We know what you are asking, dear reader, you are asking when does an innocent piece of duct tape – useful for all sorts of things: holding necessities such as refrigerator door handles and carburetors together when in a pinch, serving as a stand-in for dry wall when unsightly holes appear in the kitchen and there is no repair kit handy, becoming a source of amusing irritation for children of all ages when substituted for paper in papier mache projects and et cetera – make a better facial enhancer than Hollywood’s Best Kept Secret™, the Frownie® *?
We are pleased to be here to supply the answer: always. Duct tape, of whatever fun fashionable color you choose (Rocket Red™, Passion Purple™, Pretty Pink™ (yes, we wish we were making these up, but no, sadly, we are not)), is always better for the face than Hollywood’s Best Kept Secret™, the Frownie®.
We know this begs the simple but rather complicated question: pbjroom, how is it that you are so intimate in your knowledge of facial repair cosmetics? It’s funny (but not in the ha-ha sense of the word) that you should ask because, of course, not needing any facial repair at all whatsoever, we are not intimate in our knowledge of facial repair cosmetics, or FRCs, if you will. We are, however, as we have mentioned before on numerously uncountable occasions, slaves to the marketing and merchandising machinery that twirls and glides in the very air around us, and when confronted with a box of Frownies® we are hooked, line and sinker, into the whirlwind of FRCs. To the point that we have considered forming an FRC PAC with which to lobby our dear and beloved congresspeople with (and thereby, maybe, receive free FRCs). (Because we think many of our dear and beloved congresspeople are in need of some serious FRC). (And you all know what we really mean when we say FRCs in conjunction with congresspeople, wink wink.)
Okay.
We are sort of (not really) kidding about forming a PAC, but then, if you can’t lick ‘em (and you shouldn’t: that’s just gross), you might as well join them, but that’s a completely different story for a completely different post.
Because this post is actually only about the 19 and a half seconds it takes to rip a Frownie® from your face, per the instructions on the box.
Here’s what you do: apply Frownie® at night to various areas of your face: your forehead, your eyes, your mouth, the delicate and extraordinarily sensitive areas known as the nostrils, essentially anywhere you already have or want to prevent from having frown lines. And here in the pbjroom, we want no frown lines on our nostrils (or anywhere else for that matter which is why one of us who will go unnamed put Frownies® on his kneecaps last night which would have been fine except that he put them too low and captured a lot of what was formerly called leg hair, but that too is another story for an completely other post). Basically speaking, because we do so hate technical jargon talk here in the room, you moisten the Frownie®, pull off the appliqué paper backing, and stick on skin surface (lathered, washed, rinsed, repeated). Then, you experience the TA-DA moment of wearing Frownies® whilst you slumber. In fact, as a note of caution, stay away from too many TA-DA moments whilst slumbering least you, like one of us, don’t actually. Slumber, that is. Because you’re TA-DAing all over the danged place until almost 3:30 a.m.. And Frownies® should not be mistaken for Didn’tGetEnoughSleepies® because they’re not those at all: they’re Frownies®.
Then, in the morning, when you gently awake from your non-slumbering, stumble carefully into the bathroom and, following the instructions, remoisten the Frownies® you have not coated in drool, and, and we can’t emphasize this part enough, gently remove the Frownies® slowly from your sensitive and delicate skin by slowly moving them up and off with moistened fingers. Now, before you begin thinking how safe and easy that sounds, we would like to mention that one of the primary ingredients of the Frownies® (and their amazing wrinkle curative and preventative powers) is Super Glue®. Or, at the least, Gorilla Glue®. Whichever, Frownies®, we discovered, take Frownie® removal as a personal affrontage and attack, they (we are indeed anthropomorphizing them) consider Frownie® removal – although seemingly an inherent part of their make-up, if you will – as a battle between themselves (the good guys doing good things!) and the remover(s) (the bad guys doing bad things!), and they will, with the strength of 10,000,000,000 leeches, latch on to the tender spot they have sworn to protect and serve in their Frownie® Removal Code™, another FRC of theirs.
Or at least they did to one of us this morning when we tried to safely and effectively remove the Frownies® from our delicate areas where the Gorilla Glue® had penetrated overnight.
The thing is, if you rip Duct Tape from your face (or kneecaps, as it might be), you can sort of feel, well, y’know, ripped and tough (if that’s your desire) about what you have done, whereas if something called a Frownie®, which is, as we now know, Hollywood’s Best Kept Secret™, kicks your dragging morning ass over a little adhesive, you have a faintly powerless day all day and wonder about what you might be missing by not becoming a firewalker or an active nail-bed meditation person.
