August 18, 2014 · 11:50 am

I’m Married. I’m BEAUTIFUL.

I just got back from vacation, where I lay in a hammock for a week reading a truly horrible book. I was extra salty the whole time because of the sea water and ALSO because I wanted a trashy book to read on vacation, just not a book that was actual trash. There is a serious difference. This book was trash  trash. It was made of real garbage.

A trashy book is like something with a lot of sex and confusion and maybe a death. It’s fun and not necessarily well-written but it’s got charm in its awfulness. A trashy book knows it’s trashy and doesn’t take itself too seriously. This book was the most terrible piece of back-stabby, bitchy, sex-negative, self-congratulatory crap I have ever. read. in. my. life. And I’ve read a lot of books, y’all.

I heard the author, Jill Lauren, on an episode of The Moth Podcast a few months ago. She talked about the time when she went over to Brunei to be part of the Sultan’s brother’s harem. I don’t remember a lot about the podcast, but I remember her portraying it like she went over to find adventure and then the Sultan himself told her to suck his dick after hearing from his brother that she was a good lay and she finally opened her eyes to the fact that she was just being used for her holes and came home. That was my takeaway. I thought maybe the book would be about the decision to go over there and what it was like to be there, with some details about fucking a sultan’s brother on the side. God, I was so wrong.

Mostly, the book is the writer whining about how abusive her adoptive dad was, vacillating between loving him so completely that she was on the brink of a meltdown when her plane to Brunei left immediately after he had a surgical procedure, to dropping little snipes about how her mother always just took the abuse, to detailing a time when he beat her. It was such a weird slushy mess of “My poor dad!” and “My awful dad!!” which I think is something that’s common but it’s also something you should figure out before you set it down in type for other people.

So anyway, rich white girl from the suburbs moves to New York and drops out of school, like a TOTAL rich white girl would, and decides to start stripping, then escorting, when her daddy cuts her off from the credit cards. Of course, the first escort experience she details is extremely boring once you get over the bone(r) she throws you: that the client is a FAMOUS RADIO PERSONALITY OOOH AHHHH. Then you’re just like, oh yeah, I don’t care. The rest of her escorting experience is summed up with an account of an impotent dude poking his scaly fingers into her twat for hours, and this weird holier-than-thou attitude about how other women look at her. Something about how women would smirk at her when they saw her, because they’d spotted the prostitute, and she’d saunter past like ohhh you don’t know how rad my life is you frigid bitches. But her life kind of sounded awful. Her disgusting and boring accounts of escort life were interwoven with constant “What was I doing?” and “I really was a good girl!” bullshit that made my eyes roll back so far into my head that they still haven’t come out, that’s why I’m dictating this review.

The only reason I can come up with for her decision to go join a room full of fuckholes for some prince in another country is because she wanted a bunch of money, and her acting career wasn’t working out. She was fucking for money in New York and interning or volunteering or something at some play house with a bunch of other actors, whose names she totally fucking dropped, you better believe it, I just don’t remember any of them. I guess she got bored with that or wanted more money for the fucking (I would too). So off to the palace! This is about where she starts trying to write off fucking a misogynistic rapist douchebag asshole for large amounts of money in a foreign country as some kind of prince-and-me fantasy, as some kind of LOOOOVE.

God, this woman.

Surprise surprise, she gets embroiled in the drama with other women almost immediately. Between bitchy remarks and observations of other women in that high school mean girl “Oh isn’t it sad that she’s like that?” and “I only say she’s ugly because I’m concerned for her” kind of way, you also get treated to descriptions of how great our heroine can dance and sing and move her ass to music and how she always manages to be awesome at stuff. Bully for her! So of course she ends up in bed with the prince, and I think you’re supposed to see it as some kind of marvelous accomplishment? Like she beat out all the other beauty queens for some kind of penis prize? I don’t know. That part was very weird. She gets fucked, and it sounds awful and dehumanizing, and when she sees how it affects other women, she wants it to happen again and again. Abysmal. This part really was, to me, the pit of human despair.

The sex scenes, though. You think they’re going to be interesting or at least critical since she’s been such a giant cunt about everyone else and also described everything down to what the walls in the palace look like, but no. They are seriously the most boring thing ever. They’re like the steamy, rose petal, silky sheet dreams of middle-aged Boyz II Men fans, except a little dumber. Also she’s annoyingly talking about kind of disassociating from herself because it’s obvious that the dude is just jerking off into her because he can. She never once mentions having a good time with him, or coming, or even enjoying half a second of his dick’s presence. Totally healthy. Then there’s a bunch of lines scattered throughout the book about what he must be thiiinkiiiiing and what’s it liiiike to be a priiiiince and junior high journal-worthy analysis of why this asshole is the way he is and why it’s still impossible not to love him.

Who could resist this mustachioed weasel? Wring out them panties, girls!

Who could resist this pouty, mustachioed weasel? Wring out them panties, girls!

So there’s in-fighting and a whole lot of woman hate crimes happening, all because everybody wants this prince’s magical money dick. She tells a lie to get her rival sent home after detailing pageafter page how the girl was a real bitch for calling her fat or whatever, then turns on the “I’m a good girl!” bullshit again by lamenting DID I REALLY JUST DO THAT OMG. Yes, you did, you did that so you could make more money and have more dresses and get paid by the guy who keeps a harem of women who need money, some of them underage and in bad situations. You did it! Good job!

Eventually the sultan wants a blow for himself, and she gives him one. Unlike her Moth story, that’s not when she decides to go home. She goes home much later after getting to go on a massive and limitless shopping spree in Singapore. There’s literally a chapter of only high-end shopping porn. Once she’s back in New York with a shitload of money and stuff, she talks about all the stuff she buys there, and about dating a music producer dude (whom she names specifically), aborting their baby, breaking up with him, and moving in with someone else. She gives some embarrassing detail about her ex having been molested by someone who also shows up in the story, and possibly being gay, and having bad teeth, which I found to be really offensive, even more so now that I’ve been on her website and seen a comment about how she gave people false names to protect their identities. What about this guy? Ugh.

There’s this whole description of her decision to get a nasty-ass sounding tattoo of some flowers and snake parts and stuff because of finding herself? Or hiding herself? Or…I don’t know. I didn’t get that part. Some kind of sparkly princess bullshit about expressing something with “a pussy tattoo,” which she really wants you to know is a BIG DEAL and stuff. She keeps saying “pussy tattoo” for about four pages, I think that’s literally all that’s printed on those pages, and of course there’s a line in there about how this was before Ed Hardy so yeah, she was into tattoos before tattoos were mainstream and shit.

Well, guess what she does with herself after she finds herself? She gets herself right back on a plane and flies back to Brunei to fuck the prince some more. Except this time it’s passed off as something she does because she’s a WRITER and WRITERS DO THIS STUFF OKAY and also she maybe needs money a little bit but mostly WRITING. At this part, I was thinking “god, this book is so terrible, if this is the best she can do, I hope this is the part of the book where she decides never to write again.” (Which makes no sense. But there was definitely a point in the book when I thought “Soooo does she die, or…?”) This time she shows the prince her pussy tattoo and all the foggy Boyz II Men video sex scenes start up again but there’s something missing because now he’s in love with a new girl, whom he wants to marry, and you better believe you get a less-than-positive description of this girl’s bad skin and fat butt. That’s MY disconnected-from-reality man with three wives and a hundred girlfriends, you bitch! Hands off!

I think somewhere around in there she goes home, after taking a ride in a Maserati or something and dropping a terrible metaphor about fast cars and princes. She must have gone home, because then the book goes on a tour of her genealogy as she finds her birth mother and the two take a dance class. The best I can say about this is that it was readable. If I had to write a blurb for this book, I’d say “This book is the worst thing ever created by humankind but that one part was sort of readable I guess.” Blah blah blah. I think it’s in the epilogue that she talks about another magical and completely superficial life event passed of as a giant transformation when she announces “I’m married now.”

“I’m married now.”

“Oh, you are? You have really come a long way! They don’t let just anyone get married!”

I’m married now, she says, so I’m like totally different and I know myself and shit. Then she yaps a little bit about adoption and having a house and then it’s over. And no, you cannot have your time back!

I'm married now! BUY MY SEXY BOOK IT'S GOT SEX

I’m married now! BUY MY SEXY BOOK IT’S GOT SEX

My discomfort is not with sex work. It’s with horrible men who have a lot of money, and the women who bend to the point of breaking to get it, women who flick one another out of the way for it. Prince Jefri of Brunei is a terrible man and I wish people would STOP FUCKING TERRIBLE MEN.

My problem is also with how angry this woman clearly was (and is, I’d wager) at other women. Something about how she described her mother as powerless and never standing up to the man who abused her made me think she was hiding how mad she was at her mom for staying with her awful dad, for never taking her side with him. That makes total sense when you see how she treats other women. She talks about most of the women in the book as if they’re stupid or simple or too nice or just beneath her somehow. She even drops in a reference about going on a date with another woman (it comes out of nowhere, for no reason, except to boast in that way that people do sometimes? You know, to try and shock you? But it’s like–nobody asked, so it comes off really weird). I had a boss that used to do that: you’d be talking about the weather and she’d be like “I’m a lesbian, you got a problem with that?” I also went to art school so I have been in tons of situations where someone will say “I like pancakes” and some straight girl with blue hair will be like “I mean, I dated a girl once, whatever, NO BIG DEAL.” Anyway, our heroine does this, then proceeds to NAME the woman and say it might have worked out if this woman hadn’t been “such a short bitch.”

I also don’t like it when assholes like this fly the sex positive banner and then inject everything with their brand of sex-positivity. In this book, she encourages young women to have naked photos taken of themselves so that when they’re old they will realize that they weren’t ugly. Less than a moment before she was talking about how some of the photography sessions were icky and creepy. But DO IT ANYWAY because later when you’re ugly you will want to look back on your pretty times. Also how can a sex positive person NOT talk about sex? Good lord. After flying halfway around the world, we got more descriptions of her own naked ass and her ex-boyfriend’s bad teeth than we do of royal dong. So I guess, really, Jillian Lauren can only be described as self positive, because she’s just about the only thing she’s qualified, willing, or even interested in talking about.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but this book was very poorly written. I mean, “She was a real strawberry in a room full of Strawberry Pop-Tarts.” GODDDDDD. My thirteen-year-old self wrote that, I’m pretty fucking fairly sure. Not only is it yet another example about how dumb groups of women are, how WOMEN as a whole can be plopped into a big bucket and thrown in the sea because really there’s only one or two of worth or intelligence among the lot, you know, but good grief, lady. What the fuck is up with the horrible metaphors? There was another one about a dude who had the hands of a poet? Or musician? Or something? And she goes on and on about fingers and shit for what feels like 10 chapters but in reality is probably like 2 lines but holy hell. If I talk about this book anymore I think actual poop will come out of my eyes.

Derp-pression

Everybody’s falling the fuck apart on social media about Robin Williams. Because if you saw Mrs. Doubtfire or watched Mork & Mindy, you totally knew him and if you post a picture of him and a bunch of people like it, it’s like you’re SHARING THE GRIEF. I couldn’t be more pleased that it’s toning down a little bit now. I thought I was going to vomit blood if I saw one more weepy whiny status message about him. Or one more goddamn post about what some random celebrity said about him.

MILEY CYRUS SPEAKS OUT ABOUT ROBIN WILLIAMS

Oh, well, hey, very nice. What’s that? She posted something on Twitter? Wow, let’s all go read it and re-p0st it and favorite it because life is boring.

The only thing that’s worse is people posting stuff like “Depression is bad for you! If you have it you should dial 1-900-SAD-A-LOT so you don’t kill yourself!” Because it comes off like “OK if you don’t feel good stuff ever, you call this phone number and they inject something into your brain over the phone that makes you stop crying about everything all the time and remembering all the sad things constantly and then you’re better, and we don’t have to worry about you. That phone number is HELP. Go get it, dummy! It’s so EASY!”

It’s not easy. When you’re that deep in the woods, the worst thing ever is thinking about leaving. It’s so much easier and less scary to just stay. Yet there are so many people who say things like “Depression is so sad, suicide is so sad! There’s no reason for it when there’s SO MUCH HELP out there.” Bless their little hearts! This kind of thinking means you’ve never been clinically depressed. It’s when your brain tells you there is no way out, you’re going to die anyway, you ruin everyone’s lives and you don’t do anything right so why not rid them of your presence and let them be happy? Your BRAIN tells you that. And all your thoughts and feelings go right along with it. Why would you ever not trust your intuition? Why would you instead say “You know, I think maybe my thoughts and feelings are totally 100% wrong and I am going to go on out there and get help.” You might, and it’s a miracle if you do. But most likely you won’t. Hopefully someone will come along and say WE ARE FIXING YOU and they help you get to the point where you start to see that what you THINK is the problem.

Those phone numbers are great. They are perfect for helpers, for the friend who calls to find out next steps for your treatment, but to say we have SO many options for depressed and suicidal people and so it follows that we should not have any more depressed or suicidal people, well, dumbass, that’s about the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard. And I read My Life in a Harem  cover to cover, so I know!

HBOred

I couldn’t sleep on Sunday night, not a wink, and I’m thinking about writing to HBO about it. It’s their fault because I watched The Leftovers right before bed and it’s also my next door neighbor’s fault for smoking a cigarette under my bedroom window just as I was falling asleep, filling my room with cigarette stink and making me really mad and cranked up so sleep was REALLY out of the question, and it’s also the upstairs neighbors’ fault for totally not realizing that not only can we hear every footstep and make out every word of every conversation they have, we can also hear every moment of their Squeaky Mattress and Random Moaning Time and it’s not cute at all. When you run into your neighbor in the hallway you don’t want to remember their porn-y sex sounds. But I’d like to know who in the hell would be able to think about fuck else after they’ve heard that. I mean, come on.

Also they have three fucking cats that run up and down the floor all night long, knocking shit over, so even if I retreat to the couch for a respite from their nonstop fucking or conversations, I get no rest. And the dog growls himself to sleep. It’s enough to make me miss that neutered super-creep that lived above us a few months ago, who slunk home every night at 2am on the dot and climbed into bed alone and never had so much as a phone conversation with another human being. It’s ALMOST enough to make me miss him, but alas, he did not like me, and that’s just about the worst thing a human being can do.

