ButtercupPunch – “La clique, c’est chic!”

Me: You are vexing me right now. If I was there, I’d put you in a headlock.

Him: And I’d let you just so I could nuzzle your boob.

Me: But I’d be kneeing you in the face.

Him: And I wouldn’t mind because I’d be palming your ass.

Me: But then I’d bite you really hard.

Him: Your teeth are adorable.

Y’all, I’ve crossed over to the dark side. I am officially a pawn for my corporate overlords. That’s right, even though it’s not technically what I do here, I used my writing skills for my actual employer. But that’s not even the disturbing part. The disturbing part is that my company hired out the creation of their on-hold message, and what they got from Corporate Hold Messages Inc* was decidedly unprofessional, verbose, grammatically insane, and barely in English. Because so many of you are fans of our shared language and reading about misfortunes in the daily lives of the Buttercups, I thought I’d recap the whole damn hot mess for you.

Fear for the future of America after the jump! (more…)

Normally, if you offered to show me a video of a high school kid doing his best Slim Shady in aid of his Student Body President campaign (and a kid from one of my local high schools, no less), my reaction would be… unenthused.

If you then told me that an Abraham Lincoln costume and a clown were involved, you might spark some interest.  If you further elaborated and said that the dorkily awesome kid uses no misogyny, fake guns, or cusswords, but sticks with humor and a truly solid beat, I would mull it over.  If you finally promised that he keeps it perfectly timed at a tidy two-and-a-half minutes, you’d have my full attention.  Behold, Andrew Edison for Student Body President in “A Vote For Me”:

You win, kid.  I would definitely have voted for you, and wanted you to be my senior prom date.  Call me.  On the telephone.

I don’t know how Facebook has figured out I am in my 40s and divorced, but in addition to wrinkle cures, I also get ads for mature dating services. This one is hilarious, however, because I actually think they are trying to suggest that this Shrek-like person is someone desperate old hags like me might find attractive.

Meet Elite Mature Singles

Dating for mature singles can be very difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. Mature Singles Only believes that no one should be alone.

Uhhh, Facebook? Thanks, but I’d rather be on my own. You might want to suggest to me some “oldies” who look like Sam Shepard or Denzel Washington or Kevin Bacon or Richard Gere, not the lost Stooge.

Today I noticed Firefox was telling me something: my “most visited” blog, other than BCP, was this one, The Pioneer Woman.

Given I have long yearned to be a farmhouse wife, I suppose this makes sense. My favorite books growing up were the “Little House” books. I still have a rich fantasy life that involves farming my own land,  milking my own cows, churning my own butter and hanging out my clothes to dry in the sun. Of course, the farm husband in this fantasy is Robert Redford from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Remember when he removed Katherine Ross’s petticoat? Yes, THAT Robert Redford. (A common, lifelong sexual fantasy involves sexytimes with Sundance on a blizzardy night under the blankets after he has seductively removed my petticoat in our bedroom in our little house on the prairie as a fire roars in the woodstove and the chill’uns sleep soundly — oh yes.) (more…)

I know how to live. I spent part of my Friday night in a live chat with a faceless Bank of America representative. It got kind of funny.

Y’all, this is another one of those situations in which I am unsure how much stroppiness is warranted.  The last time I asked for your opinion was not long ago, regarding gay boys and groping, but I have to say this strikes a different level of annoyance.  Here’s how it started:  I was on the phone with my boyfriend, and we were talking about hypothetical babies, as you sometimes do, sort of as a practice run .  You know what I mean:  You sling jokingly awful names at each other (“let’s call a boy Hagar and a girl Millicent”) and rib each other on the worst characteristics with which we’ll endanger our future offspring (“let’s hope they avoid your jug-ears and my manic-depression,” or whatever).

Anyway, this good-hearted ribbing is going very well, until I ask him about his parents’ coloring.  I’ve met them a couple times, but couldn’t pin down their natural hair and eye color, especially as they’re graying a bit.  My own mother, a brown-eyed brunette, told me how surprised she was to have a blonde, blue-eyed baby, so I was drawing on my fragmented recollection of junior high biology to guess what my own spawn would look like if I chose to reproduce with the current boy (who has thick black hair, a red beard when he grows it, and green eyes).  Seriously, I recall that his father has brown eyes and his mother greeny-blue, but it seemed reasonable to ask the guy who has known them for, oh, nearly 30 years.  Could he hazard a guess?  Nerp. (more…)

In honor of ButtercupPunch’s one year anniversary, Ms. Gloria Steinem chose to turn 75 as a show of feminist solidarity.  To crib liberally (pun! Okay, by “liberally” I meant “entirely”) from Wednesday’s Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of Gloria Steinem, born in Toledo, Ohio (1934). Her father was an antique dealer and a summer resort operator who traveled all over the country in a trailer, looking for new business ventures. Steinem said, “He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink.” She traveled around the country, never attending school, until her parents separated, and she moved in with her mother.

