Tag Archives: Agent Ventura

Fear and Writing in Lost Fakeness

So I’m back from the dead, and stuff.  Maybe not dead exactly, but definitely done with grad school (as in “finished”) and now having daily panic attacks about finding a job, paying back the retarded amount of student loans I took out so I could buy stupid shit, finding an apartment I can afford without assurance of said job and with assurance of said loan bills, and basically keeping my life together so that everyone I know doesn’t start to label me as Clinical and also Totally Fucking Crazy and stop calling me.  I mean, I spent all last weekend convinced that I was going to have a heart attack.  Like honestly thinking, “Welp.  Here it comes.  It’s been real, World.”

Lucky for me, I’m well aware of my body’s ability to manufacture symptoms of cancer and heart disease every time my brain is in turmoil.  I mean, if I get mad enough about my job or certain websites or anything else, I can pretty much make myself puke or make blood come out of my ears, because my superpower is psychosomatic illness.

But for now let’s talk about more of the things that make me puke the natural way.

Oh, and hi, Blog.  I missed you!

Rich Cunt Documentary Hour

My new favorite show is called Rich Cunts Arguing. Ok, well, no, that’s not actually what it’s called. But they should call it that. I didn’t watch it for the longest time because the title has something to do with real housewives. My fundamentalist Christian aunt is a real housewife, and she bores me to death. So I think they really could increase their viewer and fan base if they just changed the name to describe the show a little better.

But anyway, what they do is they set up all of these foundations for Poor People. They all seem to have some kind of foundation. They all go to bat for some kind of Poor People Cause. Then they show up at each other’s Poor People Events wearing dresses that cost about four times what I pay in rent every month and argue and tell each other they can’t believe Rich Cunt X had the audacity to show up and raise this kind of hell at an event for Poor People! Then they say, “Can you believe her, Poor People?? What a total lack of class!”

How dare you make me call you a bitch, Bitch?!

The other episodes are these complicated webs of the five or six of them (you can never count how many of the Rich Cunts there actually are on the show) calling each other and asking to get together for quick talks. One of them says to the other “Look, I called you and asked you to come here because I want you to know that I don’t like you anymore and I don’t want to talk to you because you? You have problems. And everyone else thinks so.” Then they all have separate meetings and every 3rd episode is like an episode of Survivor, except with cocktails and pills and facial injections, and whoever they collectively vote off one week is invited back into the circle the next because they were all pretty fucked up when that argument started, aaaaanyway.

I watched several episodes of Rich Cunts Arguing last weekend, because when The Pants is out of town I tend to indulge in awful television. I treated myself to 3 episodes and a reunion special, where the Rich Cunts argue in one place for a whole hour without drinks in their hands. They watch video of themselves arguing with each other from the previous year’s show, then they argue about that some more. It usually ends with somebody saying they’re done, and then America votes (or at least, somebody claims that “America voted”) on one of them to get their own TV show. This year’s prize goes to the one with a jaw like a steam shovel, which constantly flaps in defense of her class level because of her whirlwind marriage and almost immediate announcement of a “surprise” pregnancy.

Even Rich Cunts gots Poor People problems, yo.

In other exciting TV news, there is a new show out as of yesterday which is all about cupcake baking.  But not regular old from-the-box-mix cupcakes, those crazy as shit gourmet cupcakes that people put all kinds of crap in, like beer and rock salt and tortilla chips and mustard and shit.

This is goddamn amazing. Why didn't I think of a cupcake tank!?!

Some of these people know what the fuck they’re doing, and the other ones are just kitchen retards who happen to know how to pipe icing and stuff.  They bring their families on there and scream at them and tell them what to do.  Like this one bitch who made some kind of pineapple squash cupcake monstrosity, but she made it in the “Presentation” round, which is all about, yeah, presentation, ya turkey.  She barked orders at her brother all the way through the challenge, and ended up failing in the end because all she did was pipe some real nice turquoise frosting on top and then stab a cocktail umbrella into it.

This is the real thing, Carol Sue!  You wouldn’t bring a bucket of turds to a county fair pie contest would ya?  Oh, you would?  Well.