Anyway.

Dear HBO-

Why do you insist on being so terrible?

I mean that in a genuine concern-type of way. Are you sleeping too much? Not sleeping enough? Have you had recurring thoughts of worthlessness? Are you worried, anxious, constantly concerned? I just think that only a person with severe clinical depression would allow Tom Perrotta smack them around to the point of giving him an outlet for his book-turned-sad-ass-TV-show, the title of which sounds like something you’d shove to the back of the refrigerator until it started to stink and you were forced to throw it away. That’s how I feel about The Leftovers: it is irritatingly present. I can’t figure out why. What did we do to deserve this?

Let me first express to you how important television programs are to me. I literally have nothing else to do after work. Am I supposed to go to bars or restaurants? I’m poor! Also, those places are far away from my couch. And TV is way more entertaining. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat there listening to someone ramble about God-knows-what and replayed an entire episode of Parks & Recreation from memory in my head. The only time TV is not better than life is when it’s an episode of The Leftovers. Not only is it boring as hell, it’s fucking jam-packed with the kind of saddy-sad imagery that puts decaying holes in brain that already has depressive tendencies. It’s like, You didn’t need that serotonin, did you? Because I’ma go ahead and show you a really graphic stoning and a cremation and just get rid of that for you. And it’s for NO REASON. The show has actually not given us a reason to feel ANYTHING at all, ever, about anyone, but has given us 1000 things to feel. Who are these fucking people? Why do I give a damn? Because I feel like I should be giving a damn and I just don’t.

Just about the only nice thing I can say is that I appreciate the premise. How fucking creepy! A bunch of people just disappear! What the fuck?! I love a good post-apocalyptic novel, and this premise seemed right up there with some of the best of them. Holy crap, the world has changed forever! What are we going to do now? Well, apparently, you’ve answered that question with “only things that are cripplingly pointless and/or terribly sad,” because that’s what’s happening. I mean, there’s good sad, which is difficult to come by, but you get there by not being cripplingly pointless. In The Road, the father and son had a goal: to get somewhere safe, alive. In The Leftovers, the only goal seems to be “don’t tell anyone about weird prophetic dreams, find something to wear to work, blorp blorp blorp.”

I'm whatever season is Sweaty Black Eyeliner All The Time.

I’m whatever season is Sweaty Black Eyeliner All The Time.

First of all, can we get some more goddamn eyeliner on Sexy Cop Justin Theroux? Can we? Because I don’t think you’ve made his eyes look pretty enough. I mean seriously, he looks like the Sexy Girl from a Tex Avery cartoon. Second, please stop beating us over the head with the fact that Sexy Cop’s Wife left him to join the “Guilty Remnant” (what a fucking dumb name for a cult, by the way, did they run out of good names for cults, you fucking assholes?). I believe we came to grips with this mindblowing fact in Episode 1, yet here we are in episode whateverthehell and you’re still going “ohhhhh that’s his wiiiife! ooohhh wowww! What’s she going to doooo? What about her faaaaamily?” Ugh, fuck you. I don’t care anymore. The shit with the estranged son and creepy cult leader (OH LOOK ANOTHER CULT, HOW WEIRD) is also very stupid. Why the fuck would this kid stick around waiting for a phone to ring? Teenage boys don’t EVER do that, like ever, even if it was the motherfucking apocalypse and God flew down on a broom and said “wait until this cell phone rings” they’d go play Xbox or skateboard or whatever the fuck it was they were all doing while I was calling them when I was a teenager. And the daughter’s sexy friend is getting on my nerves. Do we really have to play American Beauty again? We’ve played it enough, I think. Enough times to be annoyed that there’s a female character whose entire purpose is to make you wonder whether some guy is going to fuck her. She keeps slithering around door frames in her Urban Outfitters lingerie, rubbing her eyes like a six-year-old, crooning goofy shit, and Officer Eyeliner stares at her all slack-jawed like “Am I gonna hit that? It’s WRONG” and she shrugs like “This is the depth of my character’s development, whatever dude.” Licks her lips, thinks of nothing. Then we’ve got the preacher and his comatose wife on the side and we’re supposed to feel extra super sorry for them. His sister’s whole family disappeared on Disappear Day so she should be a total fucking nutcase but really she’s like a wet fart dressed up in Sad Lady clothes. She’s so fucking bland. In one episode, she has a gun in her purse. Ooooh a GUN oh my god NOBODY HAS GUNS THESE DAYS and wouldn’t you think that more people would have guns after a bunch of the earth’s population disappeared? Wouldn’t you think that people would REALLY go apeshit after something like that and start stockpiling weapons? But we’re supposed to Think Stuff about this piece of shit character because there’s a handgun in her purse. I am not stupid, HBO!

It would be nice if an episode of this show would change course once in a while. If it wasn’t so disturbing, the cadence of the disturbing happenings would downright lull me to sleep. Here is the formula, in case you haven’t discovered it yet, for an episode of The Leftovers:

Nighttime.

Dramatic thing happens!

Piano music, sadness.

Daytime, snow, driving.

Car accident/nearly car accident!

Depressing thing happens.

Depressing thing happens.

Hope!

NO. Depressing thing.

Piano music, sadness.

CrAZy dReAMs! POSSIBLE FORESHADOWING

Piano music, sadness.

Cult member frowny face. FEEEEELINGS!

Piano & cello crescendo, sadness.

Nighttime.

End.

I am finished, HBO. You are coming dangerously close to losing a customer! I have put up with an entire season of True Blood characters coming up with reasons to all be in the same room at the same time so drama can happen (there’s only so many times they can say “let’s all, uhhh, have a party?” before it gets really old). I sat through an entire fifteen minutes of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and one night even found myself home alone, halfway through a bottle of red wine, watching Coma, your RIVETING 8-year-old, two hour long documentary on traumatic brain injuries. I swear to God, if you start this season of Boardwalk Empire by having Nucky say to someone “So it’s like the thirties now, huh?” I am going to remove HBO from my Comcast bill so fast and so hard that you will feel it back at BO Headquarters. I mean it! I will do it. Enough with the long, drawn-out saddy sads with no discernible purpose. Throw Tom Perrotta out the window. Tie him to a tree and stone him for being awful. Then punch yourself in the eye for allowing him to be awful in TV drama format. You murderers.

 

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July 17, 2014 · 2:49 pm

Bump-It

face-melty

What’s awful about the bathroom at work…is everything. Every thing that could be awful about any room ever applies to this particular bathroom. Did I tell you I saw a girl washing her feet in the sink in there one time?

DID I TELL YOU. I SAW A GIRL WASHING. HER. FEET. IN THE SINK.

So basically it’s a big ole crap party every time I go in. There’s almost always a lingering poop smell, but not just any old poop smell, the smell of the poops of people who smoke and drink too much coffee. So like a really sour, nicotine-y stank that just won’t go away, and when you leave the bathroom you’re worried that smell’s in your hair and stuff. Also, there’s a veritable pube farm on every goddamn toilet seat, I don’t know what these bitches are doing when they sit down (are you fucking brushing it in there or something?) but goddamn, I could collect that stuff and make my own natural Bump-It.

So in the last several years, I’ve put up with everything to smears of period blood and/or boogers all over the walls, to vomit and shit crusted on toilet seats, to used maxi pads left out at eye level on the little ledge above the toilet paper dispenser in the stall, to your basic wet floor/soggy toilet paper variety of bathroom horror. But today was a brand new Terrible Thing.

There are two sinks (which means you have to stand next to the person who is washing their feet in one and their foot washing splatter hits you in the face while you scrub your hands bloody) and each has a paper towel dispenser next to it. So, logically, each sink has its own personal paper towel dispenser. These dispensers are the kind with the little knob that you pump up and down to unroll a length of paper towel which you are then expected to tear off. Since people get their hands wet and then reach for that knob, it is naturally always wet, and the wetness left lingering on it has grown cold under the air conditioning. I shudder just thinking about it. So I usually go for the little knob BEFORE washing my hands so that I can wash the cold wetness of the prior person’s hands off, then grab my length of pre-dispensed paper towel, and have hands that are As Clean As Possible. I left the stall today, went to the sink which was not occupied, and proceeded to carry out this method. I noticed that the person standing at the other sink was watching me in the mirror. She looked perplexed as to why I was using the paper towel dispenser and THEN washing my hands. Well, do you know what that bitch did next?

She fucking glanced at the paper towel dispenser that was HALF A FOOT AWAY FROM HER and decided instead to walk at least six feet away to RIGHT NEXT TO ME and started to make a grab for MY paper towel!

My face actually did this:

face-melting

 

WHAT THE HELL, MAN?

I wasn’t done washing my hands but just out of principal I turned around (or rather, WHIRLED around) and gave her the dirtiest face-melty look imaginable and grabbed my paper towel before she could get her wet little fingers all over it. She looked at me like I’d hurt her feelings or was being unreasonable or something, but for fuck’s sake, I was not aware that I was going to have to start guarding paper towels like private property from these lazy motherfuckers.

line to nowhere

It started raining on me on my way back from getting coffee the other day.  Instead of getting soaked while waiting at the stoplight, I stood under a bit of scaffolding a few feet away. After about 30 seconds, a lady with a fanny pack on excitedly asked me “Scuse me! What’s this line for?!” I turned around and noticed that yes, indeed, an orderly line of 8 people had formed behind me, a line to nowhere and nothing. The lady looked disappointed when I told her I was just trying to keep dry and cross the street.

I’m SORRY, sad lady!

I’ve thought about her a couple of times in the last few days. In all likelihood, she was on her way over to the Sears Tower to check out the Skybox! or some other kind of inane tourist garbage, which is really the only reason a be-fannypacked human being would be rattling around the financial district. But I like to think of other reasons for her to be there. Does she develop an interactive map of places to line up in the city? Was she excited at the prospect of possibly having found A BRAND NEW REASON TO LINE UP?

Probably not. She probably thought the bank next door was giving away free t-shirts or something. Po’ lady.

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July 3, 2014 · 11:14 am

Lurching Towards Ecstasy

I was at Target digging through the clearance bathing suits since they were all like $5 and there were 1000 of them, and if there’s anything I need it’s more mismatched bikini parts that don’t fit properly. So I was there for a while. While I was standing there, a woman and her husband  and an older lady that I later understood to be her mother were shopping in the women’s underwear section. The woman was on one of those scooters with a giant basket in the front. She was trying to steer it around a really tight corner and it stopped. She said “Well, it died on me!” She slapped her thighs in exasperation and looked around with her big moony eyes, searching for sympathy from me and the two preteen girls who were combing through the bikini top spaghetti. Her husband and mother were like “What, really? OH NO! It died?! Whaaat?!” She started heaving back and forth in the seat like she was going to push-start the damn thing, like rock it back to life or something, while her mother and husband mashed the buttons and turned the key every which way. The mother dropped a bunch of very large women’s briefs into the front basket, threw her hands in the air, and said “Well, I’ll go get us another one.”There was a good two more minutes of rocking and button-smashing, peppered with the lady saying “Well it up and died! It just died! I can’t believe this! It just up and died! Didn’t do nothin to it!” Finally, the thing revved to life and shot forward, knocking her backwards in the seat a little bit. “Whoaaa!” she yelped, before driving onward, leaving her husband in the dust. “It’s workin now!” she called over her shoulder. He picked up the several shapewear undergarments that had been hanging from the edge of the basket and were knocked loose by her sudden lurch through the sock aisle and ran after her.

Several minutes after that (I’m telling you, there were a LOT of bathing suits to look at), the mother comes whurring around the corner in a new scooter. She said, to nobody in particular, “I’m lookin for the girl whose scooter died.” Right when she said that, she lost her ability to make the replacement scooter work. Maybe those things have some kind of sensor for when something is too close, so that nobody runs over a small child in Target? Anyway, it was stuck in the EXACT same place. Unbelievable. “Well now THIS ONE’s dead!” she huffed to, I guess, me? To Jesus? I don’t know. I was minding my own bidness (and watching from between a bunch of extra small string bikini bottoms on the other side of the rack). So SHE started rocking back and forth like she was trying to get an old Honda up a snowy hill, and it wasn’t working. “This is RIDICULOUS. Just AWFUL!” she kept saying, and “Oh I just can’t believe this! RIDICULOUS!” Banging on buttons, turning key off and on, shaking the steering handles back and forth the whole time. I guess she rocked it far enough around the tight corner for the sensor or magic or whatever makes those things stop short of killing people wore off, and off SHE shot off into the socks section, and hollered “OH it’s workin, okay!”

I tell you I was crying tears of joy by the time they were all gone, had to wipe my face on some off-brand Spanx.

