Wednesday, December 26, 2007

O Underwear, My Heart Stacks For Thee

So, I'm sitting on my couch folding my new underwear, still toasty warm from the dryer, watching 30 Rock on DVD, and it was underwear that I just bought THAT VERY AFTERNOON!!, and it was probably clean but I felt I needed to wash it anyway cuz the show I'm cutting is about the environment and shit and the people who work there would probably tell me that the plastic residue from the packaging would make my genitals enflamed, which might be a good thing, but they'd probably be all kind of RED BLOTCHY enflamed and not ENGORGED enflamed like I'd want them to be, and whoo-boy that would be awful, and I picture the itching and the scratching and--

So I bought six packages of new Champion underwear at the Target in Brooklyn, the no-fly zone kind, like on
Curb Your Enthusiasm (I didn't know they even existed in real life!), which I already had two pairs of and really liked and asked my mother to get me for Christmas, but she couldn't find them even at Target in Milford, Massachusetts, and she felt really bad that she couldn't find them, but honest to God it was the present I really, really, wanted cuz you know--I'm talkin to the men here--when you find the perfect pair of underwear you just want to own a whole truckload of 'em and never have to worry about underwear anymore ever again, so I had two black pairs already and the six NEW pairs I bought at Target today were not all black, they came in packages of two: one black and one gray, and I had just taken them out of the dryer and was sitting on my couch watching 30 Rock folding my toasty warm new underwear.

So I grab a pair out of the laundry basket, fold it, put it on the couch next to me with the waistband facing north. Grab another pair, fold it, stack it on top of the last pair with the waistband facing SOUTH. See, if you put them all with the waistbands facing north, the waistbands pile up higher than the rest of the stack which starts to teeter and eventually the whole stack is uneven and hard to manage, and this won't do. So the waistbands face alternating directions: north, south, north, south, etc. So I grab another pair, fold it, stack it. Grab, fold, stack. Grab, fold, stack. I'm grabbing randomly, and I notice that I've grabbed four or five black pairs in a row.

Trying not to panic, I rifle through the laundry basket and look for a gray pair. I find one, fold it and place it in the stack between the bottom two black pairs. But NOW, see, we have TWO waistbands facing the SAME DIRECTION, so before I place the rest of the stack down I have to ROTATE it 180 degrees. Now I have a NEW STACK, with one gray pair in its proper place. I dig through the basket and retrieve another gray pair, and I repeat the process until I have a proper stack of alternating black-gray, with waistbands facing in alternating directions. But when I'm done stacking (WELL, I mean, come ON now...am I EVER done stacking? heh-heh...) I have two extra black pairs and no more grays left. Oh, well, THAT won't do....

I go down and search the washer and dryer to no avail. I walk back up to my apartment with a sinking feeling, the one you get when you JUST KNOW you left your bag on the subway car. I look around, but there are no more grays (just like I KNOW there aren't), and I realize that I have too many blacks because of the ORIGINAL pair I bought, the ones that made me realize that this was the underwear for me: they were BOTH black. So I have two extra pairs of black underwear, and I can live with having a black pair on the top and bottom of the stack as long as the alternating color/north-south rules remained intact, but this STILL means that I will have ONE extra pair of black underwear that will destroy the pattern of my stack. If I stack this extra black pair I will be able to alternate the waistband direction, but NOT the colors. There will be TWO BLACK pairs touching each other.

Now I have to make a decision--and here we come to the heroic part of the story: Do I throw out a pair of NEW black underwear just to maintain the purity of the stack?

I'm happy to say that I did NOT throw out the underwear. I decided to let the whole thing go.

And I feel satisfied.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Guess the Blessed Event

Your only hint: a cryptic, rambling e-mail from Maryanne Smith....

"Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God---what a Christmas present---I am so happy for her---my only comment was 'you told the brother before you told the mother'---hee, hee---Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God---I just know Grandpa had something to do with this---I know he is on one side of the Big Man up there and the Polish pope is on the other---and the two of them are speaking Polish and telling Him what to do---So, Uncle Mark the Second---Oh my God, Oh my God!!! I cried for an hour---she wanted this more than anything else in life---I love the both of you so much---Mom"

It's like one of those puzzles from a fourth grade magazine: all the clues are there, you just have to put them all together.

If you guessed "Maryanne is a cuckoo bird who thinks her late father and Pope John Paul II are sitting on either side of God, ordering Him around in Polish and annoying Him to the point where He finally allows my sister to get pregnant despite the fact that the pregnancy was done through IVF because my sister is infertile. Good thing God loves science!" then you're right.