So then this other lil Barbie impersonator (and, apparently, fellow appreciator of Things That Are Dollhouse Sized), who ended up winning, had sugar sand, fondant starfish, and fucking edible pearls on top of hers.  EDIBLE PEARLS.  Like a sugary beach.  A sugary, edible, heavenly beach.

Unfortunately, watching this show has reawakened my deep, dark desire for one of these.

Sigh. When’s MY turn, KitchenAid?!

Booger T. Kindle

The other day on the train, I watched a girl reading from a Kindle as she repeatedly dug in her nose for fat, slimy wads of snot, which she would look at for just a moment on the tip of her finger, then reach over and smear onto the wall next to her seat. I seemed to be the only person in the train car staring at her in complete horror. As I am a daily train rider, this disgusted and outraged me. “ExCUSE me,” I wanted to say. “Can you NOT do that??” Instead, I sat there staring, mouth-open, as she covered the wall with pale green smears of thick snot and boogers, then took to wiping subsequent chunks onto the front of the seat by the inside of her knees. All the while totally engrossed (hah) in her Kindle.

My brains were on fire, screaming SOMEONE ELSE IS GOING TO SIT THERE, and then, do you know what happened? Booger Kindle got up and marched off the train, and a very large, very tired looking woman got right on and sat down, and LEANED AGAINST THE BOOGER WALL. I almost puked into my purse. What do you bet if I’d done that, someone would have said, “Excuse me, can you not do that? Puke grosses me out.”

The whole time, I was IM’ing Agent Ventura on the Blackberry device.  She remarked “at least she’s not eating it,” and I replied that I’d rather someone eat that shit than wipe it all the hell over the places I might end up sitting someday.  Just put it right back where it came from, jerk.

Really it left me thinking about the rise in popularity of this Kindle business.  I mean, here we have this electronic book readery-thingy.  You load books in there with electronic magic and read from a skinny little rectangle that is supposedly lighter than a feather.  The world has advanced technologically enough to threaten the total eradication of print media, here we are on the verge of the digital revolution, people will pay $260 for this machine, yet, for some reason, those same people who are buying into the future of electronic inventions are STILL PICKING THEIR NOSES AND WIPING THEIR FUCKING BOOGERS ON EVERYTHING.

What the fuck.

A list of completely unrelated things.

1. I’d like to know where the hell Cedric the Entertainer gets off calling himself “The Entertainer.”  He should be calling himself Cedric Antonio Kyles.  Because that’s that smiling fuckwit’s real name.  And also because he’s never entertained me in my entire life.  Oh and I bet he’s got some obnoxious story about how he got that nickname, too.  Some kind of Tori Amos bullshit where someone told him he should be called that and he was just like “You know what?  You’re right!” and now he doesn’t look like a self-assured dickwad for appointing himself “The Entertainer” all the time.

2. Sharpies are neat.  So neat, in fact, that someone made one out of fondant and squished it onto a cupcake.

Unfortunately, they made all that other packing and shipping themed crap, too.

3. I might quit Netdix.  I haven’t decided yet.  It feels like a bigger decision than it actually is, though.  They’re stressing me out by constantly sending me glossy pieces of mail and e-mail “alerts” (ALERT!  MOVIES!) just to let me know that I can watch instantly on my computer or on the Wii any time I want.  What’s depressing is that I say “OK, Netflix!  Thanks!” and then I go look at the movies they’re gonna let me watch, and what do I see?  Oh.  Fried Green Tomatoes, which was on TV last week.  And The Breakfast Club.  And The Shawshank Redemption.  But how many fucking times can you watch The Shawshank Redemption before you shawshank yourself in the face?  It’s like they look up all the movies that are going to be on cable that week, plus they get a list of movies that most, if not all, Americans have on VHS somewhere in the basement, and they give you those, and they say “Look!  For free!”

Oh, I forgot, they also offer to show me 1-and 2-star rated documentaries that have similar cover art to other documentaries I have watched at some point.  If they recommend one more goddamn movie to me that involves a picture of french fries being manipulated in some stupid way, I’m going to quit.  That should put an end to the problems they seem to have with deleting my ex’s movies off my account.

4. A Facebook friend commented on the status of one of his friends today, and for some reason, even though I am not friends with that person, Facebook feels the need to alert me of this activity.  And here’s what the status message was:

$130,000,000,000,000. Say what you want about Bush but we weren’t this far in debt w/ him.

