Car Accident

•25 August 2008 • No Comments

I got into an accident yesterday going 70 mph on I-90. I am stiff and sore and wonder how an airbag can pack such a punch so to feel like I slammed my face into the steering wheel. Wait, maybe I did. Bruised chest, whiplash so badly I can’t move my neck without it feeling like it’s going to break, and — weirdly — feeling like a sadist took a mallet to my kidneys. Dog hit the windshield, too, but he is chipper and fine. I decided I wouldn’t share my muscle relaxers with him.

This is a picture of Vaughan’s in Bywater district, New Orleans. I’m going there next month to see Kermit Ruffins. I’m excited to get back to NOLA and revisit the old haunts.

dentistry and genitalia

•22 August 2008 • 5 Comments

  Imagine peeing these out your weenie…

Just to clarify, Julia and I sit no more than six feet away from each other. And yet, we choose to communicate via Skype and rapid-fire email chains. This is because we contemplate inappropriate things that are not even implicitly included in our job descriptions. The following is a transcription of our most recent exchange (completely unedited — I apologize for any inadvertent spelling and/or grammatical atrocities).

Shelagh Baird says: Okay, this is officially RIDICULOUS
Shelagh Baird says: WHY, oh why, would someone be searching for “penis x-rays”??!??
Julia Robinson says: and then click on your blog, that’s the kicker
Shelagh Baird says: and the bigger why would be why does my blog come up as a hit
Shelagh Baird says: exactly! what the hell?!?
 Julia Robinson says: do you think that it’s one of your friends?
Shelagh Baird says: I mean, surely, a penis x-ray doesn’t show anything
Julia Robinson says: I mean, have you tried putting in any of these search terms?  I don’t understand at all… maybe it’s a bug with blog app?
Shelagh Baird says: I mean, I’m not a doctor but I’m almost positive there are no boney masses inside a penis
Shelagh Baird says: all puns aside
Julia Robinson says: you may not BE a doc but you do hang out with them all day
Shelagh Baird says: I am speaking very literally here
Julia Robinson says: giving you proxy doc status
Shelagh Baird says: I do but I am reluctant to approach this particular subject with M***, W****, or S****
Julia Robinson says: I would pay money to see that convo
Shelagh Baird says: although, to be fair, both W**** and S**** have shared more about their sex lives with me than I’ve ever wanted to know
Julia Robinson says: yeeeeeeah
Shelagh Baird says: how much? I could be convinced to change my mind
Julia Robinson says: true that.
Julia Robinson says: 5 dollars
Julia Robinson says: at LEAST
Julia Robinson says: :)
Shelagh Baird says: hmmm… I bet when Joe gets back, he’d throw in a couple bucks.
Shelagh Baird says: I could buy my PMHH beers with that
Julia Robinson says: barrot would def be in
Shelagh Baird says: this is tempting.
Shelagh Baird says: and barrot!
Julia Robinson says: Yeah, and he’s getting phd RA salary
Julia Robinson says: the big bux
Shelagh Baird says: so, I could approach it like, “As a doctor, do you know of any benefit of getting an x-ray of your penis?”
Shelagh Baird says: and then hasten to explain that I’m not interested in such myself
Julia Robinson says: and yet, you strangely are
Shelagh Baird says: I’m glad we’re doing this. It just cements that I would much rather merely *look* busy than actually focus on the task at hand
Julia Robinson says: because it may cause one to become interested in your blog, as well
Julia Robinson says: do you have a task at hand?
Shelagh Baird says: IRB.
Julia Robinson says: ick
Julia Robinson says: of course this trumps
Shelagh Baird says: I might actually be about to have an IRB emergency
Shelagh Baird says: I don’t know how to write these things
Julia Robinson says: talking about pulling teeth out of someone’s dick trumps (*)
Shelagh Baird says: having opted to simply bypass that whole bit of my thesis process
Shelagh Baird says: OH! right!!!
Julia Robinson says: you and me both
Shelagh Baird says: that is one reason why one might be inspired to have their penis x-rayed
Julia Robinson says: dental health?
Shelagh Baird says: although I’m still confused about how teeth get inside there
Julia Robinson says: the world is a strange, sick, twisted place
Shelagh Baird says: clearly.
Shelagh Baird says: I’m baffled.
Julia Robinson says: I’m sure if you actually posed the queestion to the docs, you’d get more of an answer than you bargained for.  There may be all kinds of reasons to xray one’s wee wee
Shelagh Baird says: I just don’t get it.
Shelagh Baird says: well, that’s what I’m hoping for… because I really can NOT see a reason to do that
Julia Robinson says: well, maybe if you had already looked everywhere ELSE for your keys…
Shelagh Baird says: I am at loss for words
Shelagh Baird says: how might one respond to that visual?
Shelagh Baird says: it disturbs me more than my meagre vocabulary can express
Julia Robinson says: there is no response.  we are silly, bored, over-educated women who are actually on the clock while this conversation is happening
Shelagh Baird says: I know! HA. I am hiding behind my computer screen because I am cracking up

