Better Thongs and Tassles

Nothing has been happening in Cairo lately, well for me anyway. So I'm going to tell you a story about my mom.

A few years ago my mother's best friend, K, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As she got ill, my mom took it really hard. I've learned it isn't easy to make close friends when you're middle-aged, and having lived in the city for only a few years, I was glad my mom had a friend she felt she could talk to. Near the end, when this friend was in the hospital permanently, my mom decided to bring K some of her favorite magazines to help keep her busy. This friend loved home decor magazines, Country Homes-esque glossies profiling beautiful living rooms and well-lit kitchens.

My mom on the other hand, finds these magazines to be, well, dull. Her approach- Who cares about looking at furniture? Let's give K something worth staring at.

So she bought a stack of interior design magazines, a stack of Playgirls and set to work. I came home for the weekend to find my mother, at the age of 53 with scissors and a glue-stick at the dining room table cutting out photos of naked men and meticulously gluing them onto the pages -- positioning the man wearing nothing but cowboy boots delicately on the expensive sofa, and perching a man in a silver g-string on the white granite kitchen counter.

She filled the pages of one of the Better Gardens & Whatever with naked, leering men, shoved it in the middle of the stack of magazines and headed to the hospital.

I should be so lucky to someday be the kind of adult she is.

The Great American (unwritten) Novel

Whenever anything bad happened in my life, my mother always would tell me "someday you can use it as material for your novel." Until she had expressed it, I had never even considered being an author. The first time I had my heart broken by a musician, the first time I broke someone else's heart (an mechanical engineer), the medical scares (cancer, unknown), all the short-comings and failed auditions (Shakespeare), it was always the same reaction-- "your novel."

I thought she was insane. She probably is. The thing is, I don't feel a novel coming, and bad things are happening to me less and less often. Its been almost a year since the last bad thing found its way in and out of my life (XXXX). So that book that will never be written is getting thinner and thinner with each passing year of happiness, which I think would be a good thing. But my mom, so full of faith in my writing ability, might disagree.

And the mannequin says "if it's just my body you want..."

A new, and (in my opinion) the least funny, but creepiest comic so far...

Art World's Red Headed Step-Child


And to set the record straight: I dated Simon for six months, and during that time we were very close. I can say with complete certianty he most definately kept a teaparty of life-sized dolls in the basement. You can't doctor photos like that. God, it was awkward that time he invited me over for dinner to meet his friends then served us all imaginary ahwa and plastic fruit. (Hi, Simon!)

Guest Comic on Red Headed Step-child

I've been beaten at my own game--

thematteroffrance.blogspot.com