Which makes absolutely no sense.  It’s  not like the Obama administration did all of this.  And this is the kind of shit I wondered about at the beginning of his presidency, which was at a time when we were headed down the fucking shitter anyway, no matter which way you sliced it.  I had the sense at the time to know that Obama wasn’t going to make any miracles happen, what was more likely was that he’d get a bad rap no matter what he did, because this country is so far fucked anyway.  No matter who took office, they’d be dealing with the mess of this war and all of the other shit Bush dipped out on.  But, of course, so many people prefer to think of it as entirely Obama’s fault instead of carryover shit from Bush, now snowballing us into a Pit of Total Despair.

And lately, Obama is being kind of lame.  Lame in the way that I’m glad gay men are standing up and screaming at him, calling him a liar when he waffles on repealing DADT.  He needs to be yelled at and knocked about when he’s caught backing out of campaign promises.  He needs to clean up the goddamn ocean, because it’s soooo fucked.  And we need to keep  him in line.  All of us, not just half of us.

Or I guess you could just sit around and update  your Facebook status with some bullshit fact taken out of context.  Or you could start an angry Republican Christian conservative blog, wherein you claim to have read a lot of research yet fail to cite any of it.

But there’s got to be some kind of compromise here.  And I think, and hope, it should and will be on the Republican Christian conservative side.  I mean, what do you care if some fags get married?  How does that bother you?  Just keep going to your church and believing what you believe and doing what you’re doing.  It’s a bigger inconvenience for them to live in your America than it is for you to live in a free America.

Are people really that stupid?

I guess they are.

DJ D-Bag on the ones and the twos.

DJ D-Bag up there is,  I happen to know for a fact, an avid young Republican Christian conservative, who wrote this:

*I’m reposting this in it’s original context, but notice that it doesnt say you should speak up if you DON’T support gay rights, but rather simply ignore it. That’s the very reason this is posted to begin with, we ignore it. Nice try.* (inside the asterisks are my comments)
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“Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?”
– Ernest Gaines

*Mostly because two men holding hands manage to currupt the society in which they are in, far enough to the point of accepting them even against current religion and prior cultural prefferences of THAT society. They also drive the culture in question to the point of making inane and asinine comparisons like this one stated by Mr. Gaines. There is no logical comparison in it and there is absolutely no reason to even question the notion.*

I would like to know who really believes in gay rights on myspace. There is no bribe of a miracle or anything like that. If you truly believe in gay rights, then repost this and title the bulletin as “Gay Rights”. If you don’t believe in gay rights, then just ignore this. Thanks.

Be who you are *(who you want to be they mean)* and say what you feel *(based on who you want to be)*, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind *(then my notes don’t matter either)*.

FYI – National Coming Out Day is October 11, and October is GLBT History month. 😀

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*Please don’t lecture me on any half-minded notions involving “who you are”. You are who you want to be, just as you do what you want to do. Any argument based in-between is, merely, an excuse.*

Homosexuality is wrong.

Some of you might remember this back from the days of the great MySpace debate over this, which ended in me completely losing my mind and blocking this asshole, who, when I argued with him, sent me this:

lol Ok. I guess knowledge of proper ‘syntax and grammer’ usage makes up for the loosing of the bulletin message’s original context in an attempt to mire the intelligence of the writer by picking at the irrelevant? That’s usually the stereotypical way of defending eminent error.

Because that’s what you get when you point out to someone that their argument might be stronger and more compelling if they didn’t misspell every 4th word and come off sounding like your run-of-the-mill backwoods retard arguing against buttfucking: said backwoods retard misquotes you (I would NEVER spell “grammar” with an ‘e’!  How dare you?!), then pulls out his thesaurus and gets to work letting you know you’re the stereotypical  idiot, not him.

Anyway.  I enjoy the irony of the “JUST LIVE” scrawled across his fingers.  Just live…unless you’re gay, in which case you’re just choosing to live in a way that doesn’t align with my religious beliefs and you shouldn’t be allowed to because it creeps me out.  Just live, if you’re like me, straight as the day is long with the douchey facial hair and the screen printed dress shirt to prove it.  Just live the way I think you should.