(*) We think this is a reference to a David Rakoff quote but we are vague on this, too.

huh?

•21 August 2008 • 2 Comments

Also, someone found my blog searching for “g-rated penis.” What the FUCK is a g-rated penis?!? Certainly not a new Disney endeavor?

Thursday.

•21 August 2008 • 2 Comments

I’m not sure how these things happen but today I forgot to wear underwear. I didn’t wake up and think, “ooh, I am going to see *** today, so I’m going to wear a skirt and no underwear so he can touch my vagina in public.”  I wasn’t in any kind of particular hurry — I rolled into work well after 11 am, as it was — so I can’t blame time constraints for my free-hangin’ vulva.  I have clean underwear, so I wouldn’t have had to struggle with trying to decide whether it’s appropriate to just wear a dirty pair turned inside-out (it is never appropriate or acceptable to do this, by the way).

Nope, I just forgot. That’s awesome. And I am wearing a skirt.  And I’m hungover and languishing in the aftershock of three consecutive insomniac nights. I’m too lazy to make another pot of coffee and my brain is thudding feebly against my skull, making the task at hand — writing an institutional review board on human subjects application — very close to impossible.  And my heel is kind of quished into my nether regions because I am sitting cross-legged in my chair, wearing a skirt with no underwear (in case I didn’t already make that clear).

Thursday.  

The special scent of…

•24 July 2008 • 5 Comments

I am thinking about Alaska because one of my friends from the boat just sent me this.  It’s absurdist but… um, I think I must KNOW some of the guys in this clip. That, or every fucking Alaskan I’ve ever met is crazier than a freakin’ three-dollar bill. (I’m not sure why that is particularly weird but it’s a favorite saying of my dad’s and my dad is rad and also crazier than a three-dollar bill, so I’m going with it.)

I just googled “Crazy Alaskan” because that’s what I wanted to have as my picture for this posting but then I realized that I should just add one of my own, maybe of the Crusties, but probably more appropriately, myself.

This is Timmy. He is the crustiest mother fucker on the planet. He could keep a cigarette lit in 50 knot winds with 20 foot seas spitting freezing Bering Sea water all over us on the back deck. He also chewed bits of his toenails (he was unexpectedly flexible), scratched the “yeast infection” in his inner ear with the ends of dirty paint brushes that we would use to acid wash, pooled surprising quantities of snot into his ’stache (I rue the day I introduced him to the wonders of nasal spray — this one is my doing), and drank no less than 13-15 cups of black coffee and smoked at least a pack of Marlboro Reds everyday.  He made me look like a prudish teetotaller, and he LOVED his thinning, long blond locks.

That’s Tim in the background. He has his penis out. Again. We were drunk. Very.

They let me play with guns, but only if I was safe about it. I’m a crack shot on those fucking seagulls! (untrue… but I can shoot an empty beer bottle out of the air)

ANYWAY. Alaska. 