Or, at least, you might. You might not. We sure did, and thought we’d share. All day, wondering about the worth of firewalking.
In case you are wondering, dear reader, what in the world this post is about, we say, with approximately 108 or so hours betwixt now and then, this post is about love, love, love and the various and sundry forms it takes.
So it goes.
* - Seriously. We are not making this up. Go to Frownies
and see for yourself, dear reader, see for yourself.
6/22/07
The Post Our Reader Has Been Waiting For
When last we spoke, dear reader, we were remodeling and tooling around about basement digging and melodious elves and the hyperjump an aardvark can make from the fire to the frying pan, which is we understand terribly different than the leap from the sinking boat into the shark-infested waters.
Shark!! Shark!! you’d say, if you made that leap, whereas with a frying pan jump, you would not. Say Shark!! Shark!!, we mean. Because there maybe probably wouldn’t also be a shark in the frying pan with you because if there maybe probably was that would essentially constitute double indemnity which is illegal in most of the literate states.
So, naturally, this got us to thinking about the non-literate states, such as Texas for a leading example, and what maybe non-literate states might have to do with the planned hydraulic expansion we are looking forward to here in the pbjroom. We say “are” and yet, as you might be interested in knowing, we mean “were.”
We had plan “A,” the one where we remodeled the kitchen, the master bath, added a basement and threw in some really cool hydraulics for such necessary things as drop-down shelving, roof-raising and the future ability to convert the entire house into a Winnebago. Now we have plan “B,” the one where we do not remodel the kitchen or the master bath, where we do not add a basement and where we do emphatically not install some really cool hydraulics for any necessity at all. Plan “B” was born on the 4th of June when our municipality held a public hearing on the necessity of buying our house out from under us so they could build a bigger better road to handle all the traffic from all the empty lots that they are buying for the road. In municipality thinking, this makes sense. In fact, they were not, originally (unless we allow our rampant paranoia to run, uhm, rampant), going to buy our house but rather were going to leave us approximately 3 and a half meters from the new four-lane divided minor arterial where German automakers could test their latest propulsion engines. Or so it seems, judging from the non-posted speed limit sign that reads, and we quote, “Whatever.”
So, we developed plan “C,” the one where we do not do anything at all for a couple of weeks, waiting to see if the municipality will listen to reason and buy our house out from under us (as we proposed at the public hearing because we, honestly, do not currently own flak jackets nor do we think they would go all that well with our new spiffy Chucks and/or saddle-oxfords).
Well, dear reader, the second public hearing on the proposal to buy our house has come and gone, and VOILA!!
We are practically homeless. Okay, not “practically” homeless, but more “for all intensive purposes” homeless. Yes, yes, there are topo-surveys to be done, there are fair-market values to be determined, there are civil engineers involved to muck everything up tremendously and to be extraordinarily dry while doing so, there are negotiations to be had, there are plants to be distributed, there are paving stones to be removed, et cetera, et cetera. We should be, if we are calculating correctly, practically homeless in precisely six and three-quarters years from now, if the municipality really gets a fire lit under their municipal behinds. Until then, we are living large on the fat of the zero point 6% principle we will be paying the bank for the privilege of having a non-hydraulic-enhanced roof over our heads.
Oh, by the way, these are exciting times.
We are, as we write, a little over seven and a half days away from the big splashdown, the big eternal bond, the big cheese-ola, the big ham sandwich, the big we forget what we were going to say here but a little over seven and a half days away from the tying of the knot, to put it in gentle legalese terminology.
We have been given a bit of a reprieve in that the he of us has told the she of us that she should use this time wisely to consider her decision, as the he of us is going bald, fat, toothless, blind and deaf quicker than you can say “elephantitis of the syllable.” The he of us also has a bad heart and is prone to chigger bites when he gets within twenty feet of a bush, a shrub, a blade of grass or an electric lawn trimmer. But that’s probably a story for a different time.
The she of us is still cautiously enthusiastic about going forward in a sideways manner with the whole affair, and so, caution to the wind, we will proceed forward in a sideways manner on the 30th of the month of June at precisely or approximately or around 10:30ish a.m. or so, give or take.
Bi-focals, the doctor said, as if that meant anything at all, anything other than “good heavens you are getting old and going blind at an alarming clip.” Hrumph.
We pledge and promise to be more updatative if you, dear reader, promise to keep those cards and letters coming.