I can’t wait to hear the fat beats you’re preparing for this month’s Rave for Him at the Holy Basement Teen Center.  Mix on, Christian soldier.

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God, butt sex, weight lifting, cooking.

My apartment is such a shit hole right now…half of it is in boxes and the other half is a bunch of crap I MAY or MAY NOT want that is on top of boxes.  I was packing stuff I might need in the next week, thinking ohh I’ll remember which box that is in, but now everything is in boxes and there are not windows in the boxes and I don’t know where my underpants are!

That said, I am sitting here at 6pm with the biggest cup of coffee in the universe, waiting for it and the three extra-strength Excedrin to kick in and demolish the headache that is blinding me, and has been blinding me since I woke up this morning.  I had been doing this thing where I really really tried very hard to stop drinking so much coffee, swapping it again for strong green tea.  But it doesn’t work.  I get a stabbing headache that is followed by a horrible, morose mood.  I go out in public and hate everyone.  I went to Target today to pick up the aforementioned Excedrin, and I thought it would be a good idea to stop in at the Target Starbucks and get a gigantic espresso thing.  Well, guess what?  Those motherfuckers broke their espresso machine and couldn’t make any coffee drinks.  I almost threw myself to the floor and rolled around kicking and screaming.  So I ran over to the painkiller aisle and wouldn’t you know it, there were so many people blocking it with their carts that I actually, seriously, honestly considered yelling at the top of my lungs IF YOU FUCKING PEOPLE DON’T MOVE YOUR ASSES OUT OF MY WAY I AM GOING TO KILL ONE OF YOU.  LIKE SERIOUSLY.  Instead, I just stood there and waited, my face all red, breathing really hard and pulling at the neck of my hoodie.  It felt really tight.

Quitting coffee does not work.  It does not.  And the moral of this story is that Agent Ventura really wants a blog to read when she wakes up in the morning and even though I feel like someone is filling my skull with broken glass, I would hate to disappoint her.  Even so, this mood is nasty and evil and the Excedrin is not going fast enough so I HATE YOU.  Not really, but come on.  I got a text message blow off last weekend, spent the week in Southern Illinois, tried to quit drinking coffee, tried to pack for a move, and you wanna know why I haven’t written a blog?  BECAUSE I AM IN A STATE OF DESPAIR.

Not really.  I mean, packing is gay, but it’s almost done.  I have coffee now.  My sister reminded me that I didn’t like the guy that much and was only pissed off that he didn’t like me either.  Oh, and I got the best picture ever in Harrisburg, Illinois:

hardees

Fried bologna!!!

My mom makes her coffee with a French press.  I don’t know if you know about this but it’s very exotic.  You boil the water in a fancy teapot, then you grind the coffee beans in a fancy grinder.  You dump them into this glass pitcher, pour in the water, and stir.  Exactly (EXACTLY, YOU STUPID) four minutes later, you put the lid on the pitcher and push the middle down, which makes a strainer thingy squish through the coffee bean/water mixture.  In all, it takes about four hours.

There is no measuring system to speak of.  There is also no milk or sugar in my mom’s house, as she suffers from healthfoodrexia.  I could only find plain organic soymilk, which I mixed into my fancy unmeasured ratio of coffee and water.  Holy fucking shitballs it was terrible.  And it made me so crazy I thought I was going to die for about twenty minutes after I drank it.  Unfortunately, Mommy was at work and could not help her adult daughter make coffee.  I thought about calling her to have her direct me around the kitchen, but I figured she might get mad at me if she was busy explaining to a student that yes, you CAN take a library book home with you, that is what a library is for.  It’s totally weird when you realize that you don’t know where the spoons are in the house where you grew up.

I’m going to go ahead and admit that while I was at home, I ate McDonald’s, Hardees, Taco Bell, Sonic, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Denny’s.  I’m also going to go ahead and admit that three of them were in the same day.  Whatever, shutup!  I don’t care what you think!

Actually, I feel kind of disgusting.  I had three giant bottles of water today and I still feel like there are cheeseburger-shaped amoebas in my veins.

what is this?

Does anyone know what the hell kind of frosting this is?  I want to know.  It goes on cupcakes and it’s flat.  It’s so you can make cute designs on the cupcake.  I guess, anyway.