Oh, and I’m having a BIRTHDAY PARTY this weekend and am STILL trying to figure out a song lyric to dress as… My friend, Z-man in Big Sur is trying to generate some ideas from his cohort of pugilists over on his blog (I just linked him twice, in case anyone misses the point: give me some fucking ideas!).

There was something else but my teeth are floating, so I should go deal with this urine back-up before I give myself a UTI. Then I’m off to pizza and the gynecologist. I’m hoping he’ll have some insight into my peanut allergy.

Mammaquatia on the soccer field, ‘bo!

•16 July 2008 • 3 Comments

Oly went out to the bars last night. I went with him. He nearly got molested by a stinky, slobbery guy who scared me but I think Oly dug his stench. He’s like that; we can’t pass by the bums passed out on the street without Oly getting frantically excited and pulling me over for a voracious sniff. 

Oly has a good nose. He knows when mama (me) has been hitting the IPA a little too heavy because he knows he can get away with sleeping on the bed without getting in trouble. I feel a little betrayed when I wake up bleary-eyed and near-dead and he’s on the bed, all spread out, looking like the Queen of Sheeba if the Queen of Sheeba had big, crooked hairless balls. He doesn’t even bothered acting embarrassed that he’s breaking all the rules.

I also went climbing over the weekend. That is me, looking red and hivey (from eating peanuts, and YES, I do know I’m allergic, and NO, I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea).  Seattle summers are absurdly short and it takes a lot of flaking out on people and essentially not being in town any weekends to get in your yearly quota of outdoor stuff.  This also means we do our heavy drinking during the week. This is never a good idea.

Point in case: today. I am a useless fuck. The only thing that got me out of bed this morning (aside from my mother calling me and the sight of Oly’s nasty hairless balls) was a giant bowl of pho–Bun Bo Hue, to be exact (well, as exact as I can be without adding the appropriate diactritics to the name).  I spent the day… looking at pictures and realizing that someone I went to high school with but didn’t know that well is a hella cool dude.

Also, I looked at my blog stats. I am grateful that my brain is deadened today because… people are SICK fuckers, man.  Shee-it. So, with Word Press, you can check which search terms people are using (on google, for example) to get to your blog.  Suffice to say, I have NEVER written about… uh, “white mold meat,” “popping his balls,” and “mastabotory [sic] futility.”

Also, apparently, people are REALLY curious about pee holes, particularly women’s pee holes. (I can’t emphasize this enough; every day at least a few people visit my blog through some misguided quest for the glory of the female pee-hole.)  One of my favorite queries was “are vaginas and peeholes separate.” Though I’ve admitted to a certain… ignorance in these pages before, I do realize that the females bits and peices work a little differently from the pecker. (An aside: my cousin, Gilly, is trying to sell his swank condo and totally ran off a perspective buyer by saying “What, are you on fucking drugs, you fucking peckerhead?”  I guess the offer wasn’t sweet enough.)

There was also “beach hard on,” and because that didn’t generate enough quality hits, “beach ‘hard on’” so google couldn’t possibly mistake the searcher’s perverted intentions. ”Dancing hard ons” made a cameo appearance, as did “Mongolian dogs,” “Colombia,” and “funny stick sex.” I was disturbed by “mature fucking,” “mature rub,” and “balls inside body” but to each their own, eh? But still… MY blog??  Also, Maggie did a little leg work for me and googled “white meat mold” and informed me that my blog comes up as a hit on page 25 (!!!), so whoever was researching that got to me after wading through 25 pages of search results. That, my friends, is fucking weird.

In other news, Oly managed to cram my nipple in his nostril as I got out of the shower the other day. That was awkward and the poor pup didn’t understand why I was so snappy with him. He gets very excited whenever he sees me, even if it’s only been two or three minutes and runs full speed into whatever part of me he can. He is totally without grace (and often runs into walls, falls over, eats shit, and generally emulates my way of interacting with gravity) but he means well.

