My Sister's New Girlfriend

She may very well be forty-three and unmarried, but my eldest sister's no dyke. She does, however, have a new girlfriend.

My sister's new girlfriend is Paula Begoun, self-proclaimed "Cosmetics Cop."

If that moniker means nothing to you then, congratulations, consider yourself hereby duly certified for one more year of Crazy-Free Living on the Planet Earth (gmail me for your certificate-- $7.95 + s/h). If you are familiar with Paula Begoun and her affiliated works, then, to quote the venerable and venerated Tim Gunn, "This worries me." If you regularly refer to Paula Begoun as "my new guru," well, you're officially inducted into the Fucked in the Head Club. Meet my sister, Chairman and Executive Director. She will be happy to go over your orientation packet with you if you'll pardon the hopelessly creased pages and drool stains.

We stopped by my parents' house yesterday and, lo and behold, only my sister was there. As you may remember, she took up residence at their house back in February when she spotted some mice having an orgy in a bag of ginseng rice in her condominium. She has since deloused the unit and has put it up for sale. Nobody's interested, and I suspect that she will remain at my parents' house until one or both of them die and she is reduced to eating their remains.

It was eleven o'clock in the morning when my wife and I showed up, and Julie opened the door clad in a baby blue bathrobe. We sat down at the dining room table and, through the window to a passerby it might have looked like any normal family gathering (except for the fact that my 43-year-old sister was wearing a bathrobe and pajamas at eleven o'clock in the morning) with us amicably chatting away. Of course, had the passerby been able to hear the content of the conversation, well, any attempt at "normalcy" would go straight down the terlit.

Her first rant was centered entirely on sunscreen. What is the appropriate SPF rating, Australian Sunscreen Standards, UVA and UVB ray protection, how, in spite of all the hype and super-expensive emolients sold at fancy retail stores that the best protection is some shitty-looking cream sold at K-Mart for a dollar.

"A goddamn dollar," she said, her eyeballs rolling back into her head, "a goddamn, motherfucking dollar."

"Wow," I said.

"I love how nobody in this fucking family takes me seriously and everybody thinks I'm such a big fucking riot when it comes to sunscreen-- but fuck all those motherfuckers. I do my research!"

And nobody could ever accuse her of not doing her research. Except my father, of course.

"Why are our BMWs not on the safest cars list?" my father interrogated her one day this week.

"BECAUSE IT'S 2010, YOU ASSHOLE!" she shouted, her neck-vein bulging impossibly, "WE GOT THOSE CARS IN 2009 AND THEY WERE ON THE TOP OF THE MOTHERFUCKING LIST! BUT BMW DIDN'T DO THE FUCKING ROOF-IMPACT TEST THIS YEAR, SO THEY GOT BUMPED OFF THE FUCKING LIST!!! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW!!???"

My father cracked up at this and walked out of the room. I thank God that he finds her obscenity-laced tantrums funny, because I know there are some other fathers out there who would have throw her out the fucking window years ago.

Julie then showed us several one-piece bathing suits she purchased for our nine-month-old nephew. They were pretty stinking cute-- with a shark on one and a bee or some shit on the other, but they looked like they were made to fit a five-year-old. "Mommy said these were the right sizes to buy," she said forlornly, knowing she had bought them too big.

"They're coated in some special material that blocks UVA and UVB rays-- and this one is coated in something that blocks against chlorine."

I'd never known that clothing could be coated in so much shit. I expected it to feel leathery and slippery. Actually, I once owned a tie coated in Teflon to protect against stains. I ruined it with cocktail sauce.

I don't know how we got onto the discussion about Paula Begoun, but, from under a stack of photocopied consumer reviews about baby strollers and car booster seats, she pulled this incredibly huge book written by Paula Begoun.

"This is my new guru," my sister said, gazing into the photograph of the authoress on the glossy cover. I stared at it, too, but not gazingly.

"8th edition?" I said, "are you fucking kidding me?"

"Well, she analyzes and makes recommendations about every single cosmetic product on the market, so, whenever they come out with new products, she is able to write a new edition of her book."

"Genius," my wife muttered under her breath.

