Last Friday afternoon I came home from teaching, turned up ABBA as loud as I could stand, made chocolate peanut butter crispy treats, painted my toenails an outstanding, luminescent shade of fuchsia,  and danced around my house like an idiot. It was a wonderful night and I was deliriously happy, but unfortunately, by the time ten o’clock rolled around I was just plain delirious. It was the start of a flu that has had me down for four days.

So, wrought by pathogens, I didn’t have much hope for this Misbehaving Tuesday. While I have not been suffering for the past few days -as any Buddhist will tell you, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional- I have been extremely uncomfortable. By this morning I was feeling at least well enough to do the grocery shopping, but only after I recovered from getting dressed by sitting down for an hour. And I will have all of you know that I did not get any produce on this trip because I could possibly (although doubtfully) still be contagious and I did not want to touch anyone else’s produce directly. I am NICE.

Even unwell on a cold, rainy day that felt more like November than May, I couldn’t let the day pass without a some misbehaving. Since I had to wear shoes anyway, I also wore my misbehaving socks.

As the day went on, I started feeling better. Misbehaving is a powerful healer, as are green tea and popsicles. Also tremendously healing is the sight of a slug hitching a ride on a wiener dog. This just happened as I was starting this post.

I love slugs. I don’t care what anyone says. Slugs are awesome.

Anyway, this post is really my last hope for any solid misbehaving for the day, so I better wrap it up with something good. I was looking through some files earlier, and found a short bit I wrote back in the days of Weekly Writing Assignment. The assignment was to write an argument. I wrote one about farts. (For those of you who have been around for a bit, this is a repost from September.)

And now, for your misbehaving pleasure, farts.

—

“Oh my GOD, would you please contain yourself?” Leanne stood at the door to the kitchen with her arms crossed.

“What do you mean?” Frank was tying up the garbage bag.

“I could hear you all the way in the bedroom.”

“Hear what?”

“You. I could hear you.”

Frank pulled the ends of the garbage bag tight, and shimmied it out of the trash can. “What do you expect me to do? I can’t help it.”

“Of course you can. The first year we were dating I was at your apartment all the time and I heard you fart maybe once. Now, every morning, it’s a freaking serenade. Frank’s Ass in D Minor.”

“Well, sorry.”

“It’s not sexy, you know.”

“It doesn’t smell. That’s the garbage.”

“I’m not talking about the smell. When we were dating, back when you were still trying to impress me, you went out of your way not to fart in front of me. You knew it wasn’t exactly a turn on.”

“I wasn’t in front of you. I was in the kitchen. You were still asleep.”

“Yeah, until your ass woke me up.”

“Oh come on. It wasn’t that loud.”

“Really? Ceramic tile and wood floors, Frank. It’s like someone blasting a bugle into a steel drum.”

“Hey, just because you never fart doesn’t mean I should have to run outside or something.”

“I just… control myself. You could, too. You used to. And when you didn’t, you ran the tub.”

“Oh, you figured that out?” Frank smirked.

“It took a while. For the first few months I thought you were a little OCD, showering like six times a day.” Leanne shrugged, and looked over Frank’s shoulder out the window.

“Huh. Maybe it would have been better if you just heard it back then.”

“No. It would not.” She crossed her arms again. “You controlled yourself because you were trying to impress me, and I would like to think that I am still worth impressing.”

“If I wanted to still be dating you, I wouldn’t have married you.”

“Please. I want to find you sexy, and your ass gas isn’t sexy. I am doing you a favor here. You want me to be attracted to you, right? So, control yourself, would you?”

Frank rolled his eyes, held the garbage bag in front of him, and walked toward the back door. Leanne followed. “Well?” she asked.

“Great, you’re not attracted to me anymore?” Frank opened the door and set the garbage bag on the porch.

“Not when you’re farting.”

“Well, wait a minute. How much time in any given day am I actually farting?”

“That’s not the point. It takes a while for the fart exposure to wear off, you know. When I hear you fart I can be turned off for anywhere from one to forty-eight hours.”

“What’s the average? If it’s only in the morning, and only for a few hours, I can live with that. We’re getting ready to go to work then, anyway.” Frank was setting a new garbage bag in the can, and Leanne returned to the doorway.

“Thanks.” She leaned against the doorframe.

“So, maybe what I could do is just control it on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, after dinner. Keep us right on schedule.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Ok, maybe Sunday afternoons, too.”

“I can not believe we are having this conversation. Would you just be civilized and control yourself? Please? For me?”

“Fine. On Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and Sunday afternoons, I will be civilized. But the rest of the week… strike up the band.”

Leanne scowled.

“Oh come on, if I’m civilized three nights a week and one afternoon, I have to blow off a little steam the rest of the week. So to speak.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Here’s what we can do. I’ll be civilized on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons if you’ll clean your hair out of the drain on, say, Monday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday mornings.”

“Oh, FINE. No, wait. This is ridiculous.”

Frank returned the garbage can to the cabinet under the sink, paused for a moment as he leaned over the cabinet door, then looked up at Leanne with a pained expression.

“Frank? Are you ok?”

Frank smiled. “You’re welcome.”

I did, however, flagrantly disregard some responsibilities today, all of which will be extra flagrantly regarded tomorrow, and I did it while wearing over the knee socks – blue argyle this time.