I have an extra vertabrae (I discovered this last year when I went in for xrays after falling out of that stupid tree).  I get all my sex ed information from my post-soccer game drinking binges. (Trampolining and mammaquatia are proud new additions to my vocabulary!)  Everything else right now is too advanced for my feeble mind.

Hangovers are like dying of a preventable disease.  I’m off to go do it all over again.

chinese algebrassieres

•9 July 2008 • 4 Comments

My birthday is coming up and we are throwing a fiesta that is meant to be safe(r) than last year’s follies.  The theme is “Dress as a song lyric,” and my plan (today, anyway; this will change daily over the next two weeks) is to take a line from Tom Waits’ “Pasties and a G-String.”  I first heard this song when I was 10 years old and I remember my mom being uncharacteristically vague in trying to explain what it meant.

Now I know. (Non-sequiter: “Now I know” is the best engraving on a gravestone I’ve ever seen.)  In the interim 19 years, I’ve also acquired pasties (gold sequined, and, no, I can’t titty-twirl that well but not for lack of enthusiasm or dedication) and multiple g-strings. 

But after careful deliberation (read: shirking bullshit work), I have decided to go with the line “With trenchcoats, magazines, and a bottle full of rum…”  That way at the end of the night, I can be “Smelling like a brewery, looking like a tramp.”

Really, I just want to be a filthy, depraved pervert. Or at least not have to be so subversive about my depraved perversions. And, no, I don’t fuck animals, thank you.

shit.

•30 June 2008 • 3 Comments

 

UGH. Mondays… I hate hating Mondays because it’s such a bloody cliche. I’m in such a foul mood that I can’t even write a decent posting.

(And I just fucking rubbed jalapeno in my eye… this is worse than peeing on my toothbrush like I did LAST Monday morning.)

I hate being an adult.

 

Ode to ME!!!

•15 June 2008 • 3 Comments

(This is from my days back on the boat and was part of the hands-down best birthday present I’ve ever gotten… There are several puzzling references in this ode that I am loathe to explain but suffice to say, there is nothing here that I can honestly deny. Sigh.)

An Ode to Shelagh B.

Oh Shelagh B, oh Shelagh B,

The toughest bitch on the Bering Sea.

She curses and farts,

She’s pretty and smart.

She’s our very own Shelagh B.

She runs naked through town,

Wearing not even a frown.

She can side arm a glass,

With a hole in her ass.

She’s our very own Shelagh B.

She drinks enough beer to kill ya,

And pisses tequilia.

She can kick your ass,

And sometimes cut glass.

She’s our very own Shelagh B.

She’s got style and class,

And always falling on her ass.

She knows much of society,

But not how to hold on to an ID.

She’s our very own Shelagh B.

Oh Shelagh B, Oh Shelagh B.

The meanest, toughest, drunkest, clumsiest, root-nest, toot’nest bitch on the Bering Sea.

Happy 23rd Birthday! We all love ya!

(July 29, 2002)

Boring, for Bulent

•10 June 2008 • 6 Comments

[Picture Deleted for work reasons]

 

Back to the blog:

 

I have just discovered something horrible: grapefruit juice is not the right choice when one has the ague upon them (that’s my nod out to Gaelic grammar).  I discovered this in much the same fashion that I discover all bizarre unpleasantries in life—through experience. I just had to hold back a surge of gastric acids and—yep, you guessed it—grapefruit juice. Gross.

 

There is some back-story here that I would rather not delve into. Also, I have been issued a challenge, and while I think it’s a cruel and petty challenge, I also like to win (enough that I will put myself through the sheer madness of what I am about to reveal).  I have offended my soft and innocent British friend, Bulent (I’m being euphemistic; he is a hairy beast and I have a picture of him that would make a philandering priest blush), with my language and my weird obsessions with the female anatomy. This is it: draft up a posting that contains no swearing, no talk of adult-themed things, and is grandma-friendly. (I’m adding my own caveat here: his grandma, not mine. My grandma can make me look like Little Bo Peep, and not the adult version.)