I feared my sister might go ballistic if she'd heard my wife maligning her new master, but she just launched into another monologue in praise of Her.

"Before, I had been unenthusiastic about Olay products, but Paula Begoun changed the way I think about my face and my skin and my makeup. That fucking asshole derm bastard that I've been going to for the last ten years has been constantly been putting me on a cream that's bad for people with dry eyes. And a skin cream that's bad for people with digestive issues. That fucking jerkoff knows that I have all that stuff, I talk about it all the time. So Paula has recommendations for people like me-- I've thrown out all my old shit and I'm steadily replenishing."

Steadily replenishing. Good God. I can just imagine my sister trolling the asiles of the local CVS with that crazy-ass book clutched to her bosom, with pen and pencil notations and highlighted passages, doggy-eared pages, just like a bible.

Steadily replenishing. Following instructions.

Of course, who am I to judge? Frankly, her skin has never looked better.

Kamikaze Birds, And Other Mother's Day Tweets-- Sorry-- Treats

Hey, it's Mother's Day.

If reading that sentence on this blog is your O.S.R. (Oh, Shit Reminder), don't worry. I hear they're selling pansies at the Mobil station. You can thank me later.

Pansy.

I was thinking about honoring my mother with a post on this blog, but then I started to feel like that would be trite, maybe even a little insulting, (especially since she'd definitely disown/disembowel me if she read 9 out of 10 posts contained herein), and assuredly too predictable. I mean, come on-- a post about your mother on Mother's Day? That's like... like... um... a Justin Bieber post on National Justin Bieber Day. (By the way, my wife explained who he is to me last night. I am now fit to go out and circulate in even my own socially retarded public sphere.)

Hmm... this post is, I feel, containing an inordinate amount of parenthetical references. I used to use those fuckers (a lot) in my high school writing, which featured prominently a story about a woman named Mary Jane who gets her virginity stolen and the woefully inept Superintendent James Henry Wobbypoohs who investigates the crime.

(Gay.)

Anyway, this is not going to be a post about my mother. I felt that would kind of be wasted on her. She's greater than any Mother's Day post I could create-- she's funnier, snarkier, more demure, more assured, and more, well, more than I'm capable of creating. It would just be tinny and hollow and, probably, sad.

So I'm going to write about my oldest sister instead.

It's a funny thing, I suppose, writing about her-- someone who, at 42 and stolidly single, will in all likelihood never be a mother, but maybe that's why I'm picking her as my muse.

Julie.

(Hi, so here's another parenthetical reference. It's explaining the pseudonym for my oldest sister, because I hate referring to her as "my oldest sister" all the fucking time, and I'm sure as shit not going to call her by her real name. So, um, Julie it is. "Julie.")

Julie doesn't have children, and I doubt she's ever going to. She's never had a husband and I doubt she's ever going to. I could be wrong, but I'd feel comfortable, maybe even a little cocky betting my wife's eyelids on it.

And I'm not a betting man.

Julie moved back in with my parents back in February when the mousketeers decided to commandeer her condominium. She just sent me a text message:

"Omg its exhausting living in a house w/stairs!"

Life is exhausting for Julie. She works for my father, an unending haze of unreasonable expectations, haphazard instructions, and half-Israeli profanities shouted at cringeworthy decibels. Julie hides while at work. If my father is really laying into her, she'll run and hide in the bathroom, the only place in the factory where he can't get to her.

Otherwise, she hides behind her computer screen. On Thursday, Julie e-mailed me 18 times.

"Ho hum, another day of wondering what should go on my tombstone:

The thing I say most: 'Fuck'!"

Kind of sounds like... me, doesn't she? I'm very proud.

(That reminds me-- I need to write my epitaph one of these days...)

Anyway, Julie doesn't have children, but she does have her beautiful nephew, on whom she dotes and smothers as if he were her very own. It's actually very touching to see the two of them interact together. When our nephew got a cold, he threw up twice, and cried afterwards.

So did Julie.

