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Rhianna says “Please Don’t Stop the Music” – yet proceeds to kill my IPOD

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I constantly chastise my wife because she leaves tissues or loose change or dollar bills scrunched up in the pockets of her clothing all the time; she never checks them before putting them into the laundry basket. I know, I know, it could be worse – I could have a wife that hits me or has bad hair or runs up credit card debt, but this is serious. Every time that she does it, I take it as an opportunity to get on my soapbox and tell her how it is irresponsible and that she needs to check each and every time. “It’s not that hard to check the pockets” I’m prone to saying. I don’t feel good while doing this to her, but I hate, hate, hate, to have torn up tissues mixed in with the clothes. It gets all over and annoys me to no end. Or worse than that is if I stick my hand into her pants pocket to check and grab a disgusting snot rag – GROSS and that is exactly how my last fist fight started.  I don’t bring this up to rat her out or make her feel bad; I bring this up because what goes around came around for me.  Don’t tell her, but I accidentally left my IPOD in the pocket of my bathrobe and put it through the Washer AND the Dryer which destroyed it.  

I keep my IPOD set up in the bathroom with speakers.  I need it there in order to time myself when I shower so that I will know how long to stay in there. It regulates me and keeps me on track. Some might say that it is enabling my compulsions and rituals (yes – I’m talking to you Turtle Lady!) She thinks that I need to evict it from the bathroom immediately, but how else will I know how long my son should be in the bath if I don’t play the specific number of songs? Don’t even waste your time trying to understand my cleanliness rituals – they will just confuse, frustrate, and annoy you. 

My IPOD died in vain folks. It all happened because I had gotten some new music on ITunes and Damn you Rhianna! You asked me to make you feel like you’re The Only Girl in the World and you had to make that song so God Damn catchy, Didn’t you! I’m dancing around like a fool and can’t get that song out of my head and my poor innocent IPOD paid the price for it. I took my shower, finished my routine, and put the IPOD into my bathrobe pocket so that I could go downstairs to my office and download that song onto my IPOD. Unfortunately, as I’m often prone to do – I got distracted with my usual nonsense and forgot that it was in my pocket. I removed my robe, got dressed, threw it into the hamper to wash and the rest is history.

As a rule, I never check the pockets in my clothes because I never need to. I always empty my pockets when I take off my clothes. Multiple times. I am a neurotic individual who has to do things many times in a row so you know that I always check the pockets again and again in case I left my keys or the winning Powerball ticket in there. My wife never checks her pockets, so I always make sure to check hers again and again. (Once again with the multiples.) I got paid back in spades for lecturing her over and over when I threw my bathrobe into the washing machine. One can debate the frequency with which I clean said bathrobe and how if I didn’t wash it as much this might not have happened – but it’s easier for me to blame Rhianna on this one.          

As I opened the dryer door, there it was. My poor little green Nano looking up at me helpless and wondering why…just…why…I immediately picked it up and started blowing into the bottom of it to see if I could dry it off in some way – but nothing. (It’s funny because I would never attempt CPR on a human because of my fear of other people’s filthy mouths, bad breath, and, most of all I‘m lazy – but an electric music device brings out the hero in me.) Of course I was cursing myself profusely and being reminded of how stupid I really am to have done that, but I was still hoping above all hope that it just might flicker on. I cradled that poor mint-colored baby and spoke gently with encouraging words, hoping for some miracle resuscitation like when Jack and Kate found Charlie and brought him back to life after Ethan had hung him in those vines on Lost. (Another time that beloved saga made me tear up like a little school girl that missed the bus– don’t even get me started about when Jin and Sun died together on that sub in Season Six because I’m still not over that!)

I then realized what an idiot I must look like trying to give CPR to my dead IPOD on the laundry room counter. Imagine the looks I would get if my wife walked in on me shouting into that dead IPOD’s face “Whitney , come on Whitney – are you still in there Baby?” I really felt like – all of a sudden –  Ms. Houston was gonna just flash on that display screen and maybe I was hallucinating, but I could almost swear that she looked me in the eyes and purred softly “Didn’t we almost have it all…”

Needless to say, my shower the next morning was not OK and I was all out of whack. I did not pass go and went immediately to Best Buy to get a replacement at lunchtime. (This is a big deal for me to admit because me and Best Buy have a long and sordid, love/hate relationship dating back to a certain incident a few years ago that I still cannot talk about without getting irate. Long story short, it had to do with a McDonald’s Monopoly game piece and a piss-poor online ordering experience which led to me to their hotline screaming and threatening to call Ask Asa! The operator finally shut me up and got me off the phone when I told her that I had their address and I was on my way over to the call center. It wasn’t true, but she didn’t know that and credited me back to get me off the phone.) I left Best Buy without incident (this time) with my new IPOD in hand and all was right with my shower today.

