Meccanized

Mmm...delicious

They were stored on the shelf right next to the Apple Homicider and the Armed Assaulted Peanuts.

Trader Joe’s, you are Meccanized.

Consider this a formal call for submissions.  If anyone sees any other crap-tacular label placements (or typos or anything of the sort), please do share them!

(Special thanks to Sanjay Kairam for helping everything-challenged me figure out how to make this picture sing.  You are Anti-Meccanized.)

I just discovered I live around the corner from a dog spa. There is a big pink and purple advertisement on the sidewalk that I walked past a few minutes ago. And there were people going in and out with … Ugh, I can’t even write the words … puntable dogs with sweaters and shoes and little hats. Oh, the humanity (doganity?).

Does it even need to be said? Dog spas, you are Meccanized.

Or, perhaps less dramatically put:

Sickness grinds my gears.

I was super pumped to go to Kirkwood and finally learn to ski (though I am beginning to think the Universe doesn’t want me to learn to ski, given that every time I have had a trip lined up something always has come up), and instead I am lying on my couch with a 103 degree fever and a throbbing headache.

If I sound bitter … well, that’s because I am.  I look like the belle of the ball right now, too (If I sound sarcastic …).  Frizzy hair, old sweatshirt, ski socks (oh, the irony) — woah, stand back, gentlemen!

Ah, well.  I don’t wear bitterness particularly well, so I will leave you, dear readers, with this: illness of indeterminate cause, you are Meccanized.

Also, donations of soup, movies, and TLC are accepted/appreciated:)

That has nothing to do with this post or with what is bugging me.  It’s just a brilliant, memorable line, and I felt it was important to highlight given that I have just returned from the first Lost party of the season.  Great episode, though when the red-headed chick got the nosebleed and the headache and started forgetting crucial details, all I could think was “I feel you, sister.”

What is grinding my gears at this particular moment is restlessness.  I can’t sleep.

I am exhausted (and sitting in bed with all the lights off) but can’t seem to quiet my head enough to actually lose consciousness.  I also can’t quiet the couple next door who seem to be having an argument, the assclown upstairs who insists on playing video games at ten times the normal volume or the glorious sounds of Fillmore and California streets, which some have described as “like living above Tel Aviv.”

There are a million things keeping me awake at the moment (mostly just too many thoughts in this tiny, tiny head), but I don’t have the space to Meccanize them all.  So, I will lump them under one umbrella term and say F you,  “restlessness:” You are Meccanized.

You know what really grinds my gears?  My shower.

Sure, it looks innocent enough, with its inviting yellow tiles and powder blue and green curtain — it’s like a home away from home in my bathroom.

The reality, however, isn’t so comfortable.

Whenever I go to clean off, I never know if I am going to be scalded or frozen.  It is like a choose your own adventure story without the choice — the water will feel ok when I get in (the damn thing lures me into a false sense of security every time) and then bam — out of nowhere, I could be taking a dip in the River Styx or going for an invigorating swim in the Arctic Circle.

And, in addition to the bipolar water temperature (do you think there is a Halcion for plumbing?), it is always fun to see what injuries I inflict upon myself in the mad scramble to change the temperature dials.  Things like stubbed fingers and near-broken toes as I knock the shower caddy off the shelf in an attempt not to boil myself.

This morning was particularly notable.  I trashed my knee on the edge of the tub as I swerved to dodge the pellets of ice falling from the shower head.  As I lay in a heap on the floor of the bathroom, clutching my leg, my tiny body covered in the shower curtain that I accidentally took down with me, I half expected to see a polar bear lumber by me on the way to take a bath.

Shower, the only consistent thing about you is the sheer misery I feel every time you get me in your clutches.  Consider yourself Meccanized.

A friend passed this along to me this morning (and I subsequently saw it all over the news).

Now, I could Meccanize the lift attendants, who didn’t bother to make sure that this guy’s chair was in the proper lowered position or the obnoxious a-holes on the ground who decided it was the right thing to do to take pictures.

