Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

  • Spoiler-free Review: You Can See Everything

    I’m direct and honest. Not by choice, nor by nature. In my youth, all the boys complained I wasn’t open and honest enough. Then in my 30s I got one too many lesions and I found myself blurting my truth uncontrollably. I’m not mad about it anymore, because other people love it.

    But, being honest makes me especially vulnerable to pathological liars … yet also especially sympathetic to them as well. How can I judge? They can’t help themselves any more than I can.

    That’s why I am going to the theater to watch the new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, if that is her real name, and her imprisonment.

    [watches movie]

    Allow me to echo everyone when I say, Holy shit, that was not what I expected.

    Also, I want a sequel with her parents; that’s what I want.

    [additional thoughts]

    They tell you to see it with an audience. Sadly, my Audience and I were not on the same page. My Audience was sitting next to their boyfriends. My Audience was uncomfortable with showering. My Audience did not get the masturbation reference; my guffaw echoed in the silence.

    I felt some sympathy for Elizabeth Holmes: my Audience was not having it. I’m fairly certain the lad sitting next to me had lost his life savings to the fraud at 12, given how he was sighing and writhing.

    You know, it’s been eight hours now and I just realized that perhaps I shouldn’t trust the editors.

    I took to Reddit to see other takes on it and Reddit is WRONG; that shower scene is not gratuitous; that shower scene explains a lot.

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  • TWIL: Warning labels

    The average financial settlement for the Coldwater Creek radiation contamination appears to take nine months to arrive. They give precedence to people who actively have cancer, naturally. Or they say they do. I think.

    Really hard to believe that they did such a lousy job disposing of radioactive waste (put it in metal barrels and throw it into a creek) compared to how much thought they put into it now. Now they put it in salt mines that will slowly shift and encase the barrels in solid salt.

    But, because those radioactive materials are so far underground and won’t decay for say 10,000 years, they plan for communicating with future humanoids: “Don’t dig here … and if you do, don’t open any barrels you find … and if you do, don’t chug what’s in the barrels you opened.”

    I just found this delightful Wikipedia page on how much thought goes into warning future people that bad things are below:

    Long-term nuclear waste Warning Messages

    Suggestions summmarized:

    • Written message that says “There is danger below here.” traslated into into French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Navajo. Those signs would be in a circle, and every generation would encircle the previous circle of signs with more signs with updated language.
    • Skull and crossbones imagery
    • A device that makes a spooky whistling sound
    • Spikes. Lots of spikes.
    • Gravel, like the kind on top of the Weldon Spring Site Disposal Cell (where there is also a written sign with a typo warning of “Inclimate” weather; so much for bullet one above.)
    • Cats bred to change color the closer they are to radiation, publicized with “a song, called 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty) … designed to be ‘so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years’[18]
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  • Best part of the hobby

    While I was Ubering through Chicago, Gary was surfing Amazon and purchasing telescopes, plural, yes, and also lenses and lens-carrying cases and telescope-carrying cases and telescope chairs for when the eyepiece is under the telescope and a mirrored piece that lets you mount a second phone to take a photo of what your navigating phone sees and … and a box of cards to teach you how to use your telescope. He hasn’t looked at that yet, because he is assembling his palette of tools for a successful telescope experience.

    He’s also establishing himself as Telescope Expert, which is a key part of any hobby.

    At no point has he looked through the telescope. Well, he looked through it during the day one time and focused it on a leaf at the top of a tree. Not on Saturn, or the Moon or the Sun. And don’t worry – he has the Sun Filter that lets you look at the sun.

    It’s pretty clear what path this hobby will take. He will set everything up and I will look through the eyepiece and not touch the telescope. But actually, that’s fine. The point of the hobby is the learning, not the doing.

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  • Glamping

    Speaking of vacation …

    This Almost-finished Wild Animal Park is very close by.

    And per the 1 minute and 20 second mark in the video below, there are going to be “glamping” cabins.

    Check out the Glamping cabins made of chipboard, right?

    That’s going to stand up against a charging rhino, right?

    But seriously, this seems like a mini-vacation Gary might be up for.

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  • Thursday Paint Progress: 10/14/2026

    You know, there’s always been something wrong with the perspective on the New Orleans mausoleums. And the colors are dead.

    It is missing all kinds of contrast and detail.

    This is what it is supposed to be:

    7B0B89F7-8A41-4222-A219-3FA355399DBC

    See? It’s just lifeless. Time to fix that.

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  • Misfit wigs

    My first public wig (one I wore outside of a Zoom call) was named Click, and I still have that wig. Because she was a misfit wig. None of the reviewers liked her.

    “Well I like it,” I said, “And I want to nurture this poor abandoned wig no one loves.”