This is so shitfucking cute.

This is so shitfucking cute.

Also, who the fuck spends their time making cupcake batter, pouring it into cupcake pans, finding tiny stuffed animals, and arranging them with the batter so that it looks like it’s the stuffed animal that’s happily making the cupcakes?  I want to know because I would like to meet them, and maybe talk to them, and fine, okay, yeah, I want to fuck them.  You happy?

WHO is responsible for this??

WHO is responsible for this??

Okay, a boy in Australia took this next picture for me.  Not to mention the fact that there is an entire week dedicated to cupcakes somewhere in the world, I was unbelievably touched that aforementioned boy saw this sign and thought of me.  In one half of my brain, I am packing all of my stuff because I am moving to Australia to be his lover forever and ever because he is the most awesome guy I have ever NOT met and fallen in love with anyway.

Let's kiss.  NOW.

Let's kiss. NOW.

match dot bomb

Okay, so fine, yeah, I am now back in the online dating scene.  And not for any other reason but that I WANT TO GO ON A GODDAMN DATE.  Especially if it’s with someone I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, whose friends do not know me and think I’m a big ole bitch.  But you know, this means that I am now receiving emails from guys whose interests are “God, butt sex, weight lifting, cooking.”  In that order.

Today is my first day back on the online date pony, and already I’ve gotten an email about how I must be “a pretty sexy librarian” and been approached by a guy who just wanted to let me know that he is “an adventurous lover, wink wink.”  Do you fucking have something in your eye?  And what do you mean, “adventurous lover?”  You wanna do it in the Everglades or something?  Because nothing’s shocking anymore, boyo.  Not after the last six months of my dating life.

Anyway, I totally expect to meet a whole lot of the same pigfaced pussytwats I met the first time around, this time last year, but this time I’ve decided to be nicer to the boys who laugh at my jokes and buy me Sharpies and bring me candy on our first date.

And I will say that at least this website has a gigantic crop of those rugged, corn-fed, Midwestern boys I like to look at.  Woowee!

planes, trains, fuck you

So last night I began my journey back to the city from the Southern part of the state.  This meant that I had to catch an Amtrak train in Carbondale, Illinois.  Due to a car mix-up, I ended up finally securing a ride to the train station a mere eleven minutes before the train was supposed to leave the station.  So naturally, faced with the idea of being forced to spend another night in Southern Illinois and another $50 on another ticket, I freaked out and basically stopped breathing.  Luckily, they held the train for me when they saw me tearing across the parking lot, waving my reservation information in the air like a battle standard, almost crying (ALMOST) because I was sure they were just going to high tail it out of the station without me.  But they held the train, and everyone on it gave me shitty looks when I finally collapsed into a seat so I could put my head between my knees and breathe.

All eyes ceased to be on me when we hit Centralia, Illinois, and the train was immediately filled with the prisoners who had just been released from the Centralia Correctional Facility.  So everyone was paying a little more attention to their personal belongings than they had been before.  Look, if that’s offensive, I don’t care.  Because when a bunch of loud-ass motherfuckers in correctional facility uniforms, with tooth brushes and underwear in plastic bags, yelling about all the week they’re going to smoke when they get home get on your train, we’ll talk about it some more.  They wouldn’t leave anyone alone, as they weren’t allowed to purchase alcohol on the train, so they were hitting up anyone and everyone to buy it for them.  They were also very interested in using people’s cell phones, and I turned down four of them who had to make “real important phone calls.”  The guy who sat in front of me had those retardedly long and pointy and gross fingernails and set about befriending the two kids sitting across from us, who were traveling alone.  The kids went to the dining car, and the next thing you know, the little boy couldn’t find his cell phone.  “Oh, lemme help y’all look,” the ex-prisoner said, and proceeded to go through all of their things with them.  “At least my Nintendo DS is still here!” the little boy said.

“You know what you should always do,” says Ex-Prisoner, “is lock your phone so people can’t use it.”

“Oh, I do!” said the boy.  “I lock it all the time!”

“Oh, really?” says Ex-Prisoner.  “You got like, a code on it?”

“Yep!” says the boy, pleased as punch that he’s taken the necessary precautions.

“Oh, that’s good.  What is it?” asks Ex-Prisoner.