 

Rather than torture you with a trite paraphrase of our arrangement, I have copied and pasted our discussion below (it’s in backwards chronological order, by way of Facebook).  I will also add that I spent a wildly enjoyable New Years Eve (2000) with this cretin at the Hogmanay Festival in Edinburgh and forgive him his…Englishness. This posting is for Bulent.

 

 

Bulent Yusuf (London) wrote
at 8:21am yesterday

Whoopee! Can’t wait!

Write on Bulent’s Wall - Delete

 

 

Shelagh Baird wrote
at 8:17am yesterday

Whoa whoa whoa! That’s a little extreme, pal. You’re on.

Write on My Wall - Delete

 

 

Bulent Yusuf (London) wrote
at 7:58am yesterday

I wonder if you could manage to write a single blog post without any expletives or anything that could possibly offend my dear old grandmother. I CHALLENGE THEE!

Write on Bulent’s Wall - Delete

 

 

Shelagh Baird wrote
at 7:55am yesterday

Oh. Yeah. I forgot about the blow jobs and muscle relaxers. Umlauts are G-rated, though. I think Hustler is still safe for you. Stop being a prude.

Write on My Wall - Delete

 

 

Bulent Yusuf (London) wrote
at 7:53am yesterday

“20% Off Blow Jobs, Umlauts, and Muscle Relaxers” If that’s G-rated, doll-face, I’m canceling my subscription to Hustler.

Write on Bulent’s Wall - Delete

 

 

Shelagh Baird wrote
at 7:48am yesterday

Wha’?! I keep it G-rated for the faint of heart like you.

Write on My Wall - Delete

 

 

Bulent Yusuf (London) wrote
at 7:37am yesterday

Shelagh, I can’t read your blog anymore, it’s GROSS!

 

 

It is still cold here, and rainy, and I am frequently reminded of November, except I don’t get to look forward to snowboarding on the weekend. A friend informed me that the coldest spring on record for Seattle was 1917 but that we are tied this year with 1908 for being the second coldest. This does nothing to improve my sour mood and I know it is somewhat cliché to discuss the weather but this is what I am reduced to when my usual fodder is stymied. I feel undignified.

 

The lieutenant visited last week and, briefly, my soul lifted, and I was purely happy and totally in love. I still am totally in love but now that he has returned to his dank quarters on the hateful boat, I am back to being mired in this S.A.D. funk. To cope, I skeeeeedaddled this weekend up to Bellingham, which may be my favorite place on the planet, and met Maggie, the awesome daughter of my awesome friend, Brian. She reminds me of my friend, Roberto, who is an incredible artist, musician, and funny-man. (Maggie doesn’t look like him and isn’t particularly Chilean in her mien but she has a thoughtfulness about her that most people just don’t have.)  We ate pretzels and fish tacos and macaroni and cheese and her daddy and I drank a pint of Boundary Bay’s finest hand-crafted. She made my ovaries ping.

 

Then Oly and I went down to Larrabee, where we were completely alone. (Bliss!) I bouldered for awhile, and Oly collected bits of dead crab in a pile and proceeded to gleefully roll around in his handiwork.  I was unimpressed and am resolute in my opinion that dogs are disgusting creatures.

 

Met Eric at the Beer Shrine later—I knew I would find him there—and hung out with him and his very pregnant wife, Sarah, for the night. They are an awesome couple and I only point this out because Dan and I have a running list of awesome couples. (This list is, sadly, quite short, and please don’t ask if you’re on it or not. If you are, chances are, I’ve already gotten happy, lovey drunk and told you. If you’re not, it doesn’t mean I think you are a bad person, just that you make bad choices. I’m kidding.)

 

In closing, I am at work and also unimpressed with my productivity today.  To prove that I actually do anything (and to end this torturous exercise in grandma-language), I am copy-pasting my latest output, a somewhat pompous discourse on the thirtieth anniversary of the Alma Ata Declaration. Have fun with that…

 

Happy, Bulent?  I prefer you hairy in the sleeping bag reading Busty magazine.

 

 [BABBLE DELETED for work reasons]