Julie has lots of stuffed animals. Before our nephew came into this world, she doted on and smothered her stuffed animals. She named them, and probably talked to them at night when she was otherwise alone. And while that's kind of unsettling to picture, it's better than what she used to do with stuffed animals when she was a young girl. She used to love to pretend she was a schoolteacher, and that her stuffed animals where her pupils. Sounds quaint, right? Well, not the way little Julie played. She would line them all up on the porch and scream at them at the top of her lungs, presumably for not having their homework completed or for going to the bathroom without signing out the hall-pass. Little Julie would scream and yell frantically and forcefully, until her face turned tomato red and her neck veins bulged almost to the breaking point. These little shenanigans frequently drew the negative, frightened attention of the neighbors.

Alas, a career in education was not in her future. She was doomed to work for my father from the very start. After all, he's the only person I know who can shout her down. Those stuffed animals never had a chance.

She tries, by God. Really, she does.

"What the hell do you want for your bday???????" she wrote to me in email #16 on Thursday. All she wants to do is the right thing, but in a world that consistently and unfailingly leaves her feeling unappreciated, why bother, right?

Julie will always bother.

As I mentioned some posts ago, there's the constant updates about crime in our neighborhood that she insists on sending to me.

"Over the past few days, several unlocked vehicles have been entered overnight in the township. Small electronics have been taken. Residents are reminded to park their vehicles in a well lighted area, remove all items of value, and lock all doors."

And there's the random consumer alerts about unsafe products and/or services that she insists on sending to me.

"More TV for toddlers equals school trouble later

By Reuters - Mon May 3, 3:31 PM PDT
Less surprisingly, children who watched more TV at age 2 weighed more by the time they were 10 and ate more snacks and soft drinks, the researchers reported in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. "The results support previous suggestions that early childhood television exposure undermines attention," wrote Linda Pagani of the University of Montreal and colleagues at Bowling Green University in Kentucky and the University of Michigan."

And then there's the random bytes from the entertainment industry that she insists on sending to me.

"Teen Mom Star Maci Has Moved On to a New Guy!
Thursday – May 06, 2010 – 10:59am
Teen Mom star Maci Bookout has found a new guy in the wake of her split with Ryan Edwards, the father of son Bentley, 18 months."

I mean, really. Where the hell would I be without my sister?

And, in spite of her best intentions, shit happens-- mostly to her. Mostly in her car. Mostly when windows or sunroofs are opened.

In 1989, she was driving along in her beautiful red VW Jetta on a gorgeous, sun-dappled day when she stopped for a red light. All the windows were down. A man on a bicycle sidled up alongside her Jetta and stopped, too, for the red light, as some bicyclists do. Unsteady, he put his left hand out to stabilize himself against her car, and he fell right through her open passengerside window, right into her car-- she screamed like hell and the guy probably shit his little shorts. Alas, they did not exchange phone numbers and, eventually rings. Though it would have made for a hell of a how-we-met story told to the grandkids.

But that was a very long time ago. On Wednesday, though-- well... I'll let her tell it in her own words. Far more effective than mine-- just proving that there's a little bit of the storyteller in all of us Aprons:

"I was listening to book on cd (first time I ever used this cd player----the fuckin’ thing got stuck in it this morning)

Had the sunroof back---same as in the morning.

When I parked in the driveway, I stayed w/the car a bit to clean out the side pockets of crap.

I thought I’d felt something roll down my back, but looked around - like the doggies do -& couldn’t see anything on my back.

So I finished what I was doing and then I turned around to close the door & VOILA, dead baby bird smashed flat on my seat where my right thigh was.

MAJOR NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

Dad called as I was bee-lining it to the house to take my HAZMAT shower. I just kept saying “when are you going to be home?” “when are you going to be home”.

He came in the house as I was coming out of the shower. I gathered gloves, plastic cups and a container of Lysol wipes & dragged him outside.

He helped me get rid of it. He said it probably fell out of a tree on my hair through the roof and I hadn’t been sitting on it the whole time.

Nice, I’d kept my hair up & it probably became a hearse-nest for the ride home.

I have no other explanation---only the creeps."

Happy Mother's Day, you fucking lunatic. There's a dead bird on your ass. And I love you.