Win a Date with Barack Obama

Have you heard of this? Apparently, if you donate to the Obama campaign this week, you'll be entered into a drawing, and you could win dinner with the man himself. (The Man, on the other hand, has other dinner plans, and you're not invited.)

Anyway, I'm the kind of Obama supporter who gets caught sighing in admiration when I think no one's listening (true story). Clearly, I would love to dash off to . . . wherever for a day and eat . . . whatever with Obama and a few others. I could tell him why I support his stance on cats' suffrage (firmly against!), and we could laugh about how snide and silly all those Republican debates were.

And yet, there's something that struck me a little odd about the dinner drawing at first. It's creative, smart, and bound to bring in some bucks. It merits one of those aforementioned sighs of admiration. But isn't it a little like that time Scarlett Johansson auctioned herself off for a date? I've resolved my initial confusion and now think the dinner is a great idea overall, but it reminds me how double-edged Obama's campaign can seem at times. People I know have accused him of having hubris. I don't agree (although I also don't think you run for president without substantial ego). But there's this weird way in which making himself more accessible enhances Obama's celebrity, which opens him to charges of being inaccessible. Does that make any sense? Anyway, if my 32-year streak of not winning contests comes to an end and I get picked, I'll be ordering wine, dessert, and a jumbo order of hot wings.

On a completely different topic, I'm in a funk about NPR's "Vocal Impressions." It sounds like it should be a good idea, and I hate that I hate it. Am I such a snob that I don't think the NPR-listening public should be trusted with metaphor? Is calling Christopher Walken's voice "[a] zombie playing a living person in a B-movie" good and I'm just not hearing it? (By the way, I'm not claiming I could do better. Also, side note: zombies are so, so great.) Anyway, this is causing me great mental turmoil.

(Above: AP photo of Barack Obama. In case you didn't know what he looks like.)

I Can't Believe I'm Posting This Picture

But I've been dipping in the photo archives (thanks, Jenny!), and you need to know that this is what a one-year-old's birthday party looks like. Stick that in your pipe, frat parties.

(By the way, I am sporting an expression I plan to never sport again.)

A Watched Pot Will Still Find a Way to Abuse Feminine-Hygiene Products

The bean was sick this week (and the sun rose and days ended in y, but anyway).

When he's feeling down, T and I like to let him carry out his continued delusion that he's the boss of us. Case in point: The last time he was sick he had french fries and a shamrock shake for lunch. He also got to hang in Jiffy Lube while a nice mechanic named Murry talked about how he drove right through an I-PASS once, even though he didn't have an I-PASS, but he didn't get in trouble, so who needs an I-PASS, anyway? Of course, in retrospect, taking your kid to Jiffy Lube doesn't strike me as an act of spoilage, per say, but I'm so far away from the point of this post right now that I'm just going to move on.

The point of this post--the only point of this post, really--is to point out that Bean loves tampons. He finds them far more versatile than, ahem, most of us do. One day, while I was getting ready for work, he came hurdling down the hall waving a tampon in the air as if everyone knows Tampax products double as baby batons. Here are pictures of what he did when I ran out of the room for about three milliseconds. He got into my purse, grabbed a product, and stuck it in this machine that uses a mild vacuum to pop balls in the air.

Of course, being unfamiliar with such concepts as gravity and weight, I started taking the toy apart. When T saw the toy, he turned it upside down and everything fell out the way you would expect it to if you weren't someone who grew up thinking that if you sat on a running sprinkler you'd shoot up into the air. Stupid cartoons. Stupid physics.