Urine Gone!

So tonight I'm minding my own business, cringing while watching tv as I often do when I realize I'm absorbed in yet another reality show. I have an excuse this time though: it was ABC's HOOKING UP about online dating, and as you all know from my previous posts, I can relate to the horror of it all.

So, right smack dab in the middle of the show about 11 single women in NYC is a commercial for a product called URINE GONE*, because... I guess there's... uh... a lot of urine involved with online dating? Or a lot of lonely, single people with too many cats and not enough litter boxes watching this show? I can vouch for both of those guesses.

If you haven't yet seen this beauty of a marketing campaign, I'm not sure that I can do it any real justice here. I tried to search for the commercial online, but only came up with stills for this product, like the ones that follow (photos by Greyhawk68):

See, I'm not kidding. This is for real.

But the commercial is so bad that it begins parodying itself almost immediately. It's shot in typical infomercial/as-seen-on-tv/hi-cheese lighting, with added "scientific" blacklight segments to show the unseen urine and various other organic stains. Remember those 20/20 specials where they go into hotels and show you with a blacklight all the places on the comforter/chair/wall/mirror/ceiling that bodily fluids have been squirted? Well this commercial is rife with that kind of gross-out factor!

I found myself smirking just a bit when it first came on... then a bit more... then giggling... and before long, the giggles turned into guffaws, particularly when I saw this screen:

Not only was I laughing so hard that I nearly wet myself, which ironically would cause me to need this product (and thus had me seeing the genius behind the advertising campaign), but at this point I also became thoroughly confused.

I mean, you tell me: are we supposed to understand this as a substance that "works on" actually removing troublesome "wood, tile, concrete, linoleum," or is it a cleaner that gets that pesky urine out of your "blood, feces, organic matter"? Urine Gone, don't leave me hanging! Inquiring minds want to know!

Despite my confusion, I love this ad. It's true. I love you, Urine Gone commercial! With every ounce of "organic matter" in my body! Indoors & out!

(* Urine Gone is not to be confused with SEMENEX**.)

(** And Semenex should NEVER be confused with SEMENAX.)

Dear Abby:

I feel really, really ashamed of this... but I've just got to come clean. For the last year or so I've been avoiding someone... someone I've known forever and a day.

Now don't get me wrong. I've known her since we lived next door to each other in 7th grade and I love her to death. She's a sweet, caring, wonderful person... who just happens to have the creepiest taste in men. I mean it's worse than my taste in men often is, and that says a lot. (If you're on my friends list and think you're one of those men, you're not, okay!)

Anyway, T is on her second husband right now and I haven't known this guy all that long... only a handful of evenings spent hanging out at their house, just the three of us. What creeps me out about him isn't that he spouts off Rush Limbaugh diatribes or has really short arms, it's more than that... I don't really want to put my finger on it, but I guess I will.

Her husband completely creeps me out. He's a close-talker (likes to sit hip-to-hip when talking to me even though their couches are huge), he's always talking about which neighbors of theirs are swingers, and he's always suggesting that I should stay over at their house no matter how much/little I've had to drink and no matter that the drive home is only 40 minutes. I mean, he won't drop it... I'm on my way out the door, getting in my car even, and he's still saying: "We've got plenty of room here, really."

There's also the topic of his favorite party trick: the human heart beat.

Every time I'd hang out with them, he'd bring this up and how he loves to find some unsuspecting person at one of their neighborhood parties and surprise the poor bastard. Why is this creepy, you ask? Because this "trick" consists of him asking if you've ever seen "a human heart beat" and when the uninformed victim inevitably says "no," my friend's husband proceeds to drop trou and do something with his ballsack that makes it simulate a pulsing heart.

My first thought is: "Sweet Jesus, WHY?"

My second thought is: "What kind of delusional megalomaniac would think that anyone (much less a whole room of party goers) would want to see this dude's groceries?"

I've not witnessed this sight, thankfully. I was warned in advance by my friend that her husband liked to do this thing, then got all the gory details as he proceeded to recount the glory of his pulsing nuts.