But rather than Meccanizing for the sake of Meccanizing, I’ve decided that Meccanized.com isn’t just for things that piss me off.  There are certainly plenty, and I will not hesitate to Meccanize something when I deem it worthy of that lofty title.

This site is also for flagging life’s little absurdities, of which this delightful fare is one.   Sometimes the universe just orchestrates an amazing, perfect and precariously balanced chain of events, and those times should be honored… by me… on my blog.

Consider this, the pantsless, dangling ski-lift guy, as the personification of Meccanized’s evolution in the new year.

Another break from format.

I just read that the most money spent on advertising in 2005 was spent on ads for collect calls.

Did anybody still use pay phones in 2005?

You know what really grinds my gears?

Chain posting.

I think I just ground my own gears.

I am Meccanized.  I also will Meccanize Shelly Milam, since she started this whole thing.

I’m taking a step back from my usual posting style to continue a thread that Shelly Milam passed on to me.

Here’s how it works:
•    Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
•    Share seven facts about yourself in the post
•    Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
•    Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I’m not even sure I can come up with 7 things people don’t know about me (my life is an open book … one that Oprah would not pick for any month), but here goes:

1. I was born 3 months premature (I think I looked something akin to Benjamin Button but smaller and with hair).  I blame (accurately or not) all of the following conditions on my premature birth: asthma, flat feet, social awkwardness, shin splints, knee problems, hatred of cilantro, and an extremely loud voice.
2. In an ideal world, I would be a screenwriter who writes novels on the side, but when I sit down to write I have trouble translating the good, creative ideas in my head to paper.
3. When I was a junior in college, I spoke with (in the same day) a death row inmate about his crime/sentence and the members of a support group for families of murder victims.
4. I still get a little nervous on school busses, because when I was 10 the bus I was riding in got into a bad accident.
5. I yelled Gary Sinise’s name from atop a peak in the Pyrenees Mountains.  All of my friends were yelling things, but I was so caught up in the beauty of the place that I couldn’t think of anything of substance to yell.   I had re-watched “Forrest Gump” a few days before I got to Spain, and Gary Sinise had been one of my favorite actors for years, so his seemed as good a name to yell as any.  When I met him a few months later (outside of the theater where he was playing McMurphy in the stage production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” — one of my favorite books), I told him the story.
6. Until last year, I rode a kid’s mountain bike that I got as a Christmas present when I was 9.  I rode it all around my hometown (to get pizza and ice cream, the only things to do in my hometown).  I rode it from Williams College in Massachusetts through Vermont and across the border into Canada.  I rode it 800 miles from Barcelona to the South of France and back to Barcelona.  I rode it for four years at college.  When I moved to my new apartment, there wasn’t space for it, so I left it outside on Market Street and it was gone a few hours later.  Every time I see a homeless person riding a bike, I check to see if it is my Rincon Giant.
7. In my house growing up, I learned to pick locks with a plastic fork.  That is what we did in backwoods CT for fun.  Incidentally, when I tried to demonstrate my talent to a friend using my dorm room door in college, the tine of the plastic fork broke off in the lock (which never happened in CT…damn California doors/forks).  This cost me $100 and an hour of my life with the world’s creepiest locksmiths.

Now, to drag 7 people into this:

Nate Solon, blogger/chef extraordinaire and a friend from college.

Evan Solomon, a god among men who gifted me this blog.

Sarah Michael Douglas, a brilliant science mind and the person who I most often think of when I start a sentence with “It seemed like such a good idea at the time…”

Ilena George, the bee’s knees of medical students and who has done some really, really cool things in her 24 years (like working at a circus in South Africa).

Rachel Levy, who knows more television and movie trivia than I do (which I didn’t think was possible).

Ray George, my manager at Page One, who got mad at Shelly when she didn’t link to him in her blog post.

Bret Clement, another manager at Page One who I know will have 7 exciting stories to tell.