Twitter doesn't cure the randoms

I said in the last post about my great-aunt (whose daughter is still packing up her stuff for hospice, poor thing) that there was a lot of random stuff I wanted to talk about. Twitter, as some people have told me, is excellent for getting random stuff out of my head. However, I still want to discuss it here, too.

I'm a bit cranky--my boss and I both forgot it was "Administrative Professional's Day" (I think "Secretaries' Day" is less patronizing), even though I'm the one who always sends out the calendar with special dates via e-mail every month. I thought another Administrative Professional had gotten flowers from her boyfriend or something. So BossLady hastily told me I was going to lunch with her, just before I went outside with my lunch. I honestly thought that either I or the company was in some trouble I didn't know about and she wanted to break it to me gently, the way she approached it! Then she had me go through her desk and pick something from the stash of gift cards she keeps there as rewards, most of which I got. (I picked a $20 iTunes one.) I know it's petty as hell , but part of me wishes she'd just let it pass.

Then tonight I used Veet on my legs. For those who aren't familiar, you're applying a noxious-smelling cream full of chemicals that burn the hair off your legs, then scraping it off with a plastic scraper. The Veet didn't get all the hair, so I've got patches all over my legs. I can't do a thing about them yet, because you're just courting a furious rash and ingrown hairs if you try shaving too soon after using Veet. So I get to start tomorrow by wearing an icky pantsuit--pantsuits are, by definition, always icky on short, thick women, and I only wear them if I have to--and swimming with patchy legs. FUN. I definitely understand that I should be very grateful that these are my problems, and I am, but it's just been that kind of day.

Other, more interesting things I wanted to bring up:

* It's the NHL playoffs! Time for weird superstitions, like wearing Ed Hardy's "Love Kills Slowly" perfume every game day! (This will go great with my pantsuit, but it actually smells good on me.) Time to TiVo the few actual shows we like! Time to forget your favorite players and the douchebags who dare to touch them can't hear you through the TV!

My Pittsburgh Penguins lead the Ottawa Senators 3-1, and I'm superstitiously hating all the talk about how the Penguins are going to just kill the series tomorrow night. They play bad when they play cocky, and I think that kind of shit tempts the Hockey Gods anyway. L'Ailee enjoyed the way her Detroit Red Wings dominated the Phoenix Coyotes at the end of last night's game, although the Coyotes didn't have their star player Shane Doan on hand. Those teams are 2-2.

* Another bit of weirdness beloved playoff tradition of ours is the weekend games of street hockey. L'Ailee started it because it seemed horribly ironic to her to sit on the couch all weekend watching other people move around. It doesn't help that we also love NASCAR. She felt that we and our friends should be "easy to distinguish from plants." So she asked everyone to bring roller skates and gear early in last year's playoffs, and we loved it.

My friend A.'s 9-year-old daughter, who approaches hockey exactly like her ambition in life is to be the first woman to win the Stanley Cup, has really hated sitting on the sidelines. Being a responsible father, of course A. didn't want her getting accidentally roughed up by adults. He told her that she could play when she was as big as L'Ailee, who at a tick under 5 feet and a tick under 100 pounds is the smallest of the adults. Well, A.'s daughter has inherited her father's well-above-average size, and is almost there.

"You're still shorter," he told her. "Only a couple inches! Plus I think I weigh as much as she does," the girl retorted. I'm not the only woman there who was struck by that--even at 9 years old, most of us (except L'Ailee) were already too neurotic about our growing bodies to say anything like that about our own weight. I've overheard self-hating statements from girls even younger than she is that make me want to cry for them. I love that she's still confident about her body, and I know it's her sport that helps her. I urged A. to go ahead and let her play--"Of course, she'll sit if it gets too rough." The girl played on my line. L'Ailee and I looked out for her, but she can look out for herself already. She enjoyed the hell out of it, and she and L'Ailee made me look...well, much less like a Floridian who started playing at age 34. I really hope she can carry her pride in her body as something that allows her to play a sport she loves into her adolescence.

* Speaking of sports, three bisexual men are suing a gay softball league for discrimination. They were considered "non-gay", and therefore ringers for the team, which had been doing really well for a while. Never mind that bi men deal with the same legal discrimination gay ones do, never mind that bi men are certainly gay enough to scare macho straight athletes and fans, never mind how horribly self-hating it is for gay men to conclude that a male athlete with any talent obviously isn't "gay enough" for a gay team. I'm disgusted that people who know good and well what discrimination based on sexual orientation feels like would perpetuate it. This sort of biphobia sounds much too familiar to me. No, nobody *has* to play on a rec league. Also, a league full of people who are more interested in investigating what members of a winning team do in the bedroom than watching what they do on the field is one I would stay away from. But it sucks to be forced out of anything. Whatever happens, this story is a little bit too instructive. The only good part was a tweet I saw about it today: "Switch hitters disqualified from softball tournament." HA!

* And speaking of discrimination, this is much more serious and extremely scary. You've probably seen it, but everyone needs to, and not just queer people. Clay Greene was a 77-year-old man in Sonoma County, California. He and his 88-year-old partner weren't legally married, but had done all the legal things right that they could, including medical directives, powers of attorney and wills. The 88-year-old fell, broke his hip, and went to the hospital. Greene was considered not a family member by the hospital. Then it got worse. Much worse. The couple was separated, forced out of their home and into separate nursing homes, and all of their worldly possessions were sold by the county. Greene's trial against Sonoma County is this July, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights is providing assistance. We're donating--not much, not yet, but more will be coming--and I hope others who don't want to be part of a living nightmare like this do the same. Next time someone tries to bullshit you about legal paperwork being good enough, so you don't need or deserve a marriage license, remember this case.

* Disaster was averted in NYC when the local chapter of the Service Employees' International Union came to an agreement super-early this morning. There won't be a doormen's strike. Actually, it's easy to make fun, especially since I don't deal with doormen in my row house in Brooklyn, but they are a part of security in high-rise buildings. Also, L'Ailee says Manhattan smelled really bad because the garbage piled up the last time the doormen went on strike. So, I'm glad for the doormen and glad for the residents of the buildings that employ them.

* Another thing that people talked about a lot around NYC yesterday was the death of Guru, a/k/a Keith Elam, who was the awesome MC for Gangstarr. He was 43. Cancer took him. It is pretty apparent that he either died with a lot of hate in his heart toward DJ Premier (the other half of Gangstarr) or was taken advantage of by his last producer, Solar, judging by a letter purportedly written by Guru in his last weeks that Solar quoted. Whatever happened, I'm grateful for the music he left behind, with and without Premier. My belly dancing instructor told the class to "give a thought" to music for our performances on Memorial Day. I'm still thinking about the song for my solo, but my best friend Yemaya O'Reilly and I know what we're using for our tandem performance now. One of our favorite songs ever, "Dwyck" by Gangstarr In lieu of a moment of silence, pay special attention to the middle part and turn it up!

* Happy Earth Day tomorrow! I'm going to celebrate by...using mass transit to get to and from work, then watching springtime ice hockey on TV tomorrow night! Hopefully I find something a little more appropriate to do by the end of Earth Week this weekend, and I don't mean watching Talladega on Sunday.