After a couple of times of this coming up too eagerly in conversation, however, I became afraid that if I were to go back to their house that I might finally fall prey to this trap. Like he'd be hiding around every corner of their house, balls to the wind, waiting to pounce. And forget about me ever sleeping there! No way. I just know that I'd wake in the middle of the night to a pulsing sensation against my cheek.

The last time that I hung out with them, I requested a public place (a mall) and felt slightly more assured that he wouldn't risk it there. I even tried to get it to be a "girls day out" kind of thing, but the nut pusher came along anyhow. Apparently, he just doesn't let her leave his sight. And since then, my friend has emailed me several times, inviting me back to their place for various parties and festivities and I've always had an excuse. Recently, I've gotten so tired of giving excuses that I haven't even answered her last couple of emails at all. It's terrible, I know. But I haven't the energy to fend off the offers anymore.

The question that remains, given that I'm truly a shy and introverted person, is how do I tell my friend of 23 years that her hubby is too creepy for me to ever want to come around again? Do I just let her ask me why I won't come out and then reply, "Your husband's nuts," and let her figure out the double meaning or what?

Signed,
Allergic to Nuts

Girls simultaneously shout "DUH!"

Orgasms: a real ‘turn-off’ for women

17:54 20 June 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Michael Le Page, Copenhagen

For women, it seems, sex is a big turn-off, reveals a brain scanning study. It shows that many areas of the brain switch off during the female orgasm - including those involved with emotion.

“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,” says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared their brain activity in four states: simply resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner’s fingers, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm.

The results of the study are striking. As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, compared with the resting state, Holstege told a meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development in Copenhagen on Monday.

In one sense the findings appear to confirm what is already known, that women cannot enjoy sex unless they are relaxed and free from worries and distractions. "Fear and anxiety levels have to go down for orgasm. Everyone knows this but we can see it happening in the brain," he explains.

Extraordinary behaviour

From an evolutionary point of view, it could be that the brain switches off the emotions during sex because at such times the chance to produce offspring becomes more important than the survival risk to the individual. Holstege points to the extraordinary behaviour seen in some animals during the breeding season, such as March hares, when the urge to mate seems to override the usual fear of predators.

But Holstege cannot explain why there is such extreme deactivation in so many areas of the brain during orgasm. Only one small part of the brain, in the cerebellum, was more active during female orgasm. The cerebellum is normally associated with coordinating movement, though there is also some evidence that it helps regulate emotions. “We don’t know what activation of the cerebellum corresponds to,” Holstege admits.

His study also revealed clear differences when women were faking an orgasm. Part of the brain involved controlling conscious movement lit up, and there was none of the extreme deactivation.

Next the team hope to look at what happens to the brain in the minutes after orgasm, as well as in patients with sexual problems. The team has already done a similar study involving 11 men, which revealed far less deactivation during orgasm than in women. However, Holstege says the results are probably unreliable and need to be repeated. The problem is that PET scanners measure activity over two minutes - and in men it is all over in a few seconds.

About My Thesis Film...

I fucking PASSED, motherfuckers! Woot!

At some point I'll have it up on the internet for all to see. Unfortunately, it isn't this form of genius that was asked me by my friend Tom:

"so how did the film go? you didn't make a film about a film masters student showing her work to a hostile thesis advisor that happened to display negative personality traits just like your own did you? i guess that much fun should never be had at ones own expense."

No, but unfortunately, too, I'll have to make a number of tweaks and (slightly major) changes to make my thesis committee happy. I should be done with that in... oh... six more weeks or so.

What's She Building?

Everyday, people will write me to check in with the same question: "Hey, She... what have you been up to?"

Well, I'll tell ya. I've been working on audio design for my film and getting almost no sleep because of it.



I have just 11 hours left and I am in crunch mode, so what do I do? That's right. I stop to blog about... well... what I should really be doing instead of blogging.

I've also been severely congested for the last several weeks and think that I'm now getting very attached to Afrin Nasal spray. I love you Afrin. Breathing is the second best thing to having sex... the first best thing being sex, of course.