PS: the she of us would have us know that “cautiously enthusiastic” does not begin to describe her current and impending feelings, most of which the he of us will not begin to understand although he will make a valiant effort for a while until his memory goes, along with his hair, waistline, molars and canines, sight, hearing and boyish good looks, at which point he will lapse into a power-tool laden workbench or an indecipherable and unimportant spreadsheet to see if he can find his empathetic powers there. She will wait patiently or not, depending on his mumblings.
So it goes.
Shark!! Shark!! you’d say, if you made that leap, whereas with a frying pan jump, you would not. Say Shark!! Shark!!, we mean. Because there maybe probably wouldn’t also be a shark in the frying pan with you because if there maybe probably was that would essentially constitute double indemnity which is illegal in most of the literate states.
So, naturally, this got us to thinking about the non-literate states, such as Texas for a leading example, and what maybe non-literate states might have to do with the planned hydraulic expansion we are looking forward to here in the pbjroom. We say “are” and yet, as you might be interested in knowing, we mean “were.”
We had plan “A,” the one where we remodeled the kitchen, the master bath, added a basement and threw in some really cool hydraulics for such necessary things as drop-down shelving, roof-raising and the future ability to convert the entire house into a Winnebago. Now we have plan “B,” the one where we do not remodel the kitchen or the master bath, where we do not add a basement and where we do emphatically not install some really cool hydraulics for any necessity at all. Plan “B” was born on the 4th of June when our municipality held a public hearing on the necessity of buying our house out from under us so they could build a bigger better road to handle all the traffic from all the empty lots that they are buying for the road. In municipality thinking, this makes sense. In fact, they were not, originally (unless we allow our rampant paranoia to run, uhm, rampant), going to buy our house but rather were going to leave us approximately 3 and a half meters from the new four-lane divided minor arterial where German automakers could test their latest propulsion engines. Or so it seems, judging from the non-posted speed limit sign that reads, and we quote, “Whatever.”
So, we developed plan “C,” the one where we do not do anything at all for a couple of weeks, waiting to see if the municipality will listen to reason and buy our house out from under us (as we proposed at the public hearing because we, honestly, do not currently own flak jackets nor do we think they would go all that well with our new spiffy Chucks and/or saddle-oxfords).
Well, dear reader, the second public hearing on the proposal to buy our house has come and gone, and VOILA!!
We are practically homeless. Okay, not “practically” homeless, but more “for all intensive purposes” homeless. Yes, yes, there are topo-surveys to be done, there are fair-market values to be determined, there are civil engineers involved to muck everything up tremendously and to be extraordinarily dry while doing so, there are negotiations to be had, there are plants to be distributed, there are paving stones to be removed, et cetera, et cetera. We should be, if we are calculating correctly, practically homeless in precisely six and three-quarters years from now, if the municipality really gets a fire lit under their municipal behinds. Until then, we are living large on the fat of the zero point 6% principle we will be paying the bank for the privilege of having a non-hydraulic-enhanced roof over our heads.
Oh, by the way, these are exciting times.
We are, as we write, a little over seven and a half days away from the big splashdown, the big eternal bond, the big cheese-ola, the big ham sandwich, the big we forget what we were going to say here but a little over seven and a half days away from the tying of the knot, to put it in gentle legalese terminology.
We have been given a bit of a reprieve in that the he of us has told the she of us that she should use this time wisely to consider her decision, as the he of us is going bald, fat, toothless, blind and deaf quicker than you can say “elephantitis of the syllable.” The he of us also has a bad heart and is prone to chigger bites when he gets within twenty feet of a bush, a shrub, a blade of grass or an electric lawn trimmer. But that’s probably a story for a different time.
The she of us is still cautiously enthusiastic about going forward in a sideways manner with the whole affair, and so, caution to the wind, we will proceed forward in a sideways manner on the 30th of the month of June at precisely or approximately or around 10:30ish a.m. or so, give or take.
Bi-focals, the doctor said, as if that meant anything at all, anything other than “good heavens you are getting old and going blind at an alarming clip.” Hrumph.
We pledge and promise to be more updatative if you, dear reader, promise to keep those cards and letters coming.
PS: the she of us would have us know that “cautiously enthusiastic” does not begin to describe her current and impending feelings, most of which the he of us will not begin to understand although he will make a valiant effort for a while until his memory goes, along with his hair, waistline, molars and canines, sight, hearing and boyish good looks, at which point he will lapse into a power-tool laden workbench or an indecipherable and unimportant spreadsheet to see if he can find his empathetic powers there. She will wait patiently or not, depending on his mumblings.
So it goes.
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