    (Click does have a weird back, though. Shhh. Don’t tell her I said that.)

    I moved on, but as I say I kept her, and now that I know a bit more I bet I could even fix her back issues.

    I was skilled eniugh to take Big Wig …

    … and scale it down.

    So now I find myself in need of a curly pixie wig, and I have found one that is universally reviled. Evidently Twisted Pixie comes out of the box looking like Pippi Longstocking after surviving a head-on tornado in Texas.

    I could compile a gallery of screenshots of similarly horrified expressions. Or you could Google videos of “Twisted Pixie Wig.”

    Even the ever-tolerant reviewers all said there was only so much they could do.

    That clinched it for me, of course.

    Unappreciated wig, come to momma and she will turn you into … a slightly less ugly duckling?

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  • The last vacation post

    Other places I visited on vacation:

    Robie House

    Stunning. Completely sated my Frank Lloyd Wright appetite. I didn’t need to see Oak Park or anything else.

    I don’t know why the foot of the sofa leg has a CURVE in it. So out of place.

    Museum of Surgery

    Loved this place (except for the spot where you emerge into the hallway and see an iron lung and feel sorry for your Mom).

    A souvenier:

    Palmer House (second runner-up hotel)

    I did go to the lobby of the Palmer House – and I am very glad I didn’t stay there. There were no robots. Also there was the worst brownie I have ever eaten.

    Supposedly the brownie was invented there. The recipe tasted old, like they used bakers’ ammonia as the raising agent.

    And that’s a wrap from Chicago. Would recommend, and I learned a lot about hoofing it as an older lady.

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  • Travelling while aged

    I am aged, and I like it. I particularly enjoy the compliments. After living with an average body and a face not worthy of note, I find that I really enjoy hearing people comment that I don’t look 64.

    This happens a fair amount in Saint Louis. I find it happens regularly when I ask what the age threshold is for senior discounts. I know. I’m shameless. I’m pathetic. Pity me.

    I was expecting the same treatment in Chicago. Here’s what I heard in Chicago:

    • “Well, you can take the stairs up to the gallery – or perhaps you need the elevator?”
    • “If you need assistance, ma’am, we can help you get to your compartment.”
    • ”The check-out counter is at the end of this aisle. Be sure to get your senior discount.”

    Well, the check-out counter remark I dismissed given that my basket held Poise pads and a heating pad for the freezing cold train ride back. But the others? Disheartening.

    It was especially sad because I really was clawing my way back into doing things like The Kids Today. Every purchase was Apple Pay; every ride was Uber. But I resigned myself that — even with my many many Uber rides and Apple Pay purchases — I needed to accept I was a senior citizen by Chicago standards.

    Later, after a hundred dollars’ worth of Ubering, I thought, “Maybe Uber has a senior discount. Maybe I can get this to work for me.” So I poked around in Preferences.

    “Are you a senior?” the app asked.

    “I don’t think so, you tell me,” I thought, and clicked Yes to see if I qualified, and it didn’t tell me. So I just gave up.

    Oddly, the next two Uber drivers I called couldn’t get their app to go into drive mode. I called a cab to get me to the Frank Lloyd Wright house and paid with cash like an old lady.

    The problem with the driver app happened again on my return trip. I just gave that Uber driver all my remaining folding money and we did it off the books.

    Once inside the hotel I doubled down into old lady mode and called Uber to complain.

    They explained there’s a bug in the Uber driver’s app that if you are a passenger who requires special attention, like you want the driver to call you on the phone, or you’re a SENIOR because you never changed that setting back, then this bug flares up.

    “Well that sounds suspiciously convenient for them,” I said, and they said, “No, really, it’s a bug.” And I pointedly turned off that senior setting and I will never use it again, even if someday I need the driver to lift my oxygen tank into the SUV.

    The next evening, I successfully Ubered to a gay bar that gay friends had recommended, and it soothed my soul because it was packed full of men as happy as they could be. Never have I seen so smiling men in one place, all full of winks and joy and bare bellies and hugs. Men with the Y chromosome who were not yet cranky. It made me smile a little.

    Then they carded me. That made me smile a lot.

    They card everyone, it seems, but still.

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  • Travelling while alone (or, TWIL: Leave the men behind)

    First day, first thing, I went to the Driehaus Museum to get a glimpse of how to decorate a Gilded Age house after your original house burns up in The Chicago Fire.

    (Answer: Lots of marble, lots of this new-fangled linoleum stuff on the walls, all walls made with a core of brick then a layer of cement then clad in inch-thick quartersawn oak.)

    Linoleum

    Different linoleum

    Thick oak painted black to resemble ebony. Tsk. Tacky.

