Caught with pants down redux.

for years, my sister has been making her own spanx by using an upsized pair of control top pantyhose with the legs cut off. (suddenly, i'm recalling that as a child my sister-in-law's sister – does that make us related? – used to wear her mom's old cut off pantyhose as sort of a sleeveless body suit. there is photographic evidence of this, but i'm reluctant to produce it as the photo also depicts me in a blond dolly parton wig wearing a KFC t-shirt with the chest stuffed with a beach towel or something.)

anyhow, my sister is in a store checking out the spanx display, wondering if it's time to upgrade. next thing she knows, her homemade spanx and her elastic waist pants have something of the reverse magnet effect and her pants end up around her ankles. she quickly a: looks around to see if anyone has noticed and b: pulls her pants back up. probably in that order. then she goes right back to looking at the spanx as if nothing had ever happened. (she claims she was too stunned to think of anything else to do.) me, i'd have hightailed it out of the store and might never have come back. (i'm picturing the staff replaying the security tapes over and over again, or worse: youtube …)

but i guess now that mom is gone, somebody has to keep up the tradition.

p.s. she did buy the spanx.

finding my voice

my sister calls me up one day and says, "do you know what a totesum is?"

i say, "of course, it's a place like 7-11."

"well," she says, "i mentioned a totesum to shawn and he had no idea what it is."

mississippi strikes again.

now i've never had a very pronounced southern accent. in fact, most folks who aren't from the south couldn't guess i am. mainly, i think, because the rest of the world thinks all southerners go around saying things like "i ain't never done nothin' tew y'all, why'd yeeeew go and do somethin' laaaak that fer?" i can't blame them really. they only know the south from tv, movies, and books, most of which depict all southerners like backwoods hicks. and granted, there are a heckuva lot of backwoods hicks in Mississippi. i just happen not to be one of them.

but my Dixie starts showing around midnight. that's when i'm just far too tired (tarred) to add a "g" to the end of every word. Also, if i have too much to drink, i start drawling all over the place. i also get extremely outgoing and friendly. there are reasons i don't drink anymore (does bailey's in hot cocoa count?). I'm not a friend of bill w's or anything. i just decided to stop because of my migraines (though i must say, it hasn't made any real difference. in fact, i'm having more headaches than ever now, so perhaps i should jump off the wagon. and then again…)

oh, and, of course, i am totally a Dixie chick when i'm on the phone with anyone from back home. people in the room with me can always tell the difference between local and long-distance phone calls.

anyhow, like i said, i'm not normally drawly, so it came as a surprise when my boyfriend called me on my extremely random pronunciation. he says, "say i-n-s-u-r-a-n-c-e."

after i take a few seconds to figure out what the heck he wants me to say (i can hardly ever spell things aloud, which is why i have a hard time around small children), i say, "INsurance." he says, "it's pronounced 'inSURANCE." we argue this for as long as it takes for him to pull up some pronunciation tutorial on the internet and prove me wrong. (although i still think i am right)

and now that he's on a roll, he gets me to say stuff like HALLoween, TEEv, THANKSgiving, and JUly (technically JEWly). He says, "you're always moving the emphasis to the first syllable.

i had never noticed that people around me here in seattle were all pronouncing things in some freakish way, so i called on my southern folks to tell me how THEY pronounce these words. To a person, they all put the emphasis on the first syllable. even a friend of mine who speaks in the most eloquent non-accent, says, "Yes, people always know i'm southern when they hear me say JEWly." so i wasn't wrong. everybody in the south talks this way. just listen to kyra sedgewick on 'the closer."

my boyfriend is also confused when i say things like, "i'm trying to turn on the eye on the stove and it won't work!!!" he's like, "what the hell are you talking about?" "the EYE on the top of the stove…where you put the frying pan!" i say. and he goes, "You mean the BURNER?" "It's not a BURNER; it's the EYE!" i say, as i rush to confirm, via my southern friends, what that thing the frying pan sits on is called. (if al gore hadn't invented the internet, we'd have a tough time proving our points. or at least we wouldn't prove them so quickly.)

anyhow, my boyfriend and i have to agree to disagree on matters such as this since we intend to be together and bickering gets tedious.

BUT my Dixie is rubbing off on him in small ways. see, we have this very demanding cat who always whines for food, even though he's fed at least FIVE times a day. but every time we're in the kitchen or near the kitchen or are in a house that HAS a kitchen, he will holler at us until we relent and give him food. we both agree that he is spoiled. but then i say, "he's not just spoiled; he's RURNT." "he's what?" "RURNT. It's the past tense of ruin when something has absolutely no hope. it's like ruined to the power of 100 or 1000."

"rurnt," he says, "yeah, he's definitely rurnt."

and now he takes great pleasure in calling things "rurnt." And i swear i have heard him say TEEv at least once.

long lost cousin

so a couple of years ago, my mom tells me that i have a cousin who's going to be on some show called "lost." i say, there's no such show as "lost." (my first reaction is always to tell my mother she has no idea what she's talking about. often, i am right, but just as often, i am wrong.) she's adamant that she's got the correct name of the show, so i google it and sure enough i find said cousin's name listed among the cast members. so then i google him: josh holloway. and he is HOT. well, i reckon, most people know this by now, but i was just finding it out.

so my mom says that my cousin used to be a model and was on the cover of esquire and had now landed this gig on this new tv show. and then it dawned on me: this was the model/actor/wannabe cousin my dad had told me about when i lived in LA. the one he was always trying to get me to call and hook up with because we are related and were both living in the same sprawling metropolis. (parent logic, you know.). i always thought, a. why do i want to hang out with some stupid cousin? and b. right, like somebody in OUR family was actually on the cover of esquire (this is still unconfirmed). needless to say, i never called.

well, the as the months went by, even someone as out of touch with the entertainment world as i am knew that "lost" had become a hit tv show. so then i figured that if i'd called my cousin back when i was living in la, maybe i'd be two degrees from george clooney by now or something. but, of course, the time has passed. i can't call him up now on the premise that we should hang out because i'm his cousin. a. because neither one of us lives in LA anymore and b. because how lame is that? so basically, i've got this cousin who's semi-famous, but i've never met him. to tell the truth, i've never actually watched the show either. and i haven't given him more than a passing thought other than to tell this story a few times.

my sister, on the other hand, is unnaturally obsessed with the idea that josh holloway is our cousin. it's weird. first off, she watches the show religiously. not that that is any tip-off. plenty of people do that. heck, even my parents do, although my mom threatened to stop watching it when she thought josh's character was going to get killed off. i think he lived because she is still watching it.

but one of the reasons i think she's unduly obsessed is that she tells EVERYBODY she runs across that josh holloway is her cousin. (i suppose she might be lamenting that she took her husband's name as she now doesn't have quite so obvious a connection.) i think she neglects to mention that she's never actually met her cousin. that he doesn't know her from adam. and that he's her second cousin. (but at least he's not the once-removed kind.)

she seriously would like to get my dad to ask his brother for a signed photo for her. i think she would also like to get his phone number, but that might be asking too much. she and and one of her friends are thinking they should go out to california and meet him. i'm not sure how serious she is about this. i hope not too much. especially since she hasn't yet made it out to seattle to see me. (which is a whole other can of worms i'm not going to open right now.) and also because, as i have recently learned from an astute blog reader (my boyfriend), j.h. actually lives in hawaii where his show is filmed. anyhow, her husband and i both agree that her level of interest in this particular cousin is unnatural. but at least she's not trying to date him or something, even though we are from mississippi.