She’s Not There

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking Dog down the street when I saw a former coworker, current neighbor, walking down the other side. I realized who she was right when we glanced at each other’s faces, I knew she saw me and that I knew her. So I said hello, said her name, said it louder, said hello again, but when all she did was flip her hair and ignore me, I eventually said “Uhh, okay.”
She’s a weirdo. I mean, a certified weirdo. I’m pretty sure if you went to her house, there would be a certificate for Weirdoism on her wall, in a nice frame. I couldn’t even bother with being annoyed or hurt about her openly ignoring me when I thought about other things I know about her. Then I realized that it’s possible that I’m not always the weird one in the situation, sometimes other people are weirder! So here’s some stuff about this creep:
  1. She’s kind of a suicide pig, in the way that she seems almost excited when something awful or tragic happens. Case in point: when I worked with her in retail, I overheard her yelling at another employee, telling him to do something. He protested, I think he was saying it wasn’t his job or whatever, so to get him to do it, she said “LOOK! MY GRANDPA IS IN THE HOSPITAL! WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST FUCKING DO THIS?” Anyone else would have been dumbfounded, or would have gone “ohmygod I’m sorryyyy YES of course I will do this unrealistic and unfair thing you are asking of me because it would make me a dick if I didn’t!” But this fucking guy, this superstar, he said something I will never forget: “I don’t care about your grandpa! I’m not doing this. Bye.” AMAZING. She stomped away and hid out for the rest of the night. Nobody really minded because it wasn’t any kind of new thing for her to be crying in a corner somewhere at work.
  2. I can remember two separate times when she claimed that her drink was tampered with at a bar. Two. Separate. Times. Either this girl has a hard time keeping track of her drinks, or she can’t hold her liquor, or both. I don’t know. I just remember getting really tired of hearing how the ambulance had to come because she felt dizzy. At this very moment, she’s vaguebooking about “an assault” that she apparently suffered, rallying the troops to rack up enough Facebook likes to convince herself to live or something. God damn. I mean, I guess it’s possible for a single person to be a constant victim of attempted sexual and physical assaults, but I find it really hard to believe, especially when that person is a whore for drama. My grandpa is in the hospital!!!
  3. I had this Tori Amos record, it was a bunch of club remixes of “In the Springtime of His Voodoo.” It was probably the dumbest piece of Tori Amos merchandise I ever purchased, but I bought it when I was like fourteen and on vacation to Lake of the Ozarks with my parents and it had a sticker on it that said “RARE” and I wanted it SO THERE. Anyway, when we worked together, she was a club dj. I mentioned the unts-unts nature of the record to her and she said she would looooove to borrow it and could she? Of course. So I bring it to her and a couple of months pass. I ask her about it and she’s all, “Oh, I’ll get it to you. Oh sure, I’ll look for it. Let me see if I can find it tonight. Yeah, I just forgot, I’ll get it to you.” So I wait and wait, and eventually I get the feeling that she’s doing the thing people do when they want to keep that book you loaned them, and fuck that shit, so I asked her again, “Can you find my record please?” Then she came out with it: this long, detailed, over-involved story about how she was walking down the street? In the rain? And guess what! I fell down! My record bag opened and ALL of my records fell out into a puddle! Your record got ruined! I’m SO SO SORRY. I will buy you another one!” Something about that story smelled stank to me, and I think at that point I already had this girl’s number. So I kept asking her where she would buy me one, did she check online at this place, at that place? Did she look at this record store? They might have it! Well, eventually, I annoyed the shit out of her. She came in one day and, without saying a word, threw a record at me. I remember it landed in my lap and flipped a pen out of my hand. She turned and walked away before I could say anything. Guess what? It was the original one, the one she supposedly ruined. Being lied to as an adult, by another adult, over something like this, is one of the most awkward things that can happen to you.
There’s all kinds of other little things, the kind of stuff that attention whores do. Just tons of that kind of shit. One day I will sit down and make a list of it, but that day is not today. And I think the record incident is pretty indicative of Underlying Weirdness. So that’s probably all you need to know.
Anyway. Now she’s living half a block away from me. She won’t speak to me in public. Which is super weird, because the other day she was standing in front of my house talking on the phone, and I was about to step out my front door, so I was just like…do I say hello again? Do I bother? Will she speak to me this time? What’s the point if she doesn’t want me to talk to her? Bitch, get away from my house! A few days after that, I was waiting to cross a street and suddenly felt really creeped out for some reason. I expected to turn around and see a 4-foot tall Mexican dude in a tank top sitting behind me on a tiny bike, rolling back and forth, licking his lips and making kissy sounds, since that is what usually happens in my neighborhood, but no. It was her! Standing there staring at me! Not speaking! LIKE A TOTAL FUCKING CREEP.
Parts of this situation are kind of intricate, I guess. Up until his death from cancer last year, one of our mutual friends was her roommate. The day he died, all I could think about was her. Like what if she genuinely needed something? Was she okay? But she’s so repellent and odd, I didn’t know how to reach out, even though she was less than a block away. Eventually, with all the Facebook advertising she did after his death, tagging him in all of her posts, making sure Internet people knew she’d lost something, all the memorializing and eulogizing and self-masturbatory public mourning shit, I got annoyed and kind of shut off. Suicide piggery just bums me out. I’m starting to realize that some people literally don’t have any other mechanism for dealing with death, that they need to share it with everyone in order to get past it, but I still can’t feel comfortable with it. Anyway, I kind of forgot about her. Until his memorial service, which she did not attend, but texted several attendees to say that she was in the hospital and didn’t knowww what was wrooong and neither do the doctooors! Apparently, not much was wrong, since she’s alive and well and skulking around my neighborhood probably this very minute, looking for someone to train her stinkeye on. But anyway. She wasn’t there.
Anyway, blah, this sounds more like shit talking than blogging, but who the hell else would I tell about this? Also, the two have always been the same for me.

Tastes like vintage.

I just want to direct your attention to this for a moment:

ARE YOU FOR SERIOUS. Can it someday be my job to drive around the state in a vintage camper and sell cupcakes? Because I would not mind that. I might also set up a little bookmobile type of thing, but that depends on how large of a trailer I could get. Also how many puppies I would be sharing it with. You know.

 

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June 16, 2014 · 10:43 am

Remember Dad

There is a flickering electronic sign by the Walgreens near my house, a sign I pass every day. This week, it’s been my only reminder of Father’s Day, a day of the year I block out as much as possible. The sign says in red, all-caps, flashing letters, REMEMBER DAD. REMEMBER DAD. REMEMBER DAD THIS FATHER’S DAY. It’s something I’d really rather not do, but at this time of year, I have to do it. I’ve just got to choose carefully which dad I want to remember.

The first birthday card I ever got from my father was made in prison. I know that now. At the time, I thought he was just crafty, or I wanted to think he was just crafty. It was a file folder he’d cut down to card size, pre-scored on one side, the thing was still too stiff to close properly. On the outside was a skeleton in a baseball cap with a gold necklace around his neck: gold because my father had colored the necklace with markers. The skeleton had been cut out of white paper and glued to the folder, but was loose around the edges like he’d run out of glue. “Yo,” the skeleton said, a greeting in a white paper bubble above his head. Inside, Deaddy Bears colored in green, pink, and worn-out blue markers danced around the birthday greeting. I don’t remember what it said.

I used to talk about my father’s life like he was carefree, just a zany, crazy guy getting into all kinds of shenanigans. People just didn’t understand him. He just wasn’t made for this uptight world. He was too cool. So cool, in fact, that he’d gotten really high before going on an all-night delivery truck run for the grocery store chain for which he worked, and so cool and so high that once he couldn’t see the road anymore, and drove the truck into a ditch, overturning it and its contents into a reservoir. Isn’t that funny, I’d laugh when I told people. What a fuck-up, what a colossal lovable fuck-up. Or I’d say, My dad once spent such a long heroin binge in a hotel room, he woke up one day with just elastic and scraggly cotton bits from his socks around his ankles. He’s just a free spirit like that. I sold him to friends in junior high and high school as this Grateful Dead-following hippie type, which wasn’t untrue. I told stories about him taking off for California and landing in the Haight-Ashbury district, where he’d grown up, and where he returned to stay throughout my childhood, getting high, getting arrested, getting sent to rehab again and again. I imagined it much as it must have appeared in the sixties: artists and creative people walking around flashing peace signs and getting high and busking and partying. But this was the eighties, and he was supposed to be raising me. I didn’t talk about that. This was after my mother had suffered one too many black eyes. This was after she waited on the front steps for him to get home with my sister and me, only to open the car door when he finally pulled into the driveway to find that he’d hotboxed and both of her babies were strapped into their car seats, completely stoned. I didn’t think about those things, about her telling him to leave. He was just too interesting to be tied down to a family in a small town, and I forgave him.

I sold the dream of my dad to others so well that I, too, believed it in its entirety. That’s probably why my mom agreed to take me to San Francisco when I was sixteen to meet the man I’d idolized all this time. He looked tired. His face was like an old apple that had been peeled and left to rot, all soft folds and creases. He was bald, fat, and shabby. His arms were covered with prison tattoos, the smudged kind, thick greenish-blue lines with indiscernible shapes. He was not at all what I had been expecting. Nonetheless, there was still something in his face that seemed familiar, sort of like when you see yourself in the mirror and just barely recognize yourself, and you think Has something changed? Is this what I’ve always looked like?

We stayed with him in his shitty apartment in Oakland. He lived across the street from a McDonald’s, and all night long there was shouting and screaming, bottles breaking, police sirens. It was my first taste of “city life,” and it was the worst part of the city. We visited the rehab facility where he had spent eleven years of his life, he introduced us to friends. The only thing I remember about them was that they were a man and a woman, and once at a green light as we drove through Chinatown, my dad stared off into the distance, and the man said “It ain’t gettin’ any greener,” which I thought was the most hilarious thing. I didn’t know why they were there at the time, but now I realize that he probably needed some moral support when it came to meeting his daughter for the first time since she was 6 months old, and seeing his ex-wife for the first time in over 16 years. Every night, back at his apartment, he smoked a Black & Mild on the couch and told me that it was his only vice.

We stayed busy with tourist attractions so that we didn’t have to do much talking. I asked to see Haight-Ashbury, which turned out to be a bunch of head shops, Jerry Garcia-themed t-shirt shops, and a massive Urban Outfitters. I was frustrated by the utter uncoolness of it all. My dad pointed at a window and told me about getting high on crack up there as a teenager, because it used to be a good place for that. He pointed at the ground below the window and told me that Bob Dylan used to set up down there on the corner, and the guys in the crack den would fill buckets with water and dump them down on him. “Why?!” I demanded to know. “It was BOB DYLAN.” My dad shrugged. “Well he wasn’t Bob Dylan yet.” I filed this story away to tell later; further evidence that my dad was an all-knowing badass. On the fourth day of our trip, we were tired. He insisted that we load into the car and drive for 5 hours north to his brother’s house, to introduce us to the rest of the family. Stressed and nervous, I told him I didn’t really want to go. “Well, that’s too bad,” he said. “Because your mother was just telling me how much she wants to go. Don’t tell her I told you that.” He repeated that several times throughout the day, taking me aside, out of her earshot. It wasn’t until that evening, when I was alone with her in the car while he waited in line at a taco stand, that I told her I was sorry for not wanting to go. “I don’t want to go, either,” she said. “He told me you really wanted to?” I watched as the annoyance slowly crept across her face. When my dad got back into the car, she told him we needed to talk, that neither of us wanted to go on a road trip the next day. Angry that we had compared stories, my father erupted. He grabbed the food out of my hand and threw it out the window. When I think of my father, I sometimes think of a quesadilla flying through the air and landing on the curb. “You and your mother,” he screamed, “are BOTH fucking bitches. Fuck both of you. I hope you go to Hell.” I cried myself to sleep while he and my mother argued in his kitchen. He paid for early flights back, and we left in the morning. The quesadilla was gone, and it was the saddest thing, thinking that someone had eaten it out of the gutter. On the floor of his mostly empty closet, I left the gifts he’d given me: a used black leather backpack and a frame that someone had filled with pictures of him when he was young, posing by a street sign, standing in the woods. I shook all the way home, my face red, raw and swollen. I didn’t talk about what happened, I didn’t talk about my father at all anymore. He was no longer separate from that freewheeling guy I’d created and loved for so many years, one had killed the other.

Every few years, my dad finds me. What follows is a pattern of asking for forgiveness, updates on my life, and always, out of nowhere, accusation and anger. On Christmas Eve in 2004, he called me an ungrateful little cunt. Two years ago, he told me that if I didn’t start talking to him more often, he’d have to leave all his money to his new wife’s daughter instead of me, and I wouldn’t want that, now would I? When I didn’t respond to that, he emailed my mother to let her know that she had raised my sister and I to be little bitches. This dad, the one who threatens me into loving him, then verbally abuses me to keep me there, this dad who is so broken and terrified that his only choice is to manipulate and hurt, I don’t want to remember him. The dad who is just too spontaneous and creative to get a job, love his wife, raise his infant daughter, I don’t want to remember him. The dad who stole money, lost jobs, got high, wrecked trucks, who ran away from home and chose The Grateful Dead, coke and heroin, who boxed up his anger and resentment to unleash in bloody spurts on his own kid, I’d like to stop remembering that dad. I’ve spent a lot of years examining that dad, and I no longer feel obligated to make excuses for him, to accept him, to allow him to walk in and out of my life.

On the other hand, without my dad, I wouldn’t be here. He gave me my sense of humor, my cooking skills, my hair and eyes. Whatever happened that made him into the man he was when I was four, ten, sixteen, twenty-one, there was something before that which I have to consider in those moments when a drugstore sign causes me to crumple inside. There had to be something before that, something to be appreciated and treasured, something for my own sense of purpose. Just as it couldn’t all be funny stories, it can’t all be dark and frightening.

My dad, before he was my dad, with his younger brother (left).

My dad, before he was my dad (right), with his younger brother (left).

I want to remember the dad he was just after my sister’s birth, when he curled up next to her and my mother just long enough for someone to take a grainy photo, my mother’s arm reaching back, her hand on his face over her shoulder. I want to remember the man in the pictures I left on the floor of the closet: handsome, young, smiling, capable. My dad in his hairnet and white apron, behind the counter at a California Denny’s, passing plates of food over the warmer to my mother, the waitress, the woman he would marry. I want to remember that picture I have of him holding me on his knee at my sister’s birthday party when I was only a few months old. His huge hand supports me, I’m wearing a party hat that is bigger than my head, and he clearly thinks it’s funny. There’s a little rip in the edge of the picture that goes across his smile, and I used to pull it apart to make him talk. “Hi there, you’re my baby and I’m your dad! You look like me. I love you, right now I’m here and I love you.”

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July 12, 2012 · 4:44 pm

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Bathroom

The problem is, I think, that Gwyneth Paltrow does not have anyone to talk to, at least not anyone who feels that it pays enough to be one of the people who has to listen to every little thing she thinks about spaghetti and lampshades and vases, just to be able to say you’re friends with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Yesterday I got sucked into her GOOP newsletter for about a million hours while I was supposed to be working. I was SO bored and I figured oh hey, there might be some stuff to make fun of there. Probably. I bet I can find some stuff to laugh at and then–  and that’s about as far as my thoughts went, because I was not talking to anyone on gchat during one of those rare moments when my friends and my sister are either off work or are dutifully completing their work like LOSERS and I have nobody to share things with to make fun of them. Anyway, so I’m sitting there reading words written about life by Gwyneth Paltrow and placed under the masthead of a name that is the phonetic spelling of the sound of slapping the last scoop of the plain organic fat-free sugar-free Greek yogurt into the foot bed of your Rag & Bone ankle boots.

