It's Juicy. Why Wait?

Why is it no one calls till I'm on the phone? Is there some sort of telepathic kinesis going on? Does this phenomenon strike anyone else?

Why do well-meaning friends keep forwarding me cheesy animated kitten-angels, urban legends they failed to check on Snopes, and bad PowerPoint movies with misspelled yet heartfelt words? The forwards I can't stand, and seem to get the most of, are the superstitious prayers. Jesus loves you, and if you don't forward this to 23 friends in the next 8 minutes, God will smite you. If you do send it, you will get a miracle. As if some parent of a critically ill child could scour the internet for as many different magic God-powered e-mail forwards to store up as many "blessings" as they could to save their child. Jesus Christ, people. Don't you know it's bad luck to be superstitious?

Katy wanted to bake something and the recipe called for cream of tartar. I will never understand why it's called cream as it is a powdery substance, but anyway, I told her we didn't have any. She looked in the fridge and said, "Well, we have tartar sauce. It's creamy. Can't we use that?"

I told Katy to take a shower. Her response: "Can't I just rub some soap in my armpits?" At least she's not high-maintenance.

I was at Schlitterbahn with a friend and her 13-year old daughter. My friend and I were doing the usual people-watching that you can't help but do at a place where there is so much exposed human flesh on display. Very little of the viewing is pleasant. Most of it is of the morbid-curiosity type. So we see this, let's say, nubile (a word which has taken on a special nuance somewhat contrary to its original, more puritanical meaning) late-teenish young lady (and I use that term loosely). She is offering free (and highly visible) advertising for the Juicy Couture brand with the word Juicy spread daintily across her jiggly butt. My friend says to me, "Who would let their daughter out in public with a bikini that says 'Juicy' on the butt?" My friend's daughter goes, "Well, at least it doesn't say that on the front." Priceless humor right there.

This same friend had been going to a gym called "Why Weight?" At the same time, her daughter was in some abstinence class called "Worth the Wait." Well, my friend was talking to me and understandably got them mixed up. She started telling me about her daughter's sex education class called "Why Wait?" I'm afraid that's the way we learned it when I was in school.

Now back to my favorite hobby. Sorry, folks. I'll just start putting these at the end so you can skip them if you want to. But remember, if you don't read everything on each visit, you will not only have unimaginable tragedy befall you within 17 days, but you will also be unfulfilled, incomplete, and suffer an intractable case of chronic irritable bowel syndrome until you are either impaled by a splintery fencepost or spontaneously combust, whichever comes first.

Words I was surprised had not made the list before:

cataclysm, catapult, egregious, gregarious, lascivious, perdition, talisman, cortex, corona, bicker, squabble, finagle, frenzy (one of my new favorite bands: A Fine Frenzy), sacrosanct, salvage, platitude, vague, ingratiate, bastard, dastardly, Viagra, Niagara, Lycra, epigram, argot, shaft (mostly just the noun form, but also the 70s TV show), spasm, benevolent, belligerent, harelip (old-person word now politically-incorrect to say), bizarre, bazaar, oxymoron, idiot (one of our favorite road-rage words we don't like our kids to say), nuance, nubile, puerile, clique, metropolis, blurb, opaque, dysfunctional, symbiotic, Ikea, lunatic, maxim (not necessarily the magazine), mythical, obsolete, panacea, Dulcinea, dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy, jibber-jabber (did y'all ever see that weird sheep-boy Skittles commercial? Here's a link to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKkZ3hkDF4w), mandolin, mandarin, Rorschach, surreal, toupee, meningitis, fury, Bedouin, poignant, pantomime, verbatim, nomad, jive, jargon.

A lot of parents forbid their children from using what they call the "S" word: Stupid. In our house, the "S" word is something more expressive. We have so many other words worse than stupid to contend with, we tend to let that one slip by. We've told the kids it's not so bad to refer to a thing as stupid, but you shouldn't call a person that. Unless it's true.

Words that seem related, but definitely aren't: carouse & carousel, philander & philanthropy, organism & orgasm, flagellate & flatulate, plateau & platitude, latitude & platitude, (plateau & latitude might go together, but that's not how this game is played), antidote & anecdote, oblique & oblong, salacious & saliva. Wait ... I can see how salacious & saliva might go together. Orgasm & organism, too, for that matter.

Word that sounds like a bad breakfast: milquetoast

Words or phrases I prefer not to hear: co-dependent, tiff, in a dither (another old-person phrase), namby-pamby, priggish, vas deferens, rectal, rectum, vulva, dicker, okie-dokie (or okie-doke), gelatinous, enema.

Now, just remember, God loves you more if you gunk up your friends' in-boxes!!! Spread the Good News, you know. But throw in some threats for good measure.