Tag Archives: books

October 20, 2011 · 12:22 pm

The Wonky Almond

Why is it that I am doing something embarrassing or just weird every single time someone walks by my desk?  I guess it speaks to the amount of times during my work day when my brain is just fucking off and obviously not doing what it’s being paid to do.  Like yesterday I was rummaging through my purse and found a fork at the bottom.  I didn’t recognize the fork, so I sat there kind of staring at it for a minute.  OF COURSE somebody walked in with something I needed to fill out or sign or God knows what, and I’m sitting at my desk staring at a fork.

Or last week when I had this handful of almonds I was chomping on (one at a time, for once) and I thought they smelled weird.  Still almondy but kind of like maybe one of them was going to be all soft and squishy–almond gone bad!  So I’m smelling all of the almonds.  Then I find the wonky one and I think I wonder how long I can hold this wonky almond on my nostril by sucking in my breath? and THAT’S what I’m doing when the head of circulation pops in to ask if I watched Project Runway last night.  Sitting there sucking an almond to my face.

On Monday I wore a circle skirt with a button down shirt.  The button down shirt is kind of weird because it’s large, but fitted because they put this placket of buttons in the back that you button together to make the shirt fitted for a lady.  It’s some kind of weird Banana Republic extra fabric experiment that was on clearance so I could afford it.  Anyway, because of this extra fabric, the shirt tends to bunch up in the front and the back.  And the circle skirt was doing nothing to help it.  So from time to time I needed to reach up under the front of the skirt and yank down the bottom of the shirt…so it didn’t look like I had a big poofy pregnant belly from the shirt sticking out in front.  That’s what I’m doing when someone peeks in the door.  And it looks like I’m digging at my crotch.

Also I get caught a LOT sitting at my desk red-faced, eyes streaming tears, because I’m trying not to laugh at this.  Then someone walks in and I click furiously to get a boring spreadsheet or something onto the screen in front of me real quick…and it looks like I’m crying or having some kind of heart condition event because of a SWOT analysis or something equally as devoid of meaning.

There have been other incidents, which have shamed me and made me kick myself, because this is a new job.  And I told myself as I packed up my shit at the last job in preparation for this one that things would be different!  I will not be a weirdo anymore!  Kind of like how when you are a month away from going into 7th grade you tell yourself that this is YOUR year, everyone’s gonna LOVE you!  Things are gonna be different!  I’ll have an IDENTITY, starting NOW!  Then your mom takes you school shopping at the factory outlet on Rte. 110 for cheap irregular Lee jeans and white socks with extra heels.  And you realize it’s not gonna be any different.

SIGH.

Oh well.  I’m not the only weirdo in this booklearnin’ profession.  It’s notorious for its weirdos.  But I definitely think that there are weirdos who see right through me and do not like me.  Know how I know?  A software representative left me a million highlighters with the company’s name all over them.  They’re actually pretty great highlighters.  Know what else?!  They come with those page marking flags in the butt end: you twist the end of the highlighter and you get a whole stack of those little sticky flags that you put on stuff when you want to remember it.  So I offered one of these highlighters to a certain weirdo, and she just stared at it, and was like, “Ummm…yeah…I don’t really use those.”  So I just sort of skulked away, holding together the tattered shreds of my dignity.  It’s a fucking free highlighter, bitch!  TAKE IT.

IT’S GOT FLAGS! ARE YOU A FLAG HATER?!

 

Something Awful

I watched a really bad movie the other night, it’s Netflix’s fault, though.  I thought maybe I’d stop putting so much effort into trying to find something good to watch, something that would help my brain cells grow.  So I chose a total chick flick, you know, one of those movies that obsesses endlessly over meeting the right guyyy and getting maaaarried and OH MY GOD I’M THIRTY and high heels and poplin shirts and working too much and HIJINKS!

Yeah.  That’s about all I had the brain cells for.  But this movie was unlike any other movie I’ve ever seen that I’ve known was going to be bad.  It was actually worse than bad, like the filmmakers and writers were sitting around a table going “How bad can we make this?  Can we make it SO bad that people will miss the worst of the bad and think it’s kind of good?”

First of all, you were supposed to believe that Kate Hudson was 29.  I know she’s only in her thirties and her legs are like little sinewy quail drum sticks, but she’s had more facial surgery than any 29-year-old would ever be able to pay for.  Also she has no job and a house in the Hamptons.  Because that’s how it is in New York, okayyyy?