So I guess I’M the loser…okay, yes. I am the loser for looking at GOOP instead of working. I blamed it on a caffeine deficiency at the end of my day.

In perusing the GOOP newsletter, I got to thinking about how none of it is news, and you can only really call it a “letter” because Gwyneth writes the intro to every post and follows it with “Love, gp“. It’s all stuff you’d tell someone if you really had no filter in your brain for how much or how little people may care what type of soap you use on your butt, what outfit you’re planning to wear out to dinner and drinks with your friends, or who the fuck your friends are in the first place. But Gwyneth just opens her damn mouth and lets all this go on the internet, KNOWING someone will read it and that probably a lot of someones will buy it, and they ARE buying it, because there’s all kinds of product tie-ins with hyperlinks leading you to garish, flashing pages screaming THE HAIRDRYER CHOSEN BY GOOP and FROM GOOP TOP 500 PRODUCTS LIST! There’s even a bunch of designer tie-ins that you’re supposed to buy through the site (the GOOP bikini! the GOOP workout! the GOOP hydrangea room freshener!). But it all started with Gwyneth Paltrow being such an awful person that she has no friends.

Or maybe she just has awful people as friends. Because I can only think of two scenarios in which people will sit across from you and let you say things like “I like to wear black leggings, a no-nonsense tank, and a smart blazer on a long flight. The blazer keeps you warm and you can take it off if you get too warm. The leggings are comfortable and the black color keeps you looking smart.” I mean, who says that? And who says “It’s great to revamp your house with floral arrangements. I usually go to this special place in London when we’re living in the UK. I get all of the freshest seasonal flowers. Here is how to arrange them in any size vase…” Would you just be sitting there like, uhhhhhhh what? Because I would! Also I’d be wondering why I was friends with Gwyneth Paltrow if “friends” means someone who listens to you and cares about your life and isn’t always trying to sell you $75 hair oils and telling you what you could do to update your look or what you should make for dinner after you go to “the market.”

That reminds me, I need lemons. From the GROCERY STORE.  And I don’t give a FUCK if they’re organic or not.

There’s another possibility, which is that her friends are all trying to scrape some of the fame off the bottom of her stinking glamour tub. She seems to know what’s up, because she politely mentions all of them (and they all happen to be hairdressers to the stars, doctors to the stars, chefs to the stars, designers to the starrrrs) and links to their products and highly recommends their books about baking and raw cleanses and postpartum depression. I mean, she’s nice enough to keep up her end of the deal. But can you imagine going out for a drink with someone just because they run your favorite cheese shop in London? Really? All we have in common is that I like to eat it and you like to sell it. Let me get my striped  Alexander Wang bodycon dress on and pair it with a black leather jacket and black heels and we’ll go out for drinks at my FAVORITE place to have drinks owned by my friend the celebrity chef and we’ll talk and oh look at the time I have to go because I’ve got to get out of bed at 5am and do 45 minutes of dance cardio aerobics created by my friend and trainer-to-the-stars and then drink a glass of kale juice before I make bulgur wheat pancakes for my kids and turkey wraps for their lunches (cut up to make it fun to eat) and take them to school, then I have like, all these meetings and stuff, plus I have to make some phone calls. Ugh. WORK. Then I have to plan our next vacation to a private villa in Italy. Also I have to pick up the kids, I mean, I COULD have someone do that for me except I’m a good mom and stuff. So yeah, I guess you could say I’ve got a pretty full plate! Anyway, thanks for listening to me talk about the lotions and diets I found while I was in Greece last winter. I’d say we’re pretty much friends now. Do me a favor and email my assistant with some pictures of my favorite cheeses for a custom cheese board. THAAAAAAANKS.

Maybe the loneliest place in the world is Gwyneth Paltrow’s bathroom when she realizes that nobody genuinely cares what she’s slathering on her elbows before she goes to bed. Maybe she is just all business all the time, though, and never has time to be sad, because she’s busy building her GOOP empire and who cares if it’s fake or not? It’s still THERE for you when you need to be doing something, when you need to be saying you have friends. Maybe Gwyneth sits down on her energy friendly toilet with sparkling gold bidet and takes a poop and wonders if there is anything she can say on GOOP about poop. She stands and looks at it lovingly, thoughtfully, for just a moment, wondering how she could turn the size and color of her turds into a GOOP topic. Would I place it under Make, Go, or Do? Maybe I will bring it with me to dinner and drinks and ask my friends (the owner of Babycakes bakery, a couture denim designer, and the owner of a record label) what they think. I will put it in a small drawstring bag made of organic cotton, sold by Jessica Alba in her Honest Products online store! I will take it out if there comes a moment in which the conversation is not about me and I will say, “Look, friends. Look at my turd. As you can see, I had a Classic Margherita Pizza with fresh buffalo mozzarella last night. I made it in the brick oven in our backyard. As a home cook, it’s very important to me to have authentic and tasty foods to feed my guests. Here’s the ingredients that you’ll need for the pizza: Fresh roma tomatoes, fresh basil leaves straight from the garden…”

This all makes me wonder if there are any Gwyneth Paltrow superfans out there. Like, I’m sure there are people who are like “she’s my favorite actrezz omahgah Sliding Doors was mah fahvret moviiiie”, but I’m talkin bout real freaks, like one step away from stalking her. I bet GOOP is their wet dream. It’s like she’s talking to them! Directly to them! And you can BUY THINGS she recommends and personally uses! So if you ever met her she’d be like “Oh you have that eye cream too” and you could be like YAZ I DO. And the great thing about it is that she NEVER STOPS TALKING! She’s like a friend that won’t leave you! Remember that time you spent $600 on that GOOP cleanse kit and you were SO hungry on day 4 that you started to think weird things and maybe get a little sad? And then you ate 3 slices of your brother’s bacon cheeseburger pizza and then you felt bad so you threw up and felt worse…and then, just then, your inbox lit up because you’d subscribed to the GOOP newsletter and…yay! New newsletter! It’s like she was listening and she knew you needed her. Well, like, knew you needed her to talk about summer pastas.

Actually. Maybe I’ve found someone who would do that.

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March 8, 2012 · 5:51 pm

Burn It In A Trashcan Bad

Troll 2

If you have some kind of vitamin deficiency, your thumbnail will grow a little bump.  That bump will annoy  you to death because you’ll constantly be rubbing your index fingernail up and down it.  So you’ll Google to find out why you have a bumpy nail and what you’re supposed to do about it.  “Oh!” Google says, “Just file it down!”  Google, you are fucking full of good ass ideas.

So you file your nail bump down, and about five minutes into the filing operation, you think “This is making my thumb kinda sore.”  You look down, wipe away the nail file powder, and to your horror, REALIZE THAT YOU HAVE FUCKING FILED A HOLE THROUGH YOUR NAIL AND EXPOSED YOUR NAIL BED.  Fucking shit.  Then you realize that you’re me and you’re amazingly bad at doing your nails and fixing your hair and accessorizing and wearing the right shoes with the right belts because you’re just really bad at all the stuff girls know how to do when they’re born.  (But I’ve seen Bourne Ultimatum about five thousand times so I’m fairly certain I could kill a guy with a book, a towel, and a candlestick if I had to.)

Yeah. So. The nail with the hole in it FUCKING FELL OFF and now I have a tiny sliver of half-nail at the bottom of my thumb and exposed nail bed all across the top.  It hurts like hell and it’s ugly and it eeks everyone out, you probably skipped over most of the story up there ^^ or maybe winced to yourself and started rubbing your thumbnail.  I bet you did.  The Pants calls it “the troll nail” and can’t stand to hold that hand right now and looks away while I try to cover it with one of those horrible Sally Hansen stick-on nails, which is an adventure in fake ladyness in itself.

Lord almighty.  I am ready to just have my arms cut off and replaced with robot arms now.

Unnecessary.

Check out this motherfucker of all ATMs.

Wanna see this sombitch in action?  There’s a fucking VIDEO in which some Beverly Hills assholes talk about why–or something that…you know what? Sorry.  I am just getting used to living in a world where cupcakes come out of a machine if the cupcake store is not open and you forgot to buy confectioner’s sugar for frosting.  I couldn’t actually pay attention to the words being said in the video.

Holy big bad diabetes!  We’re all gonna die and it’s gonna taste unreal.

Now eat your potatoes.

Therapy is weird. It’s just WEIRD. To quote Stephanie, “It’s such a weird thing to confess all these things to a stranger and cry in front of them and then there’s a cash transaction!”  And really, there’s no other way to put it.  We sat down and made all these agreements about money and health insurance and missed appointment charges and overhead, and then I had to sign a thing saying I understood that if she thought I was going to kill someone she had the right to tell the cops or whatever, and then I had to agree that I’d pay her and shit.  Then we got down to biznass.  Then time was up, and it was like, Well, bye.  No hug or anything!

Yesterday was my second visit to Our Lady of Psychotherapy’s tiny alcove office, and during this visit she pretty much only wanted to know about my relationship with The Pants.  She wants to establish my current environment and what’s working/not working, but I sat there thinking I hope she knows I’ve got a whoooole bag of shit with her name on it rolling around in here.  Anyway.  She wanted to talk about all of our relationship problems that have ever possibly existed, and it was hard for me not to start cracking up and tell her about the fact that things are just DIFFERENT once you’ve both just started blasting each other with farts.  Different good, but also different like something’s gone missing after you’ve marinated your boyfriend in your gas.  I find myself sometimes nostalgic about the days when we would pretend we never farted.  But there is also something really comforting about it.  Aaaaand there’s also something really disgusting about it.  Like the other night when I farted at the dinner table.  I couldn’t believe I had let myself go that far.  I’m sitting there eating potatoes and I lean over and just rip a loud one.  And the response was kind of like, Wow, that was really horrifyingly disgusting.  Now eat your potatoes.

Anyway.  I did NOT talk to my therapist about farting.

She asked me why I don’t write anymore and I didn’t know what to say, but really it comes down to this: If I write something, and it sucks, I might die.  Really!  I might!  Because I would never be happy living a life without writing, without writing that was good and made some kind of a difference, no matter how small, in a single solitary person.  But there is a very large chance that I could write something and it could just suck balls all the way to the sewers in the racist part of Hell and back, suck worse than anything I’ve ever read that sucks, and that realization would probably kill me.  Because:

No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, 17 February 1903

I would have to die if I were forbidden to write, and the forbidder would be myself, so bad work would be, for me, suicide.

The other possibility would be that I wrote some kind of really horrible popcorn drivel, and a whole lot of stupid people loved it.  Then I’d be in the same boat on a river of poop because I hate stupid people and I know popcorn drivel when I see it and I’d really rather not add any to the canon.  Everybody would be like “oohhhhh it’s goooood…” but they’d look off to the left when they said it and wouldn’t make eye contact and MTV Books would print copies of it that came with a CD soundtrack taped in the back and the characters would just be Polaroid representations of random people I’ve seen on the street, the main character would be a spiced up representation of myself, including addictions to all the drugs I’m too scared to take and a better set of tits and nicer teeth.  God, that would be awful.  I’d be invited to writing studios to give people my insights on writing and characters and place and mood, I’d be invited to bookstores to read sections of my book to a small gathering of family and friends and whatever other weirdos read about it in the local paper and thought it might be a good way for a random weirdo to spend an evening in the middle of January.  Photos of the event would make it look like there were a lot more people there than there actually were.  Dipshits on Amazon who can barely be bothered to spell their own name or their state correctly will rave about how it’s the best book they’ve ever bought on clearance at an Urban Outfitters before.

Then there’s this: what if the answer is No, you would not die if you were forbidden to write.  Well, then I’d just want to die out of sheer boredom with myself.  There’s got to be more to my existence than this.

The fears about my capacity to produce a horrible novel are completely valid and feasible and so are my fears about what would happen with that horrible novel.  Know how I know?  Well, I’ll tell you.

There’s this person, who went to my undergrad and wrote two completely popcorny and Polaroidy novels, and has ever since been lauded as a literary success in certain circles (ahem, Amazon, ahem, undergrad university fiction department) because she’s been, to a degree, a financial success due to her literary efforts.  Now she spends her days blogging about writing and about how haaard it is and about how people just love her ideas and her agent is all about publishing more…and bunches of tips on “how to be a writer” that they used to stuff our heads with in undergrad and at that horrible writing studio where I worked, how to stay focused!  Software for staying organized!  Drink coffee!  Fun writing exercises and prompts!  WRITER STEREOTYPES!  Hahah you know how us writers love our coffee and Tazo teas and chocolate and wine!  Oh I just never could have written this shitty book I’ve worked on for a million years without my Godiva samplers?  Amirite, other writers?!?!

#2 on the list of things that bug the hell out of me has got to be writers talking about writing.  SHUDDER.  Nothing else makes me want to beat my head against the desk as much as this does.  And that’s exactly what I did after I went home the night I had to make a name card to put on a table where this particular writer would sit the next morning in the middle of the studio where I worked to talk to other writers about writing.  I banged my head against the table until I felt better.

On this blog, we’ve got that self-designated musical-definition label thing I HATE, “I’m a punk rock girl from the Midwest.”  So, check.  Who the fuck told you you were “punk rock”?  Who told you that you were “indie rock”?  Who goes around saying these kinds of things?  Or did you just decide for yourself that, based on your hair color and style of dress, you’re This Type of Person?  Sweet Jesus, on the list of things that bug the hell out of me, this has got to be #4 or 5.