The boy smiles hugely, proudly, and says, “It’s the last four digits of my phone number.”

“Oh, that’s good, that’s real good,” says Ex-Prisoner.  “You should probably give me your phone number so I could call you if I find your phone.”

So they look through their stuff again and again.  They tear the train apart looking for the phone.  Finally, they decide to check the bathrooms.  Ex-Prisoner offers to watch their stuff for them while they look.  At that point, I was just like hey, kids, seriously…come on.  But they walked away, and when they came back, I heard the boy say, “Wait…wait! Where’s my Nintendo?!”

And the whole process started over again.

We finally landed in the White City, over half an hour late.  I finally caught a Blue Line, which sat in the station for ten minutes before chugging forward one stop, where it sat for another ten, after which an announcement was made that this particular train would not be going any further, and that a shuttle bus would be provided…a shuttle bus which was, of course, outside in the rain, and connected only to the Blue Line a few stops away.  After which I would have to walk home.  In the rain.

So I transferred to the Red Line and immediately found myself in the midst of six sorority girls on an outing, who were arguing over, and I shit you not, the fucking lyrics to Single Ladies.  You can imagine how I felt about that.  And, of course, the one who was their fucking tour guide was telling them all the great bars, and proceeded to list all the douchebaggiest places imaginable.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with having stupid conversations.  I’m sure that some of the things I talk about when I’m a little drunk and a bit too loud and stupid are annoying to those around me.  But I was wet and tired and rattled and sick of fucking train delays and I wanted to go home really really bad.  So I pretty much wanted to kill all of those girls.

Also, I was not prepared for it to be sixty degrees and pouring rain in the city.  So I was wearing a tank top and shorts.  And I ended up standing on a corner at midnight, weighed down by all of my shit, freezing my ass off, and THAT is why I kind of maybe possibly snapped at the guy in the swirly velour-covered gigantic Dr. Seussian top hat and sunglasses who leaned into my face and said, “Well at this time ‘o night ya can’t tell if people are starting their night or ending it!  Hyuk hyuk hyuk!”

I was nice about it.  I mean, I don’t understand why the freaks come crawling out of the fucking sewers in their Halloween costumes at 10:30 every night in the city.  I’ll never understand it.  And it’s a bit of culture shock every time I come back from a visit at home, in rural nowhere, where the only sound is the neighbor’s dog and a million jazillion crickets, to be greeted by some weird lonely motherfucker in an outfit purchased at a Six Flags gift shop.

I think I said “SHUT. UP.” and left it at that.  Because that’s when I decided to splurge and got into a cab, because the other freak at the bus stop was whining about how it was Obama’s fault that the bus was late.

bye bye, stinky!

Well, you may or may not know this, but last Friday was my last day in retail EVER.  I am so excited to start my librarian job on Monday that I am peeing a little bit.  I am peeing in my non-uniform pants.

I won’t miss any of the shit that came with that job.  What I will miss are the co-workers, the partners in crime, and, sometimes, inebriation.  One of my favorites, Agent It Won’t Suck Itself, put together a video that was pretty much the most awesome thing ever.  It’s unexplainable.  It’s amazing.  If you want to see it, you should add me on Facebook.  Because, of course, it’s got my name in it, which I’d rather not disclose on this here bloggy blog, because that’s what got me into trouble with the last bloggy blog.

Anyway, the video was very touching, and it made me happy and sad. Plus it had Hitler in it (of course).

So, Miss Agent Ventura, I hope this blog has filled your blog hole for the time being.  I hope you know that I start school AND my new job on Monday, that I move a week from Monday, and that I will probably go for a couple of days in there without internet access, so this blog may have to hold you over for a bit.

But I’m sure I’ll come up eventually with some sort of schedule for my complaints and bitchery, which I will be sure to puke all over this blog whenever I get a chance.

Also, please punch me in the face if I ever mention cutting back on coffee ever again.  This stuff is great!  YEAH!