My flagrant disregard included stepping out this afternoon for a haircut, during which I may have fallen asleep. Since going short a year and a half ago I have developed a mild addiction to haircuts. They feel extra good with short hair – in part the reason why I loved shaving the bottom couple of inches of the back of my head in high school – and what can I say, the woman who cuts my hair has good hands. I decided to close my eyes to keep any little hairs out of the way and some one was talking about a Seder and then I was thinking about something having to do with standing outside of my car and how meaning is attached to words and what happens to the assignment of meaning when red has a conversation with blue and yes, I think I probably fell asleep.

Man, that felt good. Does anyone want to come over and rub my head for an hour or two?

The stuff I exchanged for the ill-fitting bras I received last week arrived today. Included in the package was, as I mentioned earlier, one of the best pairs of sandals ever:

… and along with that, a very real, very spatial reminder that it is time to clean out my closets. Regardless, I cannot wait to wear these.

So, that’s it. Also, I had some chocolate covered matzoh, which I need to not make again until next Passover, because it will take that long to be liberated from my craving for it. Sweet, salty. Let my people go, indeed.

Unfortunately, even the sleeping in this morning was not quite as satisfying as usual, mostly due to a deeply icky sex dream. The image of doing some one I find unattractive in appearance and odor is tough to shake. (Although, when I was in tenth grade, I had a dream that a boy I liked kissed me and burped in my mouth. Not only did the dream thoroughly cure me of my crush, I still remember it twenty years later and think of it every time he pops up on facebook, whereas the image of this morning’s non-amour probably will be gone by tomorrow.)

I suspect that my day started this way due to the way yesterday ended. I have been on an MTX kick on and off for the past six months or so; I was having a rough day yesterday, and just like when I was younger, Dr. Frank took the edge off. Last night I was looking up something or other about the band, linked to Dr. Frank’s facebook page, and there it was. Frank Portman in glasses: black-rimmed, rectangular glasses.

For the record, I think celebrity crushes are stupid. Even when I was in junior high and other girls had pictures from Tiger Beat taped inside their lockers and on their bedroom walls, I didn’t. Well, maybe a few, just to fit in, but I thought it was kind of silly. There were cute boys all around. Why swoon over a piece of paper?

There are two exceptions to this for me: early 90s John Flansburgh, which is really just a wholesome kind of wanting to hang out on South Street all afternoon and then get a big hug at the Gallery before getting on the R3 to go home kind of crush, and Dr. Frank. I dug MTX in a big way long before I ever saw a picture of him, and then I saw a picture, and yowza. In every possible way, my type to a T, if you’ll pardon the pun.

So, last night I saw the picture and my brain stopped working for few minutes. When it resumed operation, I realized that I have a new problem: now that I have seen a picture of Dr. Frank in rectangular, black-rimmed glasses, there is nowhere else for me to go. I will never see anything hotter than that in my life. I tried to think of something that reasonably, I might see in the course of my lifetime that would be hotter than that, and came  up with nothing. Maybe one or two unreasonable things, but nothing likely. It is the gold medal of hotness in my world.

With nowhere to go but down from that experience, of course an icky sex dream followed. As for the rest of the misbehaving, during my regular errands I lingered in Target longer than necessary and bought some orange underpants to go with my orange pants, and did it all while wearing my misbehaving socks.

Picture is unrelated: Misbehaving of a different sort. At the Smile, Hon reading last Friday.

From time to time I will buy something from the kids’ clothing department because it is cheaper and fits just fine – t-shirts, gym socks, that sort of thing. My favorite sneakers (knock-off skate shoes with flames on the sides) are from the boys department at Wal-Mart from back when I would set foot in a Wal-Mart, and I have a few t-shirts that are youth larges and XLs.

(I do need to interrupt myself here and mention that a couple of jobs ago, I worked with a gal who had lots of tiny little kids’ t-shirts from thrift stores. She wore them often and she looked ridiculous. But, her shirts had cartoon characters on them and were so little that they only covered her from shoulders to lower ribcage*, which gave her the appearance of a rapidly growing preschooler whose family was down on their luck, which is why the whole hipster aesthetic is just depressing. I am very careful not to do that.)

At one point, all of my gym-going underwear was from a plain 7-pack from the girls department, because it was cheap and not made out of some ridiculous material. (Wearing of thongs during vigorous exercise: what the hell? Discuss.) The only bummer was that I bought it during a Christmas shopping trip, and I unpacked all seven pairs to put in the wash at the same time that I was wrapping presents. One pair vanished, and for days, I was paranoid that one of Scott’s nephews was going to get my underwear as a present. (I couldn’t decide what would be more mortifying: one of the kids getting a toy with panties attached to it, or Scott’s family knowing that I bought them in the girls’ section.) I unwrapped and re-wrapped all of the presents, and never found the missing undies. Weird.

It turns out that $2.50 buys a lot of misbehaving.

Anyway, today I wandered into the kids’ department at Target because I had some Misbehaving Cash set aside, and I was unsatisfied with the tights still left in the ladies’ department. Behold, there on the wall were ruffly socks, on SALE. I now have three pairs of ruffly little girly socks that are made for, well, ruffly little girls, but I am going to wear them anyway, because if I have to wear socks for another six weeks, I should at least be able to come home and do a halfway decent impression of a ZZ Top video.

*Apparently I can’t type tonight. “Ribcage” kept coming out as “fubbage.” I think I like it: “Sweetie, you can’t go out like that. That shirt barely covers your fubbage.”