Here’s what the Amazon crowd has to say:

This was one cool book. I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone is probably on of the most down-to-earth books I have ever read. It isn’t full of fairytales and other. Stephanie did a great job of making the book very realistic. The plot was also great, sometimes something would happen that I never suspected but then there were times when something would happen that I knew was going to happen. Which in some books I don’t’ like figuring out what is going to happen but I didn’t mind it at all in this book. The characters in this book were stupendous; they all had their flaws, which is great because in life everyone has flaws. I also enjoyed how big of a part music plays in the story. Which is probably because I am a big fan of rock but I think every one who reads this book will be able to envision Emily rocking out on the stage, like I did. I also introduced to some great rock bands while reading the wonderful story. I recommend this book to every teen out there, especially if you like listening to rock bands. Also some adults might enjoy the story too.

I don’t even know where to begin. Nothing I could say would do this book justice. It’s one of the most raw, heartbreaking, and touching novels I’ve read. Ever. Yikes. The thing I admire the most is that I think the author really wrote from her heart. You can tell just by the way the story is told that she cared deeply about what she was writing about which is the key to any good book; an author who is connected to her story. What’s amazing is that this is Stephanie Kuehnert’s first novel. How someone can write something this fantastic on her first attempt in the published world is…can I use the word amazing again? The characters are deep, detailed, and flawed.

For Emily Black, music is everything. It’s what made her parents fall in love way back when. It’s what her mother Louisa was following when she left baby Emily. It’s what Emily has to stay in control of her life. Music draws her from her dreary life in Carlisle, Wisconsin to River’s Edge, an abandoned warehouse where rock bands play. River’s Edge is where Emily got her fill of sex, drinking, and rock `n’ roll, and where her dreams of being a punk rock goddess began. So she and her best friend Regan form a punk band named She Laughs, and Emily can’t help but hope that by playing music, she’ll bring her mother home.
Soon, her band is swept up in the dangerous world of rock music. Her band has a lot of talent, but so many ups and downs in Emily’s life lead her away from the music. There are the bad boyfriends, the death of her grandparents, the involvement with drugs and self-medication, and a year wasted searching for her mother. But eventually Emily finds her way back on track, and her friends are still waiting for her to come back and pick up her guitar. And so she does, because music is all she has.

And just to cleanse your palate and offer some perspective, here’s what the Goodreads crowd has on their minds:

“Not since high school dating have I felt so tricked and empty. The main character combines the collective whining powers of Twilight’s Bella and My So-Called Life’s Angela…..and then proceeds to try and trick the reader into believing it’s “punk”, when really, it’s a V.C. Andrews novel minus the incest (and the plot suffers because of that glaring omission, by the way.) I was suckered in by the Joey Ramone name drop, the Sleater-Kinney lyrical reference, the Doc Martens on the book cover. I admit it. I chose the glittery vampire, and I’m ashamed of it. Since I couldn’t find a hair shirt and kneeling on lentils is just a waste of good legumes, I read it all the way to the end, periodically stopping to shove a spork into my ear in hopes of creating the brain damage necessary to enjoy the “plot twists” and reminding myself to never ever stop submitting my own writing because, hey, if she can get a book deal, anyone can. So in that sense, it did serve a purpose, as motivation, but it also was penitential, because I was, in fact, paying for the sin of choosing the book based on its alleged “hipness” (which, like long haired boys in high school…….I never learned my lesson from.)
Oh plot, you ask? Only that a girl who’s been abandoned by her mom in the middle of bumfuck, Midwest becomes the biggest punk band since Nirvana, gets on the cover of Rolling Stone, survives domestic abuse and drug addiction, discovers a ZOMG FUCKING DARK RAPE SECRET that means her mom didn’t abandon her, she left to protect her! ……a cross-country motel search ensues. Oh, and she reunites with the long-lost mom who’s been gone her whole life in the middle of Penn Station. Of course she does. Did I mention her “punk band” is called “She Laughs”? Oh. Yeah. There was probably a reason I forgot to mention that.
“Favorite” bit of dialogue: (I would like to remind you that the author would like us to believe this is a street punk talking, by the way)
“His brilliant aquamarine mohawk….” I will spare you the rest. Anyone who has ever in their life met a punk knows that those words can’t, don’t and shouldn’t ever happen together.

I actually relate to Joey Ramone more after reading this book… he suffered through cancer, I suffered through this book.

So. So bad. Like, I want to burn it in trashcan bad.

terrible. rang completely untrue and cliche. i wanted to like it – i grew up in a shitty little wisconsin town close to the illinois border and went to punk shows in rural vfw halls and crap run-down buildings, just like the main character, but i really didn’t see anything authentic, realistic or even very likable about this book. really bad writing. so thinly-veiled (i love the diatribe about why the main character is living in the burbs, all defensive and “but the train is so close!” – and then you read in the author’s extensive bio that she lives in the chicago suburbs, too! you don’t say). the thank-you chapter is so barfily self-congratulatory. makes me angry that i didn’t go get an MFA, because apparently you can get published through connections alone.

OK.  Props for use of the not-word “barfily.”  Why does it make me feel so much better to read these negative reviews?  Well, partially because they’re so well written and witty when compared to positive reviews.  Though it’s not hard to outdo a review that’s more like a quick recap of all of the events and then a statement about how it “totally resonates with me!” because I totally went to high school and shit.

I guess it makes me feel better because I know there will always be people there who aren’t afraid to call me on my shit.  I can see how someone who attended the same fiction writing program I did would have a hard time believing any negative reviews.  The way it worked there was you basically pay them money and they fill your butthole with smoke and encourage you do to your MFA there so they can have more money and fill your butthole with more smoke.  Then you write some smoked-out manuscript and they have the writer-in-residence (ahem, Irvine Welsh, who also lent his brief blurb to this stunning piece of steaming turd written by the son of the professor emerita of the program) and it gets picked up by MTV Books and people tell you it’s crap and you’re like–wait, I think you’re mistaken.  Everyone else likes it.

I won’t do that.  I find it extremely easy to believe every negative thing people say about me and let it stop me from doing things.  Ha!

Oh, anyway.  I fear sometimes when I write a sentence that I’ll end up like the above described wang princess: lost in shit and in love with myself, thanking every writer who ever visited my school as a personal savior in my acknowledgements, and basically being the figurehead of a pile of crap that I will represent for the rest of my life.  And then I stop writing.

If you want to get down to it, there’s also this character, who, if  you’ll remember, I got into a discussion with attempted to get into a discussion with on a blog post she wrote.  You probably remember the idiotic shit that ensued to cover up the fact that her “writing” is really just verbal diarrhea meant to make her look like a Certain Type of Chick and entertain that part of one’s brain that responds well to stereotypes (if you don’t remember, it’s here and here).  This person came back into my attention today when she was suggested as a friend I might want to get to know on Facebook, because of our mutual friendships.  I clicked on her page and lo and behold, it appears that my criticism was one of the most important events in her entire life.  She’s referred to it on her Timeline!!!  Behold:

I write profanity laced articles about funny things. Once, this resulted in someone writing a number of “hate blogs” about me.

I wrote “a number” (two, if you’re counting, now 3?) of blogs discussing the poor quality of writing that hides behind a stereotype and reports the attitudes and opinions that the stereotype is supposed to represent.  I wrote about how it’s a fucking sham, and part of what bothers me about it is that there are people who toooooootally buy into that sham, and just eat that bullshit up. There are people out there who think this self-obsessed dummy is a good writer.  Because all she does is sit there and type cutesy bullshit all day about indie rock and current events and thinks it’s edgy for a girl to cuss (hence her specifically calling your attention to the “profanity laced” side of her writing repertoire).  And in the end, she’s a total fucking pussy when it comes to having a conversation about her work, or standing up for what she writes, and can only engage in a dialogue if she’s represented as the victim (as evidenced by the above Life Event, and her frantic Twitter feed on the day of my comments, the fact that my comments are worthy enough to define her experience in this particular blogging job speaks volumes to me).  “Hate blogs.”  Honey, you ain’t nothin til you’re hate blogged.  And I’m afraid what you got was just the tip of an Annoyed Blog.  (Yeah, just the tip.)  Wait a tick….all of this kind of begs the question: are my words really that powerful?

It’s people like Suburban Punk Queen and Indienet Pussy Blogger that make me just never want to pick up a pen or type anything ever again.  Someone asked me why the worst writers are always the most prolific, and I said it’s because they have no idea of the darkness of self-doubt, they’re too stupid to imagine that what they’ve produced is the worst thing anyone could imagine, is actually detrimental to the craft, to the reader, to the world at large. They think themselves a great contribution to the planet, instead of what they really are: white noise in stereo reverberating off the metal walls of the fucking flaming trashcan.  What more people need is mental illness, crippling self-doubt, a tsunami of fear each time they even think about expressing any stupid little thought that farts through their brain.  That would do it.

And what I need is way more bravery, way less worry about being as completely ass crappy as my contemporaries.  So does that come in a pill or what?

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about some different kinds of shit, shall we?

The women who use this bathroom are terrible.

I should know, because I’m forced to use it after they leave.  Based on the aftermath I have seen in the bathroom on this floor, the following is what women are doing in there:

1. Removing tampons and swinging them around by the string, splattering threads of menstrual mucus all over the walls of the stalls.

2. Taking giant shits, standing up, walking away (no flush attempt).

3. Using the toilet, flushing, then turning around and shaking their heads vigorously over the toilet seat, covering it with long, loose hairs.

4. Squatting to piss and practicing hula hooping techniques in the process.

5. Inserting tampon, dropping wrapper and applicator on the floor, walking away.

6. Removing completely soiled and soaked pad and leaving it on the top of the toilet paper dispenser, at exact nose-level with the next unfortunate person to use that toilet (That next unfortunate person happened to be me.).

7. Removing sandals and washing each foot, one at a time, in the sink (Witnessed this.).

8. Leaning over the sink to hoark a giant wad of phlegm, walking away without so much as an attempt to rinse it away (Witnessed this, too.).

9. Playing mischievous cat games with the toilet paper, i.e., unrolling stacks of it onto the floor and leaving it there.

10. Sleeping. We got an email the other day that there would be regular hourly “bathroom checks” on this floor because it’s become socially acceptable between these twats to go into the stall, lock the door, sit on the toilet without dropping pants and SLEEPING.

11. The kicker: somehow they are sharting all over the wall.  Sharting.  All over. The. Wall.

How do they do it?  I don’t know.  I DON’T KNOW.  But I have some photographic evidence for you. BEHOLD:

Really brings new meaning to the word "overflow," huh?

This monstrosity of menstruation occurred within a few hours.  Only a few hours–I KNOW!  It seems impossible that a few women could bleed that much!  I guess you could attribute part of it to the fact that there seems to be a “favorite stall” in the bathroom, the first one on the far right.  I don’t know why it’s a favorite stall, but in an otherwise empty bathroom, it’s the only one that’s always occupied.  So this is where all the period garbage ends up.  This is where it overflows in a matter of hours.  (Someone should really do some kind of scientific study on why everyone wants to bleed in that particular stall.  Someone who is not me.)

Sure, just wipe your hands there. No one will ever know.

Aaaaand here we have an example of period blood smear that’s been on the lower wall of the first stall on the right for about as long as I can remember.  I bet that dirty bitch goes back in there from time to time to visit with it.  Maybe it tells fortunes? Maybe it’s just fucking gross.  Probably it’s just fucking gross.

Well, here’s an example of a wall shart:

This is to the right of the toilet. How did it get there?!?!

And THIS is the horror that awaited me as I was writing this very post and attaching these very pictures, when I had to stop for a moment and go pee.  THIS is what was staring back at me when I went into the stalls of which I write:

Hon, you missed.

So uhh, this is what I do when I get bored at work.  I become a bathroom ethnographer.  And I have concluded in this field report that WOMEN ARE FUCKING FILTHY.

I was going to talk about a chocolaty caramel-y cupcake I made last weekend, but upon further consideration, I think I’ll find another time to post pictures of that.

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November 14, 2011 · 5:48 pm

Monday Survey: Butt Poker

If you woke up as the opposite sex, what’s the first thing you would do?

Come on.  You and I both know I’d be obligated to play with my balls for about fifteen minutes.  That’s the first thing I’d do and also the second thing and the third and on and on from there.  I’d just play with my balls, all day, forever, because that’s just about all dudes do.  I looked up from my book on the train the other day and there was this loud frat boy standing there in those thin shiny basketball pants, yelling into his phone about what he was gonna do that night, and the whole time he was looking off into space and absentmindedly fondling his balls, just rolling them back and forth in his hand like a nice little ball of dough he was gonna put on top of a pie.  I just could not stop staring at that.  Another time I saw a guy dig at his balls and dick for about thirty seconds straight while waiting for a light to change so he could cross the street.  Then he switched things up and formed his hand into a claw and dug at his asshole for the rest of the wait and half the trip across the street.

I told The Pants I wished he could have a vagina for one day so he’d know what it was like and he said “Yeah!  I’d play with it all day!” and I can’t say I was surprised.

Are you addicted to anything?

For a while it was coffee, then it was Arizona Green Tea, then coffee, then for a couple of weeks it was Goose Island root beer?  Now it’s coffee again.  Because, by “addiction,” I’m assuming you mean “afflicted with a day-long brain-splitting headache if you go without,” right?

What do you see in a guy/girl?

A guy/girl?  Like both at once?  I saw some of those and they were mostly chicks with dicks in this video that popped up after I watched the Danielle Staub sex video.  They were boys with mannish chins and stubble and little sad excuses for dongs and floppy boobs.  But you hardly ever see guys with a vagina.  So I guess what I’ve seen in a guy/girl is, quite simply, a penis and some boobs that each leave something to be desired.

Do you find piercings/tattoos attractive?

God, no.  Everybody has the same ones, to0.  Girls always get birds on their collarbones or stars on their necks and stupid shit on their wrists and feet and guys always get something on their upper arm meat and it’s interesting for about five seconds and then it’s just not worth the cool points they thought it would be, so it’s awkward for everyone who’s been made to look at it.  My apologies if you have a tattoo, though, I really like yours.

Also there’s something about facial piercings that really bugs me: it’s the fact that people who have them on or near their mouths are always gumming and chewing on them and they basically walk around looking like gigantic drooly idiots.  Some girls can pull off nose rings and it’s cute, but some can’t, and boys almost never can.  I do like a nice healed ex-pierced ear on a boy, though.  That’s nice.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever licked?