Lesson learned here: If Rhianna ever tries to Disturbia my bathroom routine again, that bitch is off my IPOD and out of my shower forever!!! And little green nano in whatever dump site you end up at – “Call me Rude Boy” but I had to get a new model…I had to go on. I really wanted to be like Rose telling Jack in the end of Titanic: “I’ll never let go Jack” but your name wasn’t Jack and I needs me some music for my shower…

AS A POSTSCRIPT TO THIS POST:
I asked my wife to read this and see what she thought of it before I posted it. As she was reading it, she looked over at me, laughed to herself, then looked back at the laptop screen, and then she looked back at me and laughed again. I was thinking how clever she must have thought I was with my Rhianna Song title play-on-words in the post, but no – she wasn’t laughing at that. She proceeded to then reach into her front pants pocket and pull out my Banana Republic Credit Card! She looked up at me and said “Oh, that reminds me…I forgot to give you this back after I ordered that stuff…” I rest my case people!

Assaulting Tom Cruise-Part 2: Great, now Rosie O’Donnell thinks I’m a scumbag

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This has nothing to do with my post, but I just think this photo is hysterical

 

In case you didn’t read it here, I went to London and assaulted Tom Cruise while trying to meet Nicole Kidman, and then forged his signature to get the movie placard he just leaned on across the Atlantic Ocean intact so that I could give to Rosie O’Donnell – now what! Getting to Rosie O’Donnell with the placard and telling her my story seemed like such an easy thing in my head. Why wouldn’t she want to meet me? It actually turned into a little but of a  daunting task but I knew there had to be a way.          

Waiting for tickets the old-fashioned way wasn’t working, and time just kept going by. One day I was looking for the car keys on my aunt’s desk in the basement and saw a gift certificate for a pair of Rosie O’Donnell Show tickets from an auction that she had attended on her desk. I was at first shocked and then mad as hell and went to find that bitch to rip her wig off. I took that certificate and stormed up the steps like Joan Crawford into Christina’s closet when she saw that wire hanger. (My aunt actually wore wigs because she thought that they looked better than her real hair – and she was right  – not because she was sick or losing her hair. I could actually go on about her wigs and the drama with them like when she had the “Rachel” from Friends or when the sand fleas in Paris Island started claiming squatter’s rights in her new Raquel Welch glazed mocha “Tigress” wig or the Cher infomercial extensions that were weaved through your head using a series of fishing wire strings, but I will save that for another post…(As a side note, it’s amazing to me that more women don’t wear wigs. I say shave your head and get one in every color. Leave it on the dresser at night, and then wake up and shake the dust off, put it on your head and you’re ready to walk out the door. You could save so much time, sleep later, and you’d use less products…Think of it as going Green Extreme! I think it could really catch on…)        

She was on the phone, but I didn’t care – “You selfish fuck! You know that I need to talk to Rosie and you went and got tickets? What’s wrong with you? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. Seriously, you don’t think that’s selfish?” She looked at me with a mix of mild annoyance and disgust and then spat back at me – “That’s your Christmas present asshole!” (If I wasn’t a mix of scitzo-madness right there, I never have been in my life and I changed my tune real quick) “Oh my God, I love you – where did you get them? I can’t believe this” I exclaimed as I now tried to hug her. Other people might have thought this an odd exchange, but in my family insanity is the norm, and really I was just so excited about going I forgot right away about thinking that she was being selfish.         

So, we got the tickets and had the date in January all set – nothing was going to stop me now! Or so I thought…         

When I got back from London, I left the placard at my father’s house which is about ninety minutes from my girlfriend’s house. On the night before the taping, we left to her house to go and get the placard at my Dad’s and in the middle of a terrible snowstorm, her car broke down. By the time we got the car towed by Triple A and then back to her mother’s house, it was almost one am. I was ready to borrow her mother’s car and get back out on the road so we could get the placard, because I had my priorities straight, but they looked at me like I just suggested that we test it out to see if you really do get pink eye from someone farting on your pillow. (Insert your favorite New Jersey Revenue Director that wears the belt of his pants so high that it could actually be confused as a dog collar here. This has already happened to him this summer when his wife farted on his pillow and he got a really bad case in both eyes!!!) Needless to say, they wouldn’t go and I couldn’t drive stick shift or I would have taken the keys and made a run for it. I wouldn’t stop complaining about it and right before I stormed off to bed I said “How am I gonna go tomorrow without the placard? What am I supposed to do,  jump up and down to get Rosie’s attention? (This is the point of the story where you would normally hear the ominous foreshadowing music in the background…)         