    At the end of the tour I said how glad I was to finally see it, given that I’d wanted to see it for the last ten years but the husband vetoed it every time. I added, “But he couldn’t make it this time. He’s not well.”

    I shut down the required outpourings of sympathy with, “Oh he’s not dying. He’s really just old and grouchy.”

    “That’s why we’re here together and our husbands aren’t,” confessed one of the two English ladies.

    ‘You did the right thing,” said a lady on her own.

    After we began to make our own ways out a woman who had been with her husband earlier sought me out and said, “I’m glad you shared that. After a certain age, they change, and it’s just never the same after that. And what you have to do is mourn the loss and move forward.”

    The next day I took the water taxi to Chinatown.

    I called Gary from the middle of the Chinatown plaza and was dumb enough to share that anecdote with him, thinking I was alleviating his guilt. Serious midjudgment on my part. The squabble only led to tears, which of course led to a bit of emotional peeing, Botox or not, and of course there are no public restrooms in Chinatown or Chicago except for the one in the Magnificent Mile’s three-story Starbucks. So I did just want to go back to my hotel the straightest way possible, and that was the EL.

    After an hour of searching for the EL station, lost, sniffling, dribbling, I found it directly across the street from where I’d started. A low point.

    So when I got on the train and I saw an open seat, then saw it was damp, I thought what better seat to take in my current state? And really, that EL ride did make me feel better. I hit for the cycle on all the modes of transport: water taxi, walking tour, EL, and I really should have taken an Uber then from the EL to the hotel, but I did not know I was walking on the street where someone had recently been shot.

    So, a bobble, but after some quiet time Gary and I began communicating again. Not before he went so radio silent that I had to call a neighbor who confirmed she had seen him four hours earlier and he was alive and seemed really happy.

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  • Too Much: the two big events in Chicago

    The Chicago trip was bookended by two big nights out. My first full day ended with Operation Mincemeat and my last full day ended with the three-Michelin-star meal at Smyth.

    Operation Mincemeat – It was obviously great. I didn’t appreciate it as much as I could have because I reserved an Uber and it seemed impossible the show would be over before the Uber arrived. That distraction was one of the reasons I felt like I didn’t sufficiently enjoy this clearly enjoyable experience.

    Another was that I didn’t do my “homework,” as the older man seated to my right said. “With fast-paced shows like this you have to read up on the lyrics.” I told him I had done some homework; I had seen the Colin Firth movie, of which he was unaware. He asked, “Was it a comedy?” No, it was not. Not as comic as the musical, which was a Romp. I had all the experiences everyone has:

    [SPOILERS]

    • The sudden realization there are only five people playing all the parts in the cast. Truly, I think at one point Johnny Bevan walks behind a blackboard, does not break stride, and in comes out a different character: different clothes, hair, accent, mannerisms.
    • The uncontrollable sobbing at the song about the letter to Bill. The young man sitting to my left shifted so uncomfortably at his emotions that I was concerned he would someday take to drink to stifle his feelings.
    • The exhaustion while witnessing a musical that (minus rhe exception noted above) delivers unrelenting fast-paced lyric-dense high-energy mapcap song after song after song.

    [/END SPOILERS]

    It was so much, so fast, madcapmadcapmadcap for hours with really no chance to digest what was happening.

    I’m sure you see where I’m headed next …

    The three-Michelin-star meal at Smyth

    I’ve been to a tasting menu before, at Acero, where I had 12 courses of relatively familiar Italian food. This was 20 courses of utterly unfamiliar foods. Exhausting. Again, so much, so fast, so new. A new course every five to ten minutes, each presented by its own waiter.

    I mean, I wanted branch out, to try new things, but in a very short few hours I tried raw venison, Masa, sea lettuce, Uni, ponzu, abalone, sweetbread, and squab, and any familiar food was paired with something inventive, like lobster with cashews. It wasn’t a case of my stomach being overly full, it was overly stimulated.

    And to be fair, I tucked in to everything. Every time a waiter materialized with mushroom slivers or malted milk bread or quail eggs I could smell it and good god, it all smelled heavenly. And then I’d eat it and my Tongue would say, Jesus, what’s this then, pass it off to my belly, Belly would say, I can’t drop this grape in here, not on top of the lobster and the aguachile.

    The bite that broke me was the chocolate mousse enclosed in tuilles topped by caviar. Sweet and salty, I get it, but that did me in. I told one of the many waitresses I had hit my neural overload, my tongue was too tired, and she was very kind and still sent me off with some pre-boxed extra dessert treats.

    For that experience I really should have done some homework. I could have tried sweetbreads and raw deer ahead of time. I could have packed it in like Joey Chestnut.

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