Did any of you realize this lame-ass website turned one year old earlier this month? I’d forgotten all about it until I saw an ad for The L Word the other day (its reign of ridiculousness is almost over: an abbreviated final season starts on Sunday) and remembered that I’d started this blog in January of last year with the intention of using it to complain about the new episodes that were about to air.
As it turned out, the fifth season of The L Word was so execrable that it wasn’t worth watching, much less commenting on, and so I found other things to complain about instead — everything from the religious right to Rivers Cuomo’s awful mustache. Now, as I look back on a year of posts (something like 30% of them had to do with my thinking Thandie Newton is attractive, so I’ll try to mix things up a little in 2009 and drool over a wider array of actresses), it occurs to me that as far as personal blogs go, this one hasn’t been very personal at all. With that in mind—and because there’s been nothing going on in the news to talk about here and I don’t want this page gathering dust in the meantime—I’m going to reveal ten things about myself that most of you don’t know.
You might want to prepare yourself before reading these. They’re the kind of explosive, emotionally devastating revelations normally found in a Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee play. You’ve been warned.
1.) Marie was my favorite Lubbock sister on the late, lamented Just the Ten of Us, which seems an unlikely choice until you consider the fact that I’ve always been partial to nerdy characters. That’s why Elizabeth was my favorite Wakefield twin (though I’ve never understood what she saw in Todd, a massive tool), and Mary Anne my favorite member of the Baby-Sitters Club. (Speaking of the BSC, was anyone else annoyed when Kristy dated Bart? That character was so dykey that her last name might as well have been McNichol. Pairing her with a guy made no sense. Same with Stacey having that boyfriend who was always on Fire Island. Why didn’t Claudia ever pull her aside and tell her she was dating a queen?)
2.) Sometimes, just to keep myself amused, I like to pretend I’m a character from an old film noir whose every move is accompanied by preposterously hard-boiled voice-over narration. You know, something like: “I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. I didn’t know where she lived. I never followed her. All I ever had to go on was a place and time to see her again. I don’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the world would end.” That’s from Out of the Past, which also has the classic line: “Build my gallows high, baby.” Everyone should say that at least once in his or her life. Next time you’re at the grocery store and the bagger asks paper or plastic, just ignore the question and put on a Robert Mitchum voice and say “Build my gallows high, baby.”
3.) I hate the words “snark” and “dawg,” and love the words “kerfuffle” and “obstreperous.”
4.) For some reason, I don’t know why, I’m fucked up about my pillowcases. I want to sleep on a freshly laundered pillowcase every night, and by now my pillowcases are so sick of being washed that they start sobbing like Meryl Streep in Silkwood (or Amy Poehler in Baby Mama) every time I throw them in the washing machine.
5.) If I were a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, I would want to be Black Mamba. Not because she’s the last one standing, but because she has the coolest name.
6.) The single biggest regret of my life is that I wasn’t alive and working as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s, because back then I would’ve maybe, just maybe, had a shot with Greta Garbo. It sounds crazy, I know, but if Mercedes de Acosta and Salka Viertel stood a chance, who’s to say there wouldn’t have been hope for the rest of us as well?
7.) I’m uncoordinated and frequently spill, drop, and walk into things. I also have enough difficulty walking in a straight line that my dad has been known to warn me, “You’d better hope you’re never pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving…”
8.) It is my fervent belief that blue M&Ms are hideously ugly and should never have been introduced into the M&M family.
9.) The most listened to song on my iPod is Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” but the song I spend the most time trying not to break into in public is the Fifth Dimension’s cover of “Wedding Bell Blues.”
10.) I’ve had an irrational fear of being buried alive ever since it happened to Carly on Days of Our Lives in the early ’90s. My mom watched that and Another World every afternoon (Linda Dano’s shoulder pads and dramatic rouge-streaked cheekbones still haunt me), and while Marlena’s demonic possession story line never freaked me out, I was so shaken by Carly’s plight that I left a note marked “Read This If I Die” in my top desk drawer instructing my parents to have me cremated. I was ten at the time, and my plans haven’t changed in the intervening years; I still shudder at the thought of Carly being trapped in that coffin every time I hear the word “burial.”
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
