion meals. For someone from the “what can I microwave?” school of culinary arts, Thanksgiving is the 800-pound gorilla of dinners. I wouldn’t know where to begin; she’s got it all under control. I’m going to hang around in the kitchen on Thursday morning and try to get her to assign me simple tasks, so that hopefully I can contribute more to the meal than my (admittedly impressive) talent for mashing helpless tubers. In any case, those spuds are going to a very bad place, my friends. If they’re all I can bring to the table (again with the puns!), I’m going to mash ‘em like no potatoes have ever been mashed.
  Maybe I’ll try some of those spices.

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Look at the size of that breast!

November 25th, 2003 by Oskar Kennedy

  For the first time ever, I took advantage of the fact that I’m living with someone who occasionally likes to eat food that doesn’t come in a cardboard carton. I redeemed the money we spend on groceries for a free turkey from our friendly neighborhood food mart. There is now a 19 1/2 pound shrink-wrapped dead bird in our freezer.
  I have no idea what we’re going to do with that much turkey. Conventional wisdom seems to indicate that, with appropriate side dishes, this monster should feed about 12 people. I don’t think we’ve had 12 visitors total since we moved in together, and we’ve certainly never had that many people here for a single meal. (I’d remember having to make someone eat in the bathroom.) I wonder if it’s possible to carve pieces off of it and prepare them, while keeping the rest of the carcass frozen.
  It makes me wonder what a tribe of Cro-Magnon would do after driving a herd of mammoth over a cliff and slaughtering them. There was no way they could’ve cooked and eaten the entire herd in one gluttonous night. They must have left a few haunches out in the snow, to carve up and cook on long winter nights, mustn’t they?
  Holy hell. How did I go from talking about our goofy-big turkey to researching another sequel to Clan of the Cave Bear. How do you people stand my meanderings? I have this vision of sitting down at my computer one day, only to be accosted by a bevy of torch wielding villagers, chanting “Burn the wandering monster! Stop him before he mixes another metaphor or butchers another allusion!”
  I think I’m going to buy a fire extinguisher.

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The Kitties Want Attention

December 11th, 2003 by Oskar Kennedy

  Our cats are both on the youngish side of rambunctious, nearly a year and not quite two years old, respectively. Every once in a while, they go into what Amy and I affectionately refer to as “psycho-kitty” mode. Their pupils get very wide, their tails start to twitch madly, and they start tearing ass around the apartment, killing anything that moves and, for good measure, assaulting anything that looks like it might move sometime in the future.
  This morning, when I dragged my lazy butt out of bed, I discovered that they had taken the latest round of p-k to new heights. They de-arranged the couch cushions and knocked most of the stuff off of the coffee table, entertainment center, and Amy’s desk. That is all per the usual madness. This time, though, they somehow managed to pull the tablecloth completely off, despite it being weighed down by a good sized book of coupons and a ceramic snack dish. The dish only happened to not smash because Amy and I have been leaving our snow-covered shoes near the table, and it seems to have bounced off of them before hitting the floor. If we’d been less concerned about tracking dirty wetness about the house, we’d be short one slightly adorable snowman-shaped snack dish. Talk about your close calls.

  Remember that joke that kids used to play on each other? “Say ‘I’, then spell ‘cup!’” Boy, that was the height of hilarity when you were six, wasn’t it? Well, all of a sudden, Charlatan likes to (spell cup). Unless I shut the bathroom door firmly enough to latch it, she comes barging in as soon as she hears the clank of the toilet lid against the tank. She’ll climb up and perch on the side of the tub, and watch the goings on in the bowl. I can’t even reach over to put her on the floor, for fear of anointing every surface in the bathroom. I’m sure it says something about me that I’m slightly embarrassed about urinating in front of my cat. What it says, I’m not sure.

  As I was typing this revealing look into the feline life forms residing here, Barrymoore decided to investigate. Sensing, somehow that I was passing on secrets that might jeopardize national kitty security. In an effort to thwart me, he climbed into my lap, inserting himself betwixt myself and the keyboard. He then proceeded to lick and nibble on the back of my hands. It was very sweet and affectionate, but it made it impossible to hit the correct keys in sequence. Fortunately, he’s much smaller than me, so I was able to remove him, after pausing to love him up for a few minutes.
  God help us if they ever evolve thumbs.

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True tales of trueness.

December 30th, 2003 by Oskar Kennedy

  Tonight, I had the following conversation with my eight-year old cousin Jackie. She was sitting on the couch at my parent’s house, looking at the new calendar my mother bought her for Christmas.
JACKIE: Hey, what day is my birthday?
ME: You mean the date?
J: No, what DAY is it?
M: You mean which day of the week?
J: Yeah.
M: Um, I don’t know. Sunday.
J: No! Wrong!
(At this point, I tried to move in and look where she was pointing.)
J: Hey! No way!
M: I just want to know what month it is.
J: It’s between Tuesday and Friday.
M: Hm. Uh, Wednesday?
J: Right. How come you don’t know what month my birthday is?
M: I don’t know. I just don’t remember.
J: You should know that! You’ve known me for eight years!
M: Well, you’ve known me for eight years too, and you don’t know mine. When is yours, anyway?
J: October 6th.
M: Mine is in October, too. The 30th.
J: I KNEW IT WAS IN OCTOBER!
M: Well, Jackie, you are very smart. I am very dumb. You are very cute, I am not at all attractive. You are very strong, I am weak and wimpy.
J: Wait, I’m stronger than you?
M: (laughs heartily)
J: Why is everything I say so funny?
M: Because, a strong sense of irony is not something you’ve developed at age eight.
J: What?
M: Let’s just say that, in 10 or 15 years, I’m going to tell you all about this conversation, and we’ll have a good laugh.
J: But what if you forget?

  She is smarter than me.

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