Uh.  What?  Oh, hello, I didn’t see you there.  I was just trying to get this frosting off these beaters…yes, I know they don’t detach.  See, that’s why I was uh, down there.  But now that I am down here…

Do you actually believe Alaska is covered in snow?

Why??  Is it not true???  And do they really not go everywhere on a little sled pulled by dogs?!  And are there not igloos?  And can I not see the chimney smoke from Santa’s house from the highest point in the state?!  WHAT LIES.

Are you ever purposely irritating?

Well.  There’s always a moment where I’m accidentally irritating.  But then when I discover that what I did was irritating, I am filled with an ungodly desire to do it again and again and again.  Just ask anyone who’s ever spent more than an hour with me why their buttholes are sore.  There is nothing funnier than poking someone in the butthole with any sharp object that happens to be nearby!  Over and over and over, until they cry and say “I hate you!  Go away!”  Oh, we have fun.

If you could make someone disappear, who would it be?

Myself!  Fuckin A.  Then I’d go around saying things like “I HAVE MADE MYSELF DISAPPEAR.”  And people would have to believe me because I’d still eat nachos and walk through snow and shit.  It would be obvious I was invisible and I’d win Magic Person of the Year and I’d buy 30 KitchenAid mixers with the prize moneys.

Look behind you, what do you see?

Five volumes of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and about thirty dusty binders full of classification schedules.  I’ve never opened a single one of them.  I’d probably only open one if a piece of candy fell in there or something.

What’s your fave thing about the opposite sex?

You can do it backwards!

What’s the most important thing to you?

I’m not sure but it’s definitely a thing.  I mean,  as a kid I used to make lists in my head of what I’d take with me if the world exploded or the house imploded or the Big Earthquake hit Southern Illinois and I had to run outside in the middle of the night for some reason.  The lists were organized in order of priority and I don’t think any people were on it.

What would you be doing right now if you were kicked off your computer?

If someone came in right now to kick me off my computer, I’d wipe the browser real quick, then toss up the policy manual I’m working on, then start crying because, look, I really need to get that policy manual done, man!  Also I just real quick like wanna Google image search “demi moore’s bush.”

How do you spend your weekends?

Sleeping late and eating giant breakfasts and going to the farmer’s markets and buying presents for people’s unborn babies and skipping the hipster indie skank den (even though they have better coffee) because the line is a million people long and everyone is knitting (why?  WHY), going instead to Starbuck’s down the street.  Eating pizza and watching movies and making fancy drink concoctions with whatever we can find and TRYING NOT TO LOOK TOO WHITE AS I GO ALONG.

What country would you love to visit?

Norway.  I heard that’s where Erlend Oye lives and I’d hump his leg.  Plus there’s whale watching every day and it’s free.  I’ve also heard that everything is lovely and clean and pretty and it’s the most pleasant place in the world.  Then I heard some other stuff that happened in Norway but we’re going to say that’s a one time occurrence and it damn well better be.

What’s on your mind right now?

Howwwww am I going to get all this onion dip out from under my K, H, and I keys?

When was the last time you went to a good party?

Halloween was pretty fun because I ate about a million of these chocolate and coconut covered yellow cake things and got all kinds of sugared up and THEN I thought it would be a great idea to pour vodka and red bull bombs on top of that, and danced around waving my tiny doll hands and tried in vain to pick up carrots off the floor with them.  And on the way home we pulled up next to the Congress in the shitty Halloween traffic and I made faces at all the Sexy Bees and Sexy Witches and Sexy Dead Girls lined up outside after whatever bullshit show had gone on and they did not like it, no, not one bit.

Can you lick your elbow?

No, but I can poke you in the butthole with this yardstick.

If you jumped out your bedroom window right now, how injured would you be?

Well if I could teleport to be in my room right now, I guess it would be stupid to jump out when I could teleport from the window to the ground, now wouldn’t it?  But technically if I teleported home right now and jumped out of my window I would not be hurt at all because I live on the first floor, which is only one floor above basement level but still sort of on rape level.

What would you do if your bf/gf cheated on you with your best friend?

Well I have no room to talk if I have a bf AND a gf, do I?

Do you like anyone you can’t have?

If I can’t have it, I instantly hate it, and that’s how I know nobody else has anything I want.  Easy!

Do you dance even without music?

The last time I did that, my sister told me I looked like farm equipment.  So, YES!

If a blind guy/girl started hitting on you, what would you do?

I’d start singing “Jeeepers, creeeeepers!  Where’d you get those peeeepers!”  No.  Kidding.  I’d run away, then come back and be like “What are you talking about?  I’ve been here the whole time.”  No, hold on, I’d take them to bars and have them lip read everyone’s conversations for me.  Wait–dammit!  That won’t work.  This blind person sucks, can I get a deaf person or someone with a real nasty cleft palate?

What was the last concert you went to?

I think it was when we saw Menomena.  I remember because a certain person talked through the entire set and then the singer came down and stood behind us to “cool off” and he was wearing the deepest Deep V from American Apparel I’d ever seen in my life, it was a total fucking joke, like a negative of a dickie.  And he just kind of hung out there and then the certain person talked to him for like 45 minutes and we couldn’t leave because they were just jabbering about music and beats and bullshit and all these girls in Salvation Army “finds” that still stunk like moth balls were standing around moony-eyed pretending they were checking their phones when really they were OBVIOUSLY waiting for that Deep V to come off and the certain person to shut up for a second so they could strike up an awkward non-conversation with the singer.  Blerg.

Do you speak your mind?

Yes, and I should do it less, because I’ve come to find out that most people like to be lied to and fellated into believing whatever they want about themselves or the situation.

What would you do if someone random on the street came up to you and started hitting on you?

I’d ask them which specific blog post pissed them off.  Ha!

Ever been caught naked?

Not fully naked, but sort of, about 3 apartments ago when I was standing in the kitchen doing dishes in a tank top and stretched-out, cruddy-looking day-off panties and I turned around and the maintenance guy was STANDING AT MY BACK DOOR STARING IN AT ME.

Ever been in a fight?

No, but I ran from one once!  There was this girl in high school who tried to hit me with her hair brush so I went into the principal’s office (I mean, why are you going to try to throw down right outside the principal’s office, girl?!) and calmly asked if he had time to see me.

If so did you win?

Well.  It’s been ten years, and she works at Wal-Mart and is dating someone who’s still in high school, so you tell me.

Name the most stupidest thing you’ve ever done?

“Most stupidest?”  How bout we let you answer this one?

But seriously, I stupidly keep thinking I don’t have any cumin and now I have seven stupid bottles of stupid cumin in my cabinets.  How stupid is that?  Nobody makes THAT much goddamn chili.

Would you talk to someone you don’t know on the internet?

BOY WOULD I

Ever been in trouble for something you didn’t do?

Nope.  I almost always did it.

Ever done anything stupid towards a cop?

I pretended my headlights weren’t on because they wouldn’t work when actually I’d just forgotten to turn them on and I was embarrassed to admit that so I pretended to flip the switch over and over and then I was just like “They were working earlierrrrr!”  He let me go. WITH NO HEADLIGHTS.

Would you send money to a starving family in another country?

No because I’ll probably just buy them a goat they can eat and keep their young warm inside the carcass.  Over there, in other countries, they don’t have the fantastic banking system that we do, and if I gave them money, they’d be like whaaaat do we do with this?  Deposit it in our checking account?  Thanks a lot, our “checking account” is a guy with a machete who drops by every 2 weeks.

If you could speak another language, what would it be?

Farsi, so I could look up that stuck up asshole I ran into last year who listed “Fluent in Farsi” on his CV and start a conversation with him, then say, in Farsi, “Bull SHIT you know Farsi, you dumb mother fucker!”

One word to describe yourself?

“Awkwarful.”

What’s the last present you’ve received?

A little Hello Kitty in a nurse uniform.  She went directly on the Shelf of Cute Things in the kitchen.

What would you rather have as a name?

Klarnzorg the Destroyer. Also my arms would be guns that shot fists.  But when I was ten I wanted to be Nicole or Kelsey.  Just ask my brother, whom I told to tell any cute older guys we ran into at Lake of the Ozarks that my name was Kelsey.

Any siblings?

The aforementioned brother and two sisters, one of which might now actually think my name is Kelsey.

Are you a sporty kind of person or do you like to lay around and do nothing but watch tv or sit at the computer?

What’s amazing is that now we have this invention known as the Wii.  The Pants owns one and you can use it to do nothing, sporty nothing, watch TV, and also do computer-type things.  All at the same time!  I am Every Kind of Person.

Could you outrun a bus?

Sure, if I push a small child in front of one, I’ve found that it usually stops for at least a couple of hours and I can get a pretty good head start in a couple of hours, man!

You and your friends are bored. What do you do?

Hit each other!  No?  You guys don’t want to do that?  Why won’t anybody stand up?  I promise I won’t poke your buttholes anymore.  See?  I’m putting my old piece of TV antenna down.

Who hates Twilight as much as I do?

This girl for sure:

Wait, shit.  It’s the other way around, I don’t think she hates Twilight actually.

What would you do if the world were coming to an end?

Where did I  put my list of things to save?  I don’t know.  Oh well.  I’ll tell you one thing:  I’d go around punching everyone in the mouth who said things like “you guuuuyyys this is just like that movie Melancholia you guyyyyys” and I’d also eat a bacon cheeseburger pizza from Domino’s, dipped in sour cream, and then a whole quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream then go out in the street and be like KING KONG AIN’T GOT NOTHIN ON ME and then the world would end.

Biggest regret ever?

Going to school for writing.  Though it was a good way to waste the time and it gave me something to do between retail shifts and it did give me lots of good fodder for really lame, overblown, self-assured characters in case I ever write anything later about stupid people who love themselves.

Would you have given into peer pressure?

If anyone had bothered to peer pressure me!  I wasn’t cool enough, dammit.  And the only party I went to in high school where someone encouraged me to drink, there were already so many girls there pretending to be drunk that it seemed like one more would just be a pain in the ass, and also a lot of unnecessary competition.

If you could see your future in a movie, would you watch it?

Only if it was starring Kirsten Dunst and I was getting married and then the world ended!

Do you regularly indulge in drugs? If so, what? i.e Dope, Ectasy

Are you a cop?  Because I haven’t heard anyone say “dope” for a long time.  Not even to call someone a dope.  But, since it probably won’t get me in any legal trouble to state my intent, I’ll go ahead and say that I’ve been checking out these Darren Aronofsky meth ads and I think I’m gonna give it a whirl because no matter what I do I can’t seem to get my eyeliner to look like that without drugs.

Three things you would want if you were stranded on an island?

Man!  All the stuff you can’t do here in Camera Land!  The only  lame thing is that I wouldn’t have internet access so I couldn’t do all the web sleuthing and peeping and stuff I’d wanna do if my IP address was some remote location in the middle of the sea.

If you won a holiday but had to choose either a cruise ship or resort, what would you choose?

If I won a holiday, I’d choose Thanksgiving, and I’d have everything non-stuffing molded out of stuffing.  Also, why would I choose to be stranded on a cruise ship with a bunch of assholes and their kids, surrounded by a high ledge with certain death below?  I’d go with a resort because it’s probably not going to sink and kids are possibly not allowed and also they might have free sushi for breakfast.  I will take my chances there.

Favorite color?

Tits.  HAhhahahha kidding!  Not really, it’s tits.

What annoys you?

Ugh, being misquoted for the sake of bullshit drama:

“I broke down this morning and got all philosophical on some indie chick’s ass and commented on this.”

Of course, “got all philosophical” doesn’t sound as mean and hateful as “go postal all over,” so you’d have a hard time getting anyone to believe I was hating on you if you were telling the truth.  And you need everyone to believe it because it’s better than the thought that someone might not hate you, at all, might just disagree with something you wrote.  Siiiigh.

If your best friend and boyfriend needed you, honestly who would you choose?

Judge Judy.  I mean, hellooooo.

One thing that annoys you about your best friend / boyfriend?

THEY ARE ALWAYS TALKING DURING JUDGE JUDY.  NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU.

If you could ask someone any question you want, what would it be?

I’d say “Why are you such an asshole?” then I’d compare their reasons to mine and have a good benchmark for whether I’m normal-asshole or extra tasty crispy-asshole.

If you won lotto would you still work?

Prolly.  Like on dried flower wreaths and building a gift wrapping station in my mansion’s work room, stuff you see old people doing in ads for rheumatoid arthritis medication.

Random crazy thing you daydream about?

I had this weird daydream that Thom Yorke made me a little change purse thing and I felt really bad because I thought it was stupid but I wore it around anyway.

Do you prefer a beer or spirit mix (vodka, bourbon)?

Lately I prefer White Cake infused vodka:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Current obsession:

See above.

I’m worried about:

See above.

Next thing I want to buy:

See above.

What’s your fav type of music?

Oh, I don’t know.  Let’s not talk about music, okay?  That’s the gateway to pretention.  Also, hearing what someone else thinks about music won’t sway my opinion either way.  Does it work like that for you?

Have you ever met anyone famous?

Oh sure.  I will now proceed to drop names nonchalantly while you envy my second-degree fame status from over there in your Lame-Z-Boy.

Any ideas for your wedding?

Ewwwwww shut UP

Song that has the best memories to it?

I guess that graduation song by Vitamin C.  I remember sitting there laughing and everyone was crying and we watched the goddamn Powerpoint of all our baby pictures 1000 times and they kept PLAYING THAT SONG and those are good memories because life is so much better than that now, for me, anyway.

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November 10, 2011 · 6:14 pm

Laundromat of Souls

I’m in a laundromat right now.  So I can say for certain that Way #1 to get rid of lewd stares, nasty comments, tailing, and general feelings of uneasiness from creepy men on the streets and in various establishments is: push out a hacking, disgustingly sick-sounding cough, OR rip a giant fart.  I can usually produce a cough more reliably than a good fart, but sometimes I manage a twofer which is actually a foolproof way to get a weirdo to leave you alone and stop following you and talking about all the things he and his 4-foot 5-inch frame are gonna do to you, giiiiirl.