But her mother’s mental health began to break down, and Steinem had to take over all the cooking and cleaning and shopping. She said that her mother was “an invalid who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches and dime pies.” Young Gloria became obsessed with Shirley Temple movies, hoping to be rescued miraculously from poverty, just like the little girl on the screen.

She managed to get into Smith College because she scored so well on her entrance examinations. After college, she went to work as a journalist. She wrote celebrity journalism for a while, but she became more interested in feminism after she wrote an article about the prevalence of illegal abortions, and all her male colleagues tried to persuade her not to publish it. She was a founder of Ms. magazine, whose first issue came out in January 1972.

Gloria Steinem said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”

Oh, y’all. Sometimes this beauty business weighs heavy on my heart. Not only did I hear just this morning that Scarlett Johansson is dieting off her famous, fabulous, enviable curves, but I also got this email from our pal J. Gold:

I’m young. I take good care of my skin. Apparently, though, I must walk around with a quizzical, eyebrows-raised expression on my face at all times because for about a year now I’ve noticed faint horizontal wrinkles on my forehead when I get all up in my bizzness in the mirror. I tried to will away my concern about this as vanity, I gotta deal with aging, you can’t see them if you’re more than two inches away from me blahblahblah until two weeks ago, when I met a 25-year-old (or so she said) who had canyon-deep forehead wrinkles. It aged her terribly and was all I could focus on when I looked at her. It wouldn’t have wigged me out if I’d seen wrinkles like this on a forty-year-old, but this woman was 25. I am now terrified of developing wrinkles like this. Is there anything one can do to prevent wrinkle formation or help smooth them out if you’ve already got ‘em? I’m a fanatical sunscreen wearer; is there any other goop I can put on my face to improve the linage situation? I don’t want to be a Nicole Kidmanesque botox-head when I’m older, but I definitely, definitely don’t want a forehead with huge horizontal lines in it. Help!

Srsly, y’all. I look in the mirror sometimes and worry that I’m turning Klingon.

Siiiiigh. Insecurities are such a bitch. But J. Gold’s concern is a legitimate one, and it’s one I happen to share. See, if there’s anything J. and I have in common (besides living in the same state, having mutual friends, and possessing a shared love of sequins and general air of radness) it’s our skin type. So don’t get upset by what I’m about to say. I’m not jumping to any misguided conclusions, I know exactly of what I speak. In short, J: you are so WHITE. I feel your cracker pain, girl. Of every trait I could have gotten out of my crazy-mixed-up heritage, I had to get the Irish-ass skin. Native American cornsilk hair, potato famine skin. Dammit! Oh well, my point is that pale skin is akin to porcelain in both appearance and fragility. Structurally speaking, typically the fairer one is, the thinner and weaker their skin. You know how they say ‘Black don’t crack?” Well it’s pretty much true, and as you follow the color spectrum on down to the truly melanin-deficient, you get more wrinkle-prone skin.

Basically what I’m saying is: your genetics have predisposed that you’re kind of screwed. Sure, there are things you can do to try and stave off wrinkles, but when your dermis is a structurally sound as onion paper, acceptance of the inevitable is the only true path to sanity retention. Now that you’ve been diagnosed with a terminal case of Honkey, I’ll walk you through the coping strategy after the jump. (more…)

Man, what a year.  From the stoned out, boozed up madness of a group chat came the idea to start ButtercupPunch, and despite the challenges of full time working/living/blogging, I wouldn’t change any of it.  I have learned so much from my co-bloggers and had so much fun along the way.  We collaborate on ideas, we edit for each other and not a day goes by that we don’t talk to each other, despite all being located hundreds of miles apart.  So before I get to my reader picks, I would like to take a moment to celebrate my bitches – holla.

My commie love, after the jump. (more…)