(Sweetie's Hunk of the Week, 37)

Sweetie's hunk of the week is a blast from the past, but not in the sense that he's some kind of old guy; just in the sense that he hasn't actually done anything that anyone's heard of in about 20 years. This week's hunk is

James Marsden!

And to make things more interesting, I'm going to give you another behind-the-scenes look at how these get written, because really I can't think of anything to say about James Marsden.

Here's the picture I chose to use of James Marsden:

James Marsden. (Probably a profile)

I chose to use that picture because I needed to distract Mr Bunches from what he was doing as I sat down to write this post. What he was doing, in order, was this:

1. Sitting on my lap, periodically pressing the "+" key, so that you would have read: S++++weetie'+s H+unk+++++of the+Week, which would have caused the FBI to think that I was writing in some sort of code, which would in turn have caused the to perform a daring daylight raid on what they would believe to be a band of suspected terrorists but which would really be not our house, but the other house with almost our exact same address, the one that gets all our pizzas and, probably, those lottery checks from that Nigerian/Microsoft Lottery I entered via email the other day.

All I had to do was give them my credit card number, and if it matched the numbers drawn, I'm rich!

2. Then, he was shaking the Only Living Plant, the sole plant we have in our house, a plant that he knew would get him in trouble for shaking it because he saw Mr F get in trouble for that yesterday. Only I didn't give in to him, and ignored it. So he went and

3. Hit the grandfather clock, which doesn't work and needs to be fixed, but that's no reason to hit it. So he got a time out, and then I told him: Here. Sit here. Daddy needs you to draw something. I gave him paper, and then was going to give him a marker when I remembered that he and Mr F were already grounded off markers for the day because they were throwing them (it was only 8:45), so I gave him a pen and said: Draw James Marsden, at which point he quit complaining and went straight to work.

So I gave him pointers. "Draw his little boy smile," I said. Then: "Draw his abs." Then: "Draw his hair," and each time Mr Bunches obliged. Since he was Picasso-esque in his representation of James Marsden, I took the step of providing you a "James Marsden Viewer's Guide:"

James Marsden: A Viewer's Guide.

With that, I set out to begin scanning in the photo, at which point Mr F decided to press all of the buttons on the printer at the same time, causing the printer to (in technical terms) not work.

That's the problem with having my computer in the same room as the Babies! Or, given their level of destruction, that's the problem with having my computer in the same state as the Babies! From here on out, I will be posting from Nebraska.

Sweetie then took the Babies! for a car ride "to the Bank." I helped her load them into the car and came back upstairs to do this post, secure in the knowledge that I'd get some uninterrupted time to write it, and began writing:

You don't know him without you have: But I would not immediately get a chance to decide what James Marsden has been in, besides being the vaguely-bad-guy in The Notebook, and also I think he was in X-Men, but I can never watch that movie, so I'm not sure. (See this for the only emotions I have about X-Men: The Hopelessly Boring and Name-Mispronouncing Movie), because The Boy had risen from his cavelike room and come downstairs, and while I tried to get to work posting this, he wanted to talk.

The Boy "talks" in the morning via pronouncements, not conversation. I still feel obliged to interact with him because I don't want to end up sitting on Dr. Phil one day on an episode entitled You Didn't Talk To Me Over Breakfast, Now I'm A Meth-Crazed Bank Robbing Punk Rocker. But interacting is limited to fending off statements designed to goad me into an argument. As I tried to look up James Marsden, The Boy fired off this salvo:

"God, I'm so sick of the Swine Flu." This week, The Boy has been sick of coverage, already, of Balloon Boy and Brett Favre, and, now, apparently, Swine Flu had drawn his wrath. When I didn't immediately respond, he said "I don't see what the big deal is for something that's just a really bad cold," a bit of misinformation that I think he got from reversing what I had told him, which was that many people refer to what they have as the flu but they don't have "the flu," they just have a really bad cold, and that there's a difference between a "cold" and "the flu." The Boy had taken that and decided that everyone who says they have the flu just has a cold.

I'd given up, meanwhile, on finding out more about James Marsden's background and instead moved on to

Things That Make You Go Hmmm About Him: Which I then got distracted from by trying to explain to The Boy that it hadn't, actually, taken that long for "them" to come up with a swine flu vaccine, and that people know perfectly well how to make vaccines for almost every virus-caused disease, at which point The Boy changed the subject and said: "Stupid Bob Dylan."

"Stupid Bob Dylan,"

which threw me for a loop, at first, as I didn't see how Bob Dylan was to blame for Swine Flu, or vaccines, or even Balloon Boy, but I then realized that there was a Bob Dylan song playing on my iTunes. Before I could defend Bob Dylan, The Boy had retreated downstairs to begin his preparations for watching football, which consists of sitting on the couch watching people prepare to play football, and, probably, thinking of things to be irritated with. ("Stupid 50-yard lines.")

By then, it was time to move on to:

Reason I Tell Myself Sweetie Likes Him: And, by then, too, Sweetie and the Babies! were back from the Bank, and the Babies! were crowding around me wanting to hang out, a situation that was made worse by the fact that the Dylan song had been followed by "Part of Your World," from The Little Mermaid. Yeah, I've got both Bob Dylan and The Little Mermaid soundtrack on my iPod. That's what makes me cool.

By this point, I was hard pressed to even remember what James Marsden looked like, so I went back to check on it and see what I thought it was Sweetie would like about him, reviewing his picture:

James Marsden. (Naked!)

But that wasn't very helpful. I distracted Mr Bunches and Mr F by showing Mr Bunches how he could drop my Froot Loops into my coffee... don't ask... and by putting Mr F on the chair behind me where he could amuse himself by sticking his fingers in my ear ... not as distracting as it sounds, which really says something about my life... and looked up the first picture I could find of James Marsden on the Internet:

James Marsden: The 13th Cylon.

And I decided, as Mr Bunches got mad that he couldn't take the cushion off the rocking chair and opted to climb the cat tree, instead, that what Sweetie liked about James Marsden is... something or other, and Mr Bunches, get down!

Which brings us to

Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: "He's got a little boy smile, and he's sexy." Note: As I typed that, Mr F is lying on the floor kicking randomly. Mr Bunches is sitting up on the cat tree again, and The Boy has come back into the room to do his homework that he has to have finished before watching football, and has a look on his face like he's going to say something. Probably something like Stupid school, teaching us stupid things that'll let us have stupid jobs and earn stupid money. And also Stupid Bob Dylan.

Although, to be fair, I asked The Boy what he was thinking about just now, and he said: "Spanish?" He actually said it as a question, though, as if he wasn't exactly sure he had been thinking about it, something I'd have brought up to him except Mr F wandered off and is crying, and I don't know where Sweetie is. Probably Nebraska.

Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: Sweetie just happened to walk in as I found the picture below. And the cookie jar's broken.

Stupid James Marsden.