This morning I met this awful girl, and the moment she walked up to our group to say hi to the person in the group she knew, I got this nasty feeling like not only did I not want to meet her, and hope that she didn’t reach out and introduce herself, but I also wanted to get as far away from her as possible in that very moment and never see her again.  For almost no reason whatsoever!  I mean, she hadn’t even had a chance to DO anything stupid, she just walked toward us and my entire being went ARRRRGGHHHHBLERRRF!

Her name is Sally.  She has straight blonde Barbie hair down to her shoulder blades.  She was wearing black sunglasses and just about enough foundation and powder to make her face look like an art experiment or a crime scene that had been thoroughly dusted for the rapist’s prints.  Her voice was crusty and deep like she’d heard someone make fun of a deep voice once and and just re-created it constantly to be funny, but it wasn’t funny anymore!  Not to me, anyway!  She was over-layered in leggings, some kind of stocking that went over her ankles, ankle boots with snappies and clips all over them, a skirt, a long shirt, a coat, a hooded thing under the coat, a scarf, and fucking black leather bike gloves.  When she reached out to shake my hand, “HIIIIII I’m SAAAAALLYYY,” her tone condescending somehow, quickly looking away from me and to the next person in the middle of my introduction of MYSELF, I cringed because I had to touch her bike-gloved hand.  And I thought, “Well, of COURSE you’re wearing a bike glove you don’t need to be wearing.  Fuckhead.”

I found out she’s this art student from the most expensive and notoriously snobby art school in this city, a school this city is just about known for.  I’ve never met anyone from that school that I’ve been able to stand for more than two seconds, who hasn’t managed to make my skin crawl with their thick stink of pretention.  I mean, there’s this guy, who I ripped to shreds in the comments because I couldn’t fucking STAND that there are people in the world who get paid to regurgitate the pile of steaming shit this guy’s spraying (comments have since been deleted, THANKS INTERNET POLICE).  Then there’s this guy who read a story I published and proclaimed it shitty and proceeded to try to hit on me by telling me I owed him a meet-up since he was pretty sure it was based on his life, then changed his story and called me an idiot and reminded me the story was crappy, all because I called him on his ass crap.  Now we’ve got fucking Deep Throat Sally who, I’ve heard, submitted as her master’s thesis an art installation that was only 8 screens lined up, the same girl getting fucked in different pornographic ways on each.  That’s fucking art.  No, really, it’s fucking, and it’s also art, WHATEVER YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE IT’S SO VISCERAL.  We’re 0 for 3, shitty art school.  Things aren’t looking too good for you.

I’m totally over the fact that people pay any fucking attention to these ass fucks.  Author dude gets a STUPID amount of pussy.  I mean, every time I turn around, some chick I know is just slobbering out her hoo-ha, trying to get in his bed.  And Deep Throat is one of those girls that nobody seems to like and everybody says that nobody likes but their excuse for paying ANY attention to anything that comes farting out of her stupid face is “Yo, you don’t want to tell that girl you don’t like her, she is fucking CRAZY, man.”

Let’s remember, for a moment, that people usually think a woman is crazy if she talks, at all, about anything.  So naturally Deep Throat, who cannot shut her stupid mouth about how “visceral” things are, naturally fits that category, possibly through no fault of her own.  But I wish we lived in a world where people would fucking be honest with these stupid assholes.  Stop fucking them and stop listening to their fucking bullshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Walt Dick-me

I stayed home on Saturday night and heated up the ol’ TV TUBE because I was behind on about a million years of housework.  How lame is that?  Anyway, I have been staying over with The Pants for just about three weeks so every time I’ve dropped by my place I’ve just dumped shit on the couch or the floor, or just opened the front door for long enough to toss stuff inside.  Umbrellas, jackets, half-slips, bags of Cherry Sours.  It was time for a major cleanup.

So I turn on the TV and holler like my neighbor does when there’s some kind of sports on TV, because TBS is showing Disney’s Beauty and the Fucking Beast!  YES.  This delights me to no end because I only watched it about 60 million times as a kid so I know every word and distinctly remember every single cell of animation.  So I’m running around vacuuming the drapes and spreading potpourri in the drawers and other stuff that fancy ladies do, and I’m singing along to the chirpy giggle-pated Disney melodies.  Then I’m stricken by a very Adult Thought.

Okay, know how all the ladies in town are all about Gaston, and he’s clearly a piece of crap on his inside parts, where the feelings are?  Imagine how jealous they were after the horrendous, ferocious Beast gets turned into a hot dude?  Because he hasn’t been a normal dude for a long time, he’s been basically a gigantic wolf/lion/dog man.  Superhuman strength and all that.  And judging by the fact that he can stand immediately after his transformation, his muscles haven’t atrophied or been harmed in any other way during his human-to beast-back to human metamorphosis.  So he’s probably got some pretty good strength and muscle tone, amirite?

Look, what I’m getting at here is how awesome it must have been to get your bones jumped by a supermodel who was very recently a full-time werewolf.  Just think about it for a few minutes.  If you need a Kleenex or two to ball up under your bathroom area, go and get them now.  I’ll wait.

Man.  Belle really got the nice end of the deal.  Hot beast on-all-fours lovin’ with Disney’s version of Alcide from True Blood, and a whole library of her own.  The kind with rolling ladders.  GIVEN TO HER.  Like, this is your library.  One can only hope that the royal collection policy from back in the day included some good YA and that Belle didn’t pay for the library in beastly urinary tract infections.

Could I trouble you for a more accurate description of a stillbirth?

When I was in college I had this creative writing class with a girl who was like Narcissus when it came to her own writing.  She was pretty much convinced it was the greatest poetry anyone had ever written and she COULD NOT BELIEVE it came out of her.  Here’s how the class went: either 3 poems or 1 short story were passed around to the class every week.  The next week, we’d all be ready with positive feedback, as well as any constructive criticism we had for the story/poem.  So we’d go around the room and everyone would talk about what they liked (which was sometimes so painful, “I really loved the cover page you made for this!  It’s so SNAZZY!  Do you use Corel WordPerfect?”).  Then we’d go around the room and everyone would pretend that they didn’t have anything negative to say about a short story called “The Pool” or “The Fountain” or “The Pool by the Fountain” that basically consisted only of a girl who died of cancer and a guy who vowed to never marry another person…you know, the kind of story Boyz II Men would write if they just put their lyrics into paragraphs instead of stanzas.  So the instructor would start us off on that part every week by offering some really polite criticism that could be taken or left and usually ended with “didn’t work for me but maybe it worked for someone else.”  Then we’d all meekly take turns with our gentle, easily ignored, well-masked non-criticisms.

So about halfway through the course, the cellar doors got blown way the fuck off this little organization and the shit pretty much hit the fan when this girl brought in her poetry.  She had made it clear that she’d been writing poetry for a really long time and reading e.e. cummings pretty much all her life and so she was actually a PRETTY good poet so if we could just skip to the compliments part, please.  She gives us the customary reading aloud of her work, the week after it had been given to us to take home.  Then she sat there almost pooping her pants with excitement, wriggling in her seat, pushing her hair behind her ears compulsively, clicking her pen, waiting in dire ecstasy for each next polite little gem of attention to trickle out of someone’s mouth.

As for the poetry, it wasn’t that good.  It just wasn’t.  The ones that weren’t straight-up parodies on the cummings style were just failed attempts at really deep, aching love poetry that just swirled down the toilet of cheesiness the moment she brought her boyfriend into them.  That’s because her boyfriend was this wheezing, zit-encrusted sack of dung who delivered pizzas for Domino’s and she chronicled their love affair by making silly little plays on words and cutesy references to him as her “knight with white pizza boxes.”  I mean, the poems were just hilariously bad.  And it was sad because I think if she hadn’t taken herself so assfucking seriously, they could have been really good.  Fuck yeah, write a poem about a guy who delivers Domino’s pizza and has zits.  I’d read the hell out of that.  But there was something about it, her demand to be placed instantly on the level of Walt Whitman & Co., that was just really off-putting.  It all stunk of little effort and great expectations.

(I also wrote some really horrible shit in that class.  Partially because I was also taking myself very seriously, and I thought I was hot shit because I wasn’t as bad as Narcissa, Queen of Pizza.  So on my week I submitted a story I’d written in 3 hours, a fact I thought was a testament to my excellent ability as a writer, in the week before I’d started my period, when I was experiencing some of the weepiest, whiniest, most sentimental pre-menstrual syndrome I’ve ever experienced in my life.  Anyway, my story was about this girl who got knocked up by her boyfriend and her mother wanted to force her to have an abortion and she wouldn’t, so she ran away (waaaaah!) and hid from her evil mother, and her mother made her think her boyfriend didn’t love her anymore (aaaaaaaagh!) and then he came to rescue her and then she gave birth to a stillborn and they hugged it and later got married.  The End.  I would like to say I have never written anything that crappy again—as I deserve to be punched in both eyes for making people read that schlarbage*).

So after the initial round of friendly “I like the, ummm….title!” comments, during which everyone took what you were going to say so you didn’t want to puss out and be like “Oh I agree with everything that’s been said, ” we started in on the negative.  Nobody really needed a prompt, but we got one from the instructor.  I don’t have the copies of this girl’s poems (which I kept because I kept everyone’s work because I keep everything), but I remember that one from that week went something like this:

I am

in the garden

r-e-s-t-r-i-n-g-i-n-g

my mother’s purple necklace

that she gave

to me

…and so forth, and so on.  So the instructor was like, “I just don’t really feel like you’re using your own voice, and that’s a shame because you have such a strong voice,” and of the other poem, which was the famous pizza delivery lover one, she said “It just feels at the end of the poem like it’s more of a limerick.”  To Narcissa’s horror, people agreed with this sentiment.  That it seemed like a cutesy little fart about a relationship that would probably better fit in a prime time sitcom.  Of course, she told us why every last one of us was wrong for feeling the way we did.  She basically said we just didn’t get good poetry.  It was just so far over our heads, we couldn’t understand a word of it.  Her poetry was going to stay that way and that was THAT.  And the next week she emailed us all a poem she’d written about our criticism, a meta-poem, which basically re-iterated everything she’d spat at us in class that day, but this time, it rhymed!  Also, she made a point to say something truly crappy to each of us on our review day, just because.  (On my big day, she said “And I don’t know if anyone’s bothered to like, tell you this?  Or if you even bothered to do any research?  But your description of a dead baby is way off.  That is SO NOT what a dead baby looks like.  My mom’s had two stillbirths, so I know about this.”)  So that was the end of the polite orchestration.

Maybe that was for the better, as it was my last taste of honest criticism.  I went on to get a writing degree at an arts school where I hated everyone (save 1 or 2 women) and just about broke my teeth from grinding them every single day, surrounded by people who were just like Narcissa Princess of Pizza in that they thought they were great, their parents thought they were great, and then they came to school every day at this open enrollment arts institution and they were told, yes, in fact, you are great, possibly even the greatest that ever lived.  So they’d just walk around shitting out of their mouths and writing down every goddamn thought that ever crossed their minds and you’d have to sit in a class and listen to them being filled with sweet-smelling smoke, purchased with tuition dollars and pumped right up their fancy little b-holes.  It was during this time of my life that I came to be really uncomfortable with praise.  There were absolute clowns in my classes who were just fallen all over and assured that they were THE shit.  Like this guy Patrick: he couldn’t be bothered to spell his name correctly, and wrote “paTRtiCk” in pen on the tops of all of his short stories.  He complained about things like how he’d been telling his mom all morning that he was going to puke, and she kept saying he wasn’t going to puke, and then he PUKED!  So the teacher would nod politely and then tell him how impressed she was with his work (which was about a girl who got cancer so her boyfriend brought her a stuffed cat and his mom threw it at him, the end), then she’d tell all the rest of us how much she loved our work.  I mean, how could anyone trust that logic?

I started to really want someone to rip into me.  I felt like I was ready for it.  Tell  me I’m crap.  Tell me what doesn’t work.  Tell me who I’m trying to be when I write this!  Make me find my voice!  THROW THE STUFFED CAT AT ME FOR CHRISSAKES.

Where was I going with all this?  Oh yes.

I mentioned my own idiocy in commenting on a blog post last week, which I knew was a bad idea because the post was written in this glib, flippant tone, a tone that just suggested to me that this person didn’t want to discuss, just be agreed with.  It was a tone I should have recognized since I’ve read so many of Narcissa Pizza Princess’s poems!  JUST NOD AND THINK I’M COOL FOR THE WORDS I SAY GODDAMMIT.  But I offered my two cents, which were that marriages that end are not all failures, and that when we’re sad about things that happen to others, it usually means we’re sad about something we fear for ourselves.  That’s all.  So my reply spiraled into, I think, the writer taking offense with me even bothering to suggest that, so she followed up with this post, which was meant, I think, to express that you’re a dummy if you think she gives a shit about anything that comes out of her own head:

I didn’t think it’d be necessary to say this but here it goes… Sometimes, when I write about something, it’s because it’s a noteworthy occurrence. This doesn’t mean I necessarily care about the item at hand.

That annoyed me.  Sorry to bother you by prompting a discussion on your post!  I didn’t realize you didn’t give a shit.  Just tell me that, then!  In the comments!  Where I’m trying to talk to you!  “Oh, actually? This was all some crap I wrote but don’t really, like, CARE about.”  Why start a whole new dramatic post and tell the wooorld?  Then I looked over the rest of the site.  I saw a lot of that thing I don’t like, that thing my old supervisor Turdburger used to do: he’d say things like “Well I’m rockabilly so I like this and that” or “I’m rockabilly so I’m totally not into that.”  He’d call himself out as part of a group and tell you to your face that his personal style, which he’d absconded from masses of other people with the exact same personal style, dictated his choices in music, movies, cell phone carrier, and every other goddamn thing you could possibly think of.  So here I saw a lot of the same thing: indie this, indie that, hipster, indie, hipster blerrrrrrf.  Band name, music style, band name band name band name, music style.  One of the tags for the post was even “unpopular opinions in indie,” which is pointless because what does “indie” have to do with anything?  Nothing!  It’ s a buzz word.  There’s also lots of self deprecation (“I’m a slut!”), and lots of talk about how much drinking, etc. the writer does.  Oddly enough, the exact same shit I used to write back when I was 3 years younger and single and just drinking and fucking around and writing about it in grand detail just to titillate and tease and attract and push the envelope and be this carefree, don’t-give-a-fuck, hardcore, badass version of myself that I now realize probably annoyed the bejeezus out of a lot of people.  I mean, to the letter I wrote this stuff.  (Except the “I don’t actually care about what I write about” part.)