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My Humble Act Ends with a Tap Routine

Skankbaby

My new-ish neighbors are total assholes.  I hate to sound like a really unfeeling human being, but I don’t understand how the economy could be so bad that a young couple could move out of a comfortable first floor apartment next door, and a family of fifteen could move in.  These people are so goddamn skanky and loud.  There is almost always a crowd in the 4×4 strip of front yard they have, up to the wrought-iron fence by the sidewalk, and a grill, and a baby pool, and trash, and a fat man screaming for everyone to take off their shoes before they go in the fucking house.  Beyond the sidewalk is another strip of (public) grass, next to the street, where they have been depositing each turd lain by their three dogs in their enclosed lawn.  I know this because I have been noticing the stink on my way past on particularly hot days.  Finally, someone busted them for it, because I saw the landlady explaining to the fat patriarch that no, you don’t own that property by the street, and even if you did, you would be expected to pick up your dog’s shit and dispose of it.  And the fat man responded by playing totally dumb, “Oh, really?  Okay, yeah, because, I didn’t know that, okay, wow, uh huh.”

If I lived above or below these people I would be so pissed.  I just live Next Door and I don’t like it.

Am I just a cunt for expecting a reasonable level of quiet?  I must be old and crotchety because I can’t stand it when they leave the bathroom window vent open and I have to listen to the only words of “Single Ladies” that the neighbor girls know.  And they have this new punishment for the baby when it cries, which is to leave it sitting on the sidewalk in front of my building, where its “time out” spot has been designated, while they destroy the sidewalk in front of their building with gang signs and tributes to Michael Jackson in pastel sidewalk chalk.  So the little thing sits there in its filthy diaper, screaming in its frustration, and I’m at the point where I’d go out there and pick it up and play with it just to get some peace and quiet, as it sits directly in front of my open street level window.  Mind you, that would be a sticky endeavor, because the skankbaby looks like it has been rolled in melted candy and dirt, in that order, and even has dirt between its little baby fat rolls and under its tiny fingernails.  I would go over and ask if I could wash their baby for them, but then I’m sure they’d get uncomfortable as their shortcomings as parents were pointed out by a gringa, then come over and collect their baby, cooing and smiling, then in a couple of weeks they’d just start leaving it in front of the other neighbor’s house.

Do the Basil

I really, really don’t like it when people say they’re going to “do” food items, or when people use the proper names of places as verbs.

You know, as in, “Ummmm….um um um um ummmm…I think we wanna doooo the tomato?  And basil?  Yeah, let’s do the tomato and basil, and I’m gonna do the blackened salmon.”

“I’m gonna do the turkey burger.”

“We’re going to do the pinot.”

People usually say shit like this WAY LOUDER than they need to, and while they’re saying it, they’re pointing to a menu as if the waiter is going to need to read it, like even though their voice is LOUD, the menu must be utilized to illustrate exactly what they want.  Sometimes, and this is the worst, they look across the table and nod, big-eyed, at whomever they happen to be eating with, like, “Do we agree that we’re going to do green peppers on the pizza?  Did I get that right??”

Okay, but waaaay worse than this is reading on someone’s Facebook or hearing someone designate where they’re going to be by turning that place into a verb.  Such as:

“I’m probably going to Denver it in the fall.”

“I’ll get in touch with you when we Chicago it.”

“We Seattled it in March…why didn’t you come?!”

This is quite possibly one of the most douchebaggy things a person can do.

Speaking of Facebook, however, it’s also really awful and annoying when people refer to it in public, in loud, open conversations, as “FB.”  Now, I’m guilty of abbreviating it as such when I’m writing an email, but I swear to Christ that in my head I’m thinking the whole word.  A tub of shit walked past me yesterday at the Art Institute saying, “Well then she put that thing on my F.B.”  Just like that!  EFF BEE.  I emitted another, now famous, audible “yeuuugh.”

Once I was at a movie with Agent Ventura and, just after something funny happened in the movie, a girl in the midst of seven or eight friends just behind us said, “Oh my God I’m gonna post that on someone’s wall when we get home.”  Like it’s not enough to laugh at it and enjoy it AS IT IS.  We need to immediately plan to post it on “someone’s” wall.  It doesn’t matter who.  Just someone.  Just get it done.

(As I recall, we thought that was really annoying, and we had plastic theater cups that were 1/4 Sprite and 3/4 Smirnoff.  Then we went to the bar next door and had some beer and she told me she was going to New York, and we got all emotional and cried and stuff, then I went home and puked in the sink, then I went to work the next day feeling like someone had filled my head with nails.  But I STILL thought the Facebook thing was annoying.)