Next, you have to believe that this girl is “the ugly one”:

Eww what a total dog, huh?

It makes total sense because, as Tina Fey pointed out in her book, the brown haired girl is always the smart one nobody wants to fuck, and the blonde is fun and everyone wants to fuck her.  But this movie turns that on its head, dear readers!  Because it turns out EVERYBODY wants to fuck Ms. LonelyTitties!  Including her best friend’s fiance.  And of course, he’s the captain of the U.S. Olympic Douche Team, and his name is Dex.  I am so serious about that.  His name is Dex, and someone’s Gay Best Friend (TM) made that up, you know he did, he made that name up as a “sexy guy name,” and suggested it to the woman who wrote the book this was based on.  Before he suggested Dex he threw out names like “Thad” and “Tre.”  Probably also names like “Golden Dick McFuckme” too, but those didn’t make it to the final round.

The proper uniform for any Team Douche hopeful.

So on the night of Ugly Brunette’s birthday (HER THIRTIETH! OMG START THE COUNTDOWN), her dearest friend since birth has kindly removed the tubing from her fake nose that allows her to breathe through the faux-holes the doctors drilled in there, and thrown her a birthday party.  It’s really just a good chance for Bestest Friend to flap her golden hair around and talk about herself, and also a good chance for Kate Hudson to showcase the fact that she has never actually been drunk, but instead was always one of those girls who was too scared in high school to actually drink, so she’d have like two sips of a beer and carry the same can around for the rest of the night, pretending really badly to be hammered out of her mind and hoping that nobody would notice.   So Bestest Friend says a lot of shit that’s actually pretty mean, poops all over her friend and her birthday party, takes all the credit for everything EVER, then goes home with Team Douche.  Team Douche later returns to look for her $2,000 handbag, which she has naturally left under a table while pretending to be wasted.  That’s how he runs into Ugly Brunette and they decide to fuck after a really awkward scene in a bar where a girl in stretchy pants and a napkin for a shirt gives her dirty looks because, as Ugly Brunette reasons, “Nobody can believe I’m here with you, Team Douche, you’re too gorgeous for me.”  Weep weep weep!

Yeah, so, they fuck.  Then it’s all weird because the group all still hangs out every weekend in the Hamptons.  And Team Douche is still fucking the shit out of his fiancee in the next bedroom, all loud and annoying.  Ugly Brunette just lays there in bed trying to drown it out and pretending she doesn’t want to have a nice little vacation wank.  Then he tells Ugly Brunette that he loves her and wants to be with her, but she waffles like “But she’s my best frieeeennd.”  In the meantime, he is reluctant to call off the wedding because hey, even though he doesn’t love his fiancee at all, which he makes clear, and is actually totally annoyed by how much of a total self-obsessed asshole she is, he’s still going to go ahead and marry her unless Ugly Brunette asks him not to.  WHAT A FUCKING GUY.

In the meantime, Bestest Friend is a complete asshole.  She does nothing but demand things from Ugly Brunette and act like an airhead and insult her and basically make her feel like shit through the entire movie.  Still the film keeps trying to explain that they’ve been friends foreeeeverrrr, and that means you don’t just tell someone to stop treating you like shit and being abusive to you, okay?  It’s all evidenced in the below dance clip:

The fact that they did this together in junior high is mentioned like 1,287,972 times in the movie, until you’re like JUST FUCKING DO THE DANCE ALREADY  because you know they want to, you know they do.  And the dance scene slows down at the end (if you can make it that far) and they’re both just laughing and having a great time, and this part is supposed to show you that even if someone is a compulsive liar, makes you feel awful about yourself and your appearance and basically fucks up your life every chance they get, giving absolutely nothing positive to the relationship at all, ever, if you can perform a choreographed dance to Salt N’ Pepa with them, all the shit and unhappiness is totally worth it.

Well.  Ugly Brunette finally decides to put her foot down and tell Captain von Douchington III that she wants him to end it with her bestest friend.  Because, see, she says it’s HER FAULT that the two of them didn’t get together before he hooked up with her friend.  “I should have said something back then,” she wails.  “I just let her haaaave you.”