I'm not complaining about any of this, because I decided after my last whiny blog entry that I would try to look on the bright side more often. I may not have time to get to the grocery store, but that's okay as long as I have some kind of sustenance in the house.

So to end things on a positive note, let me add that I've basically been living off of Diet Coke and fried eggs for a while now, and the resulting 3-days of diarrhea has been fucking awesome! As a matter of fact, I'd go as far as to say that I'd happily recommend this weight loss technique to anyone else too busy or lazy to get their ass into the local gym. Feel the burn, people. Feel.The.Burn. Awesome, I tell ya!

Okay, I'm done reporting in now.
More sound, less chatter.

Miss Me?

You may have been wondering, like quite a few others, why there haven't been many posts from your She-Creature pal here, and you've been doing a very supportive job of emailing and cajoling me with gentle praise and flattery. I thank all of you for your support.

I've been dealing with a lot of work and bureaucratic bullshit the last week or so, basically having to do with my graduate thesis project. It's so boring that I will not go into the details here, other than the fact that I have a useless thesis advisor who I am beginning to believe is actually just jealous of my creativity. I was told a while back by another student that he has this problem, then another student told me that too, and yet stupid me kept him on as my advisor. Little did I know that he would be subtly (and not so subtly) undermining me all the way through.

To make a long story short, I have come very close to a breaking point and truly understand why some grad students suddenly go postal. Not that I will, mind you, but that doesn't stop the fantasies from playing in my head. Like this one, for instance:



That's enough of that. Hopefully all the BS will pass and I'll have my MA soon. Then I will be able to more regularly concentrate on the more important things in life. Like blogging.

Also, I was without an internet connection for a few days last week. Yes, sad but true. Wanna know why? Because Earthlink is a total scam, that's why. I decided one night last week to change local phone companies from Talk America to BellSouth to save about $8 a month. It was simple, I did it online and of course you keep your same phone number with no disruption in service.

On the day that I got the email from BellSouth stating my account was active with them, my DSL rather abruptly stopped working. I called Earthlink support and after 2 hours on the phone with the tech guys, they finally discover that someone put in a disconnect order with them. So they patched me through to the accounts people, where some other person (the 4th one in that call) looks into it and says that I ordered the disconnect.

"Um, no I didn't. I just signed up here a few months ago. I have a 1-year contract."

"Yes, you do. I see that," she tells me.

I explain that all I did was change phone carriers and then that starts another confused line of questioning.

"You switched from BellSouth to Talk America? No wonder you don't have a connection. We don't work with Talk America at all," she tells me.

"NO, I switched TO BellSouth... TO THEM. When it was working 2 hours ago, I was still with Talk America."

"That's impossible. Let me put you on hold for half of your life," she should have explained.

When she came back, she tells me this garbage about "reprovisioning the line" every time you change companies, and they have to pay the different phone company a fee, so they pass that fee onto the DSL consumer. She then matter of factly stated, "That will be a $50 disconnect and early contract termination fee, and a $99 reprovisioning fee to get your account reinstated with BellSouth. I can get your account back up and running in 2 to 3 days."

My voice went up 3 octaves and 10 decibels as I shouted, "WHAT?!?!?!?!"

I argued with her for an hour, she finally waived the $50 early disconnect fee, since she agreed that I was not technically terminating my contract, but she refused to waive any of the "reprovisioning" fee.

When the account was finally running, I had to get the tech guys to reconfigure my modem on the phone again, then call my router company and have them help me reconfigure that too... but not before Earthlink tried to convince me that my "old" router (3 months old, mind you) would not work with this system and that I should buy their wireless router for just another $149. Fuck you, Earthlink. That guy had the nerve to ask me at the end of the second 2-hour call, "Have you found this call to be helpful to you?" I shouted, "Hell no, not when I just wanted to save $8."