Now I could probably write a paper about the phenomenon that is Young People Who Feel The Need To Discuss Their Use Of Alcohol and Sexual Experiences, Completely Unprompted By Others.  And I’d be the first one to submit data to my own study: if you could read my old blog and somehow not know my favorite kind of beer and how much vodka I’d consumed on a particular night, and how badass that made me, woo doggies, you must not have read my blog.  You must have just looked at all the pitchers of me in tight clothes!

Are we all destined to be forced to watch copies of our younger selves flap around in the same ways we did?  In five years, will I read something like this that someone else has written and be like, “Oh, you stupid twat.”  It’s like getting a Delia’s catalog when you’re 35, I’m sure.  What the hell is all of this polyester crap and why did I ever buy it?

Also, on another note, if there’s one thing I can’t stand more than people who label themselves, it’s librarians who label themselves.  I don’t know how many times I’ve seen “punk rock librarian” or “super nerd librarian” or “hot librarian” or “snarky librarian” blah blah blah used as a personal description for speakers in conference flyers, About Me’s on professional blogs, or every fucking where else some younger generation dipshit librarian is told to describe him/herself.  Then you meet these people who fancy themselves the hot one that everybody wants to fuck and also have intellectual conversations with, and they have mustaches and wear Twilight t-shirts with pit stains and kilts (for the irony, not for the heritage) and they stay at home every night petting their cats and blogging about the ice cream they made and how it was the bomb.  And because they are a stark contrast to the older generation of librarians, who have mustaches and wear sweaters with apples and schoolhouses and candy appliques and stay at home every night petting their cats and reading, they are suddenly, immediately cool, and they christen themselves “Indie Librarian.”

There’s this one librarian who refers to herself as “punk rock,” and she’s quoted on just about every librarian’s blog, and she’s totally smart and knows what she’s doing, but what rubs me the wrong way is that she tries to come off like she’s Iggy fucking Pop or something.  Then I met her once in the real-worldosphere, outside of the blogosphere, and she’s fucking bald and 6000 pounds and wearing a pilled, saggy dress shirt with a scooped front and snowflakes embroidered around the waist (in March), and it goes so low in the front that one of her wide, flat tits is hanging out of it.  She was just this big slob who spent more time writing about the image she wanted you to have of her than she did just being her whip-smart fucking self.

Oh, it’s just a mirror image of real life, isn’t it?  If  someone cannot stop talking about how cool and different they are, they’re just pissing themselves inside, just all over their insides, because they’re boring even their own brain.  And it just goes to show you that you should not trust an internet presence, especially when a person has a lot of things to write about what they’re like and what they think of themselves.**

*schlock + garbage

**Case in point: I am a cyborg.

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November 5, 2011 · 6:22 pm

Seriously, though.

And the hits just keep on comin.

WHYYYY. I HAVE SO MUCH MORE TO GIVE.

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November 4, 2011 · 1:13 pm

Back Door Has Fisis Behind It

I’m annoyed by burlesque.  I’m annoyed by the shellacked, rubberized, pink, squishy, edge-of-raunch, hand-over-mouth-like-Bettie-Davis burlesque.  My sister used to say it’s just “stripping for fat girls.”  And that’s  pretty much what it is!  If you’re too chubby to be objectified by men in the more-nekkid way, you might as well strap on some vintage underwear and embrace the good old-fashioned way, when women with bigger butts and wider hips were the norm.

Nothing against fat girls or sexy vintage underwear.  That’s cool.  I personally have a gigantic 60’s ass.  And even in the 60’s they would have thought it was  a big ass, probably.  They would have said “She’s a lobster…all the meat’s in the tail!  Hot-cha cha cha chaaaaa!”

I do have a problem with burlesque girls looking at chicks who dance at the Admiral Club or Diamond City and go “Ewww what a whore.”  It’s all the same thing.  Maybe you’re covered up about 27% more than she is at the end of the night, and you and your burlesque troupe friends have to split the door price instead of getting your own tips, but come on.  It’s all just dancing around in panties, isn’t it?  And for some reason, the girls who do burlesque just always happen to get on my very last goddamn nerve.  It’s an annoyance that’s separate from my hatred of burlesque, they’re a dipshit first, an old-timey stripper second.  I just can’t say I’m surprised when some bitch that has annoyed me to no end for all the time I’ve known her tosses out there “Oh, here’s a flier for my burlesque troupe, we’re doing a show this Friday night.”  You don’t say.

Halloween is the day when girls wear skanked-out lycra straps over their nipples and call it a costume.  Burlesque is the nonstop Halloween for the jiggly-fleshed girl, because “It’s not skanky because it’s art, okay?”

I think it’s really exciting and interesting. It seems (with) this revival, women are embracing this style and want to have fun with it and they want to embrace their inner bombshell and get really..you know  have fun with dressing up and feeling their own ..like..confidence and sexual power.  They are seeing a different version of sexy other than a blonde bikini babe, tan, and natural running down a beach in slow motion.  You know, this is a different kind of sexy and I think there is a lot of women who can relate to this style. . .”–Dita Von Teese, aka Heather Renee Sweet, to Katie Couric, who you know does not give a shit.

ick.

Oh, tell it to the fucking Pussycat Dolls.

Anyway.  I had this boss once when I worked in retail who was a tooootal cocksucker.  No, really, she sucked a lot of cock.  And it was weird that she did that because she also hung out around groups of boys and did the whole “Hey, hey dudes: I’m a lesbian.  What do you think of that?  Does that turn you on, that I’m a lesbian?  Because I’m SUCH a lesbian.  WINK WINK!”  Meanwhile, her girlfriend, a Filipino art student who was like 6 years younger, stayed at home all day babysitting her son for her.  I always felt sorry for that girl, but not too sorry, because hey, you chose to do that to yourself.  I had a friend who called my fake lesbian boss the Faux Lesbeaux, which, over time, translated itself into the name everyone used for her eventually: the Flezboss.

This woman was stupid.  I’d wager she still is.

The Puma store where I worked had a back alley, where The Homeless liked to congregate at night.  This alley had a dumpster that was strategically placed to hide the back door from street view.  There, in the shadow of the dumpster, The Homeless would unleash their bowels.  It just so happened to be right in front of our back door.  So, the Flezboss created a Support Ticket! to have someone come clean the alley.  On it, she wrote, in her cutesy “Aren’t I just a little airhead? Hee hee hee!” way, “Back door has fisis behind it.”  Fisis.  Because in her mind, it’s cute when you spell things majorly wrong.  She then took that piece of paper around to everyone and said “Look!  Look how silly and stupid I am!!!  Is this how you spell feces?  Hey, does anyone know how to spell feces?  Teehee!”

She pretty much hated women, but her lezzy cover-up served to dispel that rumor, because “I love women!  They’re totally hot and they turn me on and I go down on them.  Does that, uhhh…do anything for you??”  She constantly made bitchy comments under her breath about women customers or coworkers.  If a male visitor, customer, or coworker talked to anyone but her, she squeezed herself into the conversation, flipping her hair and batting her eyelashes and mentioning her sexual orientation as casually as possible.  Her only attempts to socialize or connect with her female coworkers was to feign idiocy over her menstrual cycle every month.  She’d announce that she had to go to the bathroom because of “Girl issues!”  She’d ask us for tampons, all the while shoving the tampons she’d bought that morning deeper into her purse so we wouldn’t see them.  It was so we could bond, you know?  Like women bond over their periods in shitty movies and brainless burps of television.

She tried her damnedest to get myself and like four other women fired for arbitrary shit like “Your tone this morning was negative” or “I could tell from your facial expression while you were reading the week’s numbers that you were being negative.”  One day I came in, she brought me into the office, sat me down, and handed me a piece of paper to sign.   The piece of paper said that she had been the only witness to me saying something derogatory, to myself, in another room, about a manager.  And that since she witnessed this (through a wall), I was on my Final Warning.  I think, on that day, I just kind of wept at the futility of it all, how fucking stupid it was that fake lesbians with fat asses had the power to yank my crappy ass retail job out from under me.  She was just an asshole.  Why in God’s name would you fire ANYONE from a shitty job in a basement of a Puma store?  Isn’t there something else you could be doing?  This comment she told HR she overheard never happened.  I’d shout it from the rooftops right now if I’d said it.  And I didn’t.

I’m pretty sure she just didn’t like that I was smart, and I could see through her bullshit.  People haaaate to be around someone like that, someone who knows when you’re being a stupid asshole on purpose.  That’s probably why she had another piece of paper sent down from Retail HR On High to tell my favorite manager and friend that she was “being too clique-y” with the staff.  This was like a day and a half after she tried to win cool points with the staff by going around with her bad-assery badge on her sleeve, saying that just the night before she and another member of the staff had driven around in her car with open PBR tall boys.

Here’s some old blog posts about her, which I wrote under my own name and threw out there on the interwebs for all to see, too young and stupid to realize that she’d find them and my work life would be even more hellish than I ever thought possible:

So when the Flezboss stopped me, at 5:01, from clocking out and running directly into traffic so that she could lean into my face and stage-whisper “DO YOU HAVE A TAMPON?!?” like it was the first time she’d ever asked me that question, it was actually very hard not to just lean into her face and scream my fucking head off.

I wish I had exploding tampons with nails wrapped around them. I’d give her one of those. Because she asks me every fucking month–and I think I’ve blogged this before–if she can have one of my tampons. Like she’s completely taken by surprise by the fact that she needs them at the same predictable time every fucking month, the fat fool. I guess they do use double the amount over at the Lezzie Borden she calls an apartment, and maybe it’s harder to stay stocked up, but Jeeeezus Christ on a cracker. Buy the big box, you fucking asshole. You and that oily little catfish you call a girlfriend couldn’t use that many in a month.

Anyway, I’m going to start drawing up plans for exploding tampons. Then I’ll give one to her and if she’s smart she won’t ask for one again.

And of course I have a giant box of them in my locker, but I always give her the same doofy look she’s giving me, shrug, and say, “Nope!”

Then one day she got a new job:

You know what also lifts a girl’s spirits?

When the fucking white-trash skank whore thorn in her side gets loosed and falls out. That’s right: the Flezzboss, the famous, hated, shitty excuse for a leader is being banished to an outlet in Florida, where she will rot for all eternity beneath piles of rejected Made in Vietnam shoes. By August 1st, she’ll be gone, jettisoned from Chicago just as fast as the plane’s fuel can carry her fat ass.

I keep having to take a moment for a deep breath and a wave of calm realization that the bitch is almost wiped out of my life for good. Ugh.

Now I can buy cute scarves and jeans and not have to worry about someone going out and buying the same one, then wearing it the next day, and then pointing out that she bought the same scarf or pair of jeans as me.

Of course, she just went out and got her hair cut like mine, after telling me she was going to. But she can have whatever haircut she fucking wants, as long as she stays in fucking Florida and gets eaten by the monster we call A High Volume Outlet.

And I won’t have to worry about getting written up every time I breathe wrong, and I won’t have to worry about whether or not my fatty boss is comfortable with my facial expression during the morning meeting, and I won’t have to listen to her screeky voice ever again while she talks shit about everyone on the phone. It’s like I had a giant tumor of fakeness in my life, and it’s being removed.

And here’s a little clip of her being a total suicide pig:

I totally agree that I'm a good person. I just wanted to talk real quick about how amazing I am now that someone is dead.

Sometimes when I think about her, I get really angry.  I get mad that I was under the direction of a person like that, who basically had carte blanche to do whatever the hell she wanted to me.  When people like that are in power, even if it’s just a management job in a shoe store, you basically have to sit there and smile stupidly and stay out of their way and never EVER let them think for a second you might be the slightest bit offended by their racist/sexist jokes, which they tell with their eyes blinking stupidly, pretending not to know that what they just said is totally inappropriate.  You’re supposed to laugh along and be just as much of an asshole as they are because people like that are fucking bullies, and if you stand up to a bully who manages a shoe store, get ready to be fired from A FUCKING SHOE STORE.

I swear there’s a point to all of this.

The point is this: recently my anger and annoyance, deeply rooted in the past and lying sideways somewhere under my liver like a little rock, flared up a little bit.  See, I go all over the interwebs looking for pictures of cupcakes and cupcake recipes and fun stuff that makes me feel good, which usually means that I do lots of Google searches for things including the word “cupcake.”  It’s unfortunate that Safe Search would never have protected me from what I found not too long ago.  It appears that, aside from getting arrested, my former boss has been spending her time having her photo taken in such a way that darkens the word “cupcake” and all its positive connotations forever:

No...please stop...

Ohmygod.

These images come to us courtesy of “Cupcake Pinups,” a photography studio that is so serious about its love of sugar, rockabilly, tattoos, and strappy underwear, that it’s actually invested in a real Facebook page to promote its business.

Upon seeing these, I wanted to douse my brain in lighter fluid and set it on fire.  And don’t even think I take any satisfaction in the death imagery above: I don’t wish this woman dead and that wouldn’t make me happy.  What would make me happy is if everyone quit talking to her, forever and ever.  All I see here is a tubby bitch lolling around in a fake cemetery with her mouth open like she’s saying “HEYYYYYY How do you spell feces?!?!  HAHAHA LOL!”

And why…whyyyy did they have to use a cupcake for this asscrappery?  That’s what made it possible for this cunt from the fake graveyard of Hell to haunt me, years later and now that I no doubt make a better salary than she ever did in the shoe store management circuit.  She has reached across  time and the deep web to torment me with this horrifying example of Rockabilly-burlesque fusion with a cherry on top.

And yes, that is a fake cupcake tattoo splotched on her arm.  For the sake of the art, you know.

Happy Fucking Halloween, indeed.

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