We ended up taking the train to NYC for the show since we could no longer drive. I complained the whole train ride and then the whole subway ride (for a real reason now, not just out of principle that I think I’m too good to ride on the filthy subway) and then the whole time while we were waiting in line to get into the theatre for the show. One might say just another day in my life with my normal routine, but I am usually a little better than that…         

Since they were bought at an auction, we had really great seats right in front next to the piano player John and I stopped complaining and quickly got hyped up again. Winona Ryder was the first guest and everyone got copies of the Girl, Interrupted book and then they went to commercial. Edie Falco came on and everyone got copies of the Soprano’s soundtrack, and then they went to commercial. Time was going by so quickly and I could just feel my opportunity slipping by me with every koosh ball she shot out at me. (For the record, I caught two and the third she shot toward me went horribly off course – one would think with all the practice she had shooting those things that she would have spot-on precision like a sniper. I didn’t realize until later why she kept shooting them my way.)         

          

They go to the next commercial and Rosie was up and out of her chair walking towards me and I could just feel the fates aligning and the stars were all in a row like this is the way it is supposed to happen. As she stopped in front of our seats and started talking, it was just her and I and we both knew it. She looked right at me (or so I thought) and said “Does anyone have anything they would like to say or have any questions?” I guess, in hindsight, I should have known that she wouldn’t be talking to me at that exact  moment; I mean how would she know that I so desperately wanted to tell her about Tom Cruise? Just as the words were just leaving her mouth it was like something out of a movie: to everyone’s (especially my girlfriend’s) surprise, I burst out of my seat like someone set me on fire  – like a roman candle exploding into the air on the Fourth of July. Most surprised of all, was the person sitting in back of me that Rosie was actually talking to and who I had jumped up in front of. I could tell that someone else got up too, but I couldn’t see who it was and didn’t dare miss my chance to talk to Rosie.        

I started screaming and talking a mile a minute about how I had assaulted Tom Cruise and screamed in his face and forged his name and smuggled the placard back by lying and tricking the airline into letting me get it onto the plane. I guess that in hindsight (there goes that hindsight thing again) I should have actually thought out what I was going to say beforehand so that it painted me in a little bit of a better light, but I just got so excited and I knew that she was going to just love me and my story and that she would probably call me a Cutie Patooty and laugh and then get Nicole to meet me and she’d end up with Tom and I’d be with Nicole and we would go on vacations together and we would most certainly be friends after this. Sadly though, that isn’t how it turned out.         

Rosie, of course, was trying to take in my incoherent ramblings and looked at me with amazement and then asked me the obvious question: “Where’s the placard?” At that moment, I felt a definite shift in my stomach and knew this wasn’t going so well and might not have been a good idea – sort of like eating McDonald’s before heading to the airport for a six hour flight. With that, I shot daggers at my girlfriend and proceeded to tell Rosie about how her car had broken down and she was so selfish for not driving me with her mother’s car to get it at one am and what was wrong with her. Once again, not painting myself in the best light. Rosie said “Send me the placard” and then tried to dismiss me and looked past me at the person still standing in back of me. “Hi there little boy, do you have something to say?” With that one short little sentence, my stomach just dropped and I felt a very bad vibe all of a sudden as I slowly turned around and gasped.         

I turned to come face to face with a sick little bald boy all of about ten years old standing up to say how he was here courtesy of the Make a Wish Foundation and that his one wish was to meet Rosie and to see her show. NO ONE WAS MORE SHOCKED THAN ME AT THAT MOMENT! People started to take what he had just said in and there were a ton of awwwwww’s, and then every set of eyes in the place started turning from his innocent smiling face towards me and shooting daggers and staring like I was an animal. I slowly tried to sit back down in my seat but it felt like everything was happening in slow motion, to say the least. I could feel the disgust directed at me and it was radiating through the air like dust and if I would have known where the exit was I might have run out the back door, but I felt like I had to explain.  I cut Rosie off as she was talking to the boy and stood back up and started explaining – first to his mother who looked like she was about to pop me right in the chops and then back to Rosie, then to my girlfriend, then to randoms in the audience and back to the little boy and then back to Rosie…”Rosie, I didn’t know…I thought you were talking to me…(as I turned back to the boy) I thought she was talking to me…I didn’t see you…(turning back to Rosie) I didn’t see him…I thought you meant me…How could I know? I thought you meant me.” Needless to say the rest of that taping wasn’t as fun-loving as the first part and I kept trying to explain to my girlfriend, who in turn was trying to pretend she wasn’t with me and just shook her head. “I didn’t know…” I just kept repeating – “I didn’t know…”            

Apparently, when Rosie kept shooting those koosh balls towards us, she was aiming for that little boy and trying to get them to him, not to me. The narcissist in me just assumed that she wanted me to have them. I never did live that day down and I really did feel terrible about that kid. but honestly, who looks behind them before they jump up and start talking? Who else would that happen to?