Pancake Boots

I have now been job searchin’ for three months.  I have not gotten so much as a phone call.  I am seriously confused about this, as I have experience in things, and am a smart girl, and at this point I am even applying to places like that one place, which will not be named, which sells those famous pancakey looking boots with sheep wool on the inside.  YEAH.  I applied THERE.

It’s nice, though, that libraries which have not even offered you an interview send you a nice rejection letter to let you know they went with another candidate.  Duh, assholes.  But thanks for making me feel like I was, briefly, a candidate.

I don’t know, I guess I’m like, an artist, or whatever…

What bothers me sometimes is that I talk to these guys who have like a thing that they do…you know, like they’re drummers or photographers or painters or something.  This is the problem with Chicago, it’s that every dude you meet is so far “into” something that he’s got his head twisted backwards and crammed up his ass.  His art is the most important thing in his life.  I mean, it’s typical for guys to basically be more focused on themselves and their stuff than they are on anything else, and for the most part, I think that’s the way it should be.  I LIKE people who have a passion and are in pursuit of it.  You’d be boring if you didn’t.  But what annoys me are boys who are so focused on climbing, both socially and artistically, that they just become really phony and shallow.  It’s really too bad.  I don’t believe you can be true to any sort of artistic vision and still be into all that “networking” shit.

Uh, anyway, what I meant to say is that I always get myself into these “talking to” positions with boys who do stuff, and I never seem to like it, and I always have to pretend that I do.  Don’t get me wrong, a lot of what these guys do is good, but it’s never exactly anything I find any interest in beyond appreciating what it is for that moment.  Most of them can do their craft pretty well, they’ve got the technique, but son of a bitch, since when are technique and talent the same fucking thing?

So I smile and nod and say “Oh you’re really very good at it!” which is true, usually.  But it always starts to wear on me, like, Ugh, if I end up dating this guy I am going to have to pretend for a million years to be really moved by whatever he does.  And I can never be honest.  It’s hard to ignore the lack of respect you have for someone’s thing.

I was once accused of having a “humble act.”

I was accused of this by a boy who I was face down, ass up in loooove with*.  He was reminding me of something I’d written that he’d read, he was listing its merits and forgiving the things that were wrong with it, just going on and on about how greeeeaaaat it was.  At the time, he had his hand on my upper thigh, and I don’t know about you but I don’t trust anything that comes out of someone’s mouth when their hand is that close to my lady bits.  So I said he should stop it, that I didn’t want to talk about it.

He removed his hand from Lady Bit Zone, grabbed his beer, and as he brought it to his lips he looked away and said, “Oh, fine, go on with your little humble act then.”

This bothered me for kind of a long time, because I was in LOVE with him, so his simple opinions had the ability to tie me to a tree by my ankles and gut me and leave me draining blood and swinging in the wind.  It bothers me sometimes to this day, a little bit, because I am often scared of being as fake as I see others being.  But not so much anymore, because I’ve seen a true humble act now, officially.  It has a lot to do with cultivating attention, which is what the most self-serving of “artists” needs in order to keep creating, which is why some people feel the need to be so goddamn loudmouthed and open and public about what they’re doing while they’re doing it.  What keeps them going isn’t the drive to do what they claim to have the drive to do, it’s the attention they get for it along the way.  It’s sickening to have someone’s half-assed crap shoved in your face before they’ve given it a second thought, or to be asked to follow the “development” of someone’s art project every step of the way, while assholes with no accomplishments except stupid tattoos and checkered scarf collections constanly fellate their comments section with stuff like “Dude this is looking so rad.”  And they, of course, respond politely, humbly, “Aw, thanks guys!”

THAT is sick.

When did people forget about the benefits of solitude? If you’d shut the fuck up about yourself I might be inclined to look at what you’ve done.

*This same boy sometimes wore a t-shirt that said “I’M WORKING ON MY NOVEL.”  What’s funny about that is that HE WAS.

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Friday Dance Party III

I had something else in mind for today’s dance party, but recent events changed the lineup.

This Friday Dance Party is dedicated to Agent Ventura, who really loves Michael Jackson and is very sad today.

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