Thursday, April 20, 2006

Sign O' The Times

Seen Wednesday, April 19, 2006 in West Hollywood:

One billboard. Black background. Big white type:

6 + 6 + 06

THE SIGNS ARE ALL AROUND YOU*

And over at the Tomkat Theater, the marquee:

DOWN THE DRAIN**

Is someone trying to tell me something?

At any rate, yesterday started out well and then began to suck. I got my early errands done and even got a pedicure, and was home by 11 AM, where I discovered I had a client message asking me if I could do a quick turnaround assignment by 4 PM. I replied that I could, and he sent me the materials around 12:30. At 3:57, I was composing an e-mail and attaching the document I had managed to write in 3.5 hours, and I went back to double-check the document for errors before sending it -- and half of my edits were gone. The hardcore writing I had done from about 2:00 on was not saved. I don't know what the hell happened, but I was panicked and enraged, and I knew he would be in deep shit with his client (he is subcontracting stuff out to me) because the client was expecting to get the document that day.

Ugh. I ended up holed up in my bedroom for an hour and a half after picking up Viva, reconstructing the document while Sweet Dub ordered takeout Lebanese and managed our child's periodic breakdowns. It was my night to put her to bed, so pretty much right after finishing my assignment, I went straight into mommy night-night mode. And Viva already knows how to exploit the guilt. She acted like I had shot her in the face, a la Dick Cheney, by being home but not spending time with her.

Viva can really get you. She has been asking recently about sisters and brothers and what the difference between them is, and I explained that if Mama and Daddy had another baby, that baby would be her sister if it were a girl or brother if it were a boy. I explained that a sister or a brother is someone who has the same mommy and daddy as you.

"If you have a baby, it will be my sister or my brother?" she says.

"Right," I say, "Depending on whether it's a girl or a boy."

"Where does the sister or brother live?" she says.

"With its family, baby. See, if we had another baby, the baby would live here, with us. Because we are its family, just like you and daddy and I are all a family."

There is a pause while she processes this, and then, "But where would I go?"

------------------------

* I did actually look this up on Ye Olde Internets, and I found the usual portents of impending doom. I hate to encourage this kind of thing, but it fascinates me in a sick way.

** Not their best. But kind of appropriate considering Tom and Katie just announced the "birth" of their "baby." If only they'd made their announcement in front of the Tomkat Theater. That would be hot.

Edited to add: Oh, my gosh, my golly, please please please click here for a fabulous deconstruction of TomKat's baby's name. I'm so Suri!

3 comments:

freethoughtguy said...

Did you notice that these billboards have upside-down crosses instead of plus signs?

Lisa Blah Blah said...

No, I didn't realized that. In fact, I didn't even register the plus signs until a couple of days after my original post. (When I was seeing more of the billboards all over town.) Nice catch!

And yeah, my husband did tell me that they were advertising a movie. But that's not as funny as them being just a random thing you run across every day, now, is it?

Lisa Blah Blah said...

Oops, I mean, I didn't *realize* that. Typing too fast, ugh!