Just now I saw a commercial for Earthlink on tv, all these diverse, meltingpot Americans saying that they're Earthlink and they live to help their customers or some shit. Funny, but everytime I called and no matter how many times I was transferred to someone else, every single person on the other end of the phone was from India, but I didn't see a single Indian face in that Earthlink commercial. That made for some great language barriers too as I got angrier and angrier, but then wondered if I was just getting angry at some poor schlep who was going to go back to a hut and kick the neighborhood holy cow.

I don't want any hate mail, people. Of course I know that isn't the case. Oddly enough, they all had names like "Joe" and "Bob" and "Susan" and "Laura" and "Mike." That just made the frustration levels even more Outer Limits for me. Anyway, poop on you, Earthlink... for your scams and for your outsourcing.

Mother's Day morning was spent in a groggy hungover blur of wrangling the kids and my mom at 9:00 to "beat the crowds" at the local Golden Corral buffet.



The sign just screams "quality."


It was already packed, even at our ungodly early arrival time. YES, I said UNgodly, you damn early-riser, churchy types. We wound around in a snaking line of wonderful smells, like "old person," "too much perfume," "poopy diaper," and "not enough deodorant." And I think that was all coming from the one person in front of me.

The length of this line made me giddy for a moment thinking that perhaps Space Mountain or Splash Mountain was at the end, rather than the hastily prepared breakfast foods that still eerily smelled like lingering "old person," "too much perfume," "poopy diaper," and "not enough deodorant."

After filling to the brim with our fair share of grease-laden samples while crammed like sardines into the corner next to a window with broken mini-blinds and the morning sun blazing in on us, I now know what it feels like to live in a convection oven.

While some of the gang was helping themselves to ice cream and pastries, I noticed that my 9-year-old had barely touched his stack of bacon. He'd plowed through several sausage types and apparently just stopped and pushed it away... quite unlike him. Suddenly, he starts clutching his stomach and moans, "Oh, ow, ew, I'm gonna puke." I spout off "I've got him! We'll be at the car. Meet us when you're done."

I nervously ushered him out of the bustling maze of tables and old people to get just outside the doors for my son to make an urping, coughing, gagging"noise and hurl himself straight toward the awaiting line of newcomers. I shouted "OH NO YOU DON'T!" and grabbed his hand to run him to the vehicle, which was luckily around the back corner of the restaurant. I wasn't as worried about him puking on the queue as much as I was worried that his vomit would set of a chain-reaction in me, with my combination hangover and angry stomach lining.

We got to the back of the building and he leaned against a maple tree while he continued to moan and sputter and gag for another 15 or 20 minutes until my mother finally came out. Luckily nothing came out of either he nor I, though his antics made at least 2 couples change their minds about eating there. I saw them get out of their cars, look at him in horror and return to their cars with a "let's try somewhere else." After that, he and I had a heaping helping of TUMS for our dessert and we were both fine.

Then I took the kids to Target so my daughter could pick out 53 different Barbies that she wants for her birthday on the 25th. I didn't buy any, because we were really just killing time before the next running of HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. I had already seen it opening night last week and immediately disliked it, but the kids' dorkiness doesn't fall far from the tree, so they insisted that I take them anyway. They seemed to like it at least. Thankfully there were no odd movie-going experiences to report. It all was pretty smooth this time.

I think I've run out of things to type, so I'll end here.

Goodnight, you princes of Maine... you kings of New England.

I don't know why I typed that.

Sexy Friday Night

What does a hott, sexxxy, sinnnnngle laydee like me do with a whole weekend to play?

Well, first she straps one on and then she begins to make noise and gyrate all over the house... doing it in every room, in fact... for FOUR HOURS STRAIGHT! I'm an animal, I tell ya!

And now you want photos, don't you, you dirty birdies? Okay, I'm not one to disappoint.

Here's my strap-on... ain't she a beaute?

And I really know how to push her buttons. Hottttt!

This pic just makes me ache...

...thinking about how her straps dig into my shoulders.

That's right, I dusted off the old accordion and totally went to town. We polka'd, we rock'd, we even samba'd a bit, I think.

Well, it sounded like a samba.