(If I were a man, this movie would piss me off more.  It is evidence that men have no dicks.  They have no say in who they marry: they just go where they’re told.  Clearly, von Douchington was only doing his best with what he was given: the girl he loved didn’t TELL him what to do in the beginning.  Also she is kinda ugly so clearly he’s going to climb up a big blonde tree first chance he gets.  Because nobody told him not to!)

Spoiler alert: the movie is a piece of shit.  Also spoiler: von Douchington breaks up with the blonde girl and comes straight to Ugly Brunette’s ridiculously huge and fancy New York apartment.  He’s like, “See, I did it.  Let’s you and me get married now.”  Bestest Friend is close behind because she wants to reveal to Ugly Brunette that she cheated on von Douchington and is having the other guy’s baby.  That’s when you’re just like, what the fucking hell is wrong with these people?  This is like top shelf Maury Povich: still Maury Povich, but nobody’s wearing clothes they got at Marshall’s.  And of course von Douchington is hiding somewhere in the apartment and she finds him and they all fight and it gets really confusing because Bestest Friend has the balls to tell Ugly Brunette she hates her because of the cheating.  I got confused there because it seems like it worked out pretty good for all parties involved.  Like, couldn’t they sit down and be like “We’re fucking now and you’re knocked up and fucking someone else anyway so who wants a drink?”  No.  No, that did not happen.

Instead Ugly Brunette is walking down the street 2 months later, smiling her big dumb face off and dressed like Hilary fucking Clinton for some goddamn reason.  She has, of course, an armload of men’s clothing fresh from the dry cleaner’s.  Because a man without a penis cannot pick up his own clothing, okay?  So she runs into Bestest Friend who looks weird and pregnant and sad and Bestest Friend is all “I bought him those shirts, whore” and Ugly is like “I’m sorry, not sorry I fucked him behind your back but sorry I hurt you,” then Bestest Friend is like “Whatever I’m having a baby!  I’m happy and I don’t care.”  Ugly Brunette nods and smiles in that really ugly patronizing way that nurses smile when you hand them a cup of your pee.  Then she meets her man around the corner and they walk off into the sunset together.

The moral of the story is that when someone treats you like crap, hang around and let them do it for as long as it takes for them to get engaged.  Then swoop in and fuck whoever they’re going to marry.  It’s not morally wrong because THEY’RE the asshole, see?  The only thing you’re going to have trouble with is figuring out how to fuck a guy without a dick.

The book this movie was based on became an international bestseller.  Wikipedia says that it “addresses the stigma against single women in their thirties and the pressure that society places on them to get married.”  One reviewer described the book’s plot as “a realistic situation that women face in today’s society.”  Then the movie went and got an overwhelmingly negative review.

Really this book addresses that stigma and does nothing to diminish it, and everything to make it more powerful.  Also I’ll give you $50 if you’ve ever been in any of the situations in this book/movie.  Wait–no I won’t.  Because you’ll probably use it to buy the sequel.

The Donger Need Food

An email thread of which I was a part was featured on the last Dongtini Podcast!  If you don’t already listen to this, you should start now.  Stephanie and Simone are who I want to be when I grow up and get more funny.  Go get them off iTunes and join them on Facebook or just have a good old listen-and-a-comment here.

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July 22, 2009 · 8:58 pm

Face Punching Contest

I sometimes wonder what exactly it is that firemen and policemen do all day long.  I’m happy we have them when they’re putting out fires and stopping crimes, but today marked the second day in less than a week when I have seen hordes of fire trucks and emergency vehicles and cop cars lined up and down both sides of busy streets downtown, lights flashing, traffic sitting, people boiling in the heat of the sun and the sizzle of their own frustration with the dead traffic.  Today every one of them had their lights flashing full on, up and down two entire blocks of Michigan Avenue, which did nothing but whip the shopping tourists into an unholy frenzy.  If there are flashing lights and emergency vehicles, of course, it can’t be anything but a terrorist attack.  So they figured the best thing to do would be to crowd on the corners and stare, gape-mouthed, at the fire trucks stationed there.  The vehicles did seem to be concentrated on one area, and walking by, I figured I would be re-routed to another side of the street.  Oh, no, apparently the disaster that was huge enough to stop all downtown movement of non-service vehicles was not necessarily a threat to the sidewalks.  The cops and firemen were, of course, standing around, sipping Starbucks frappuccinos, leaning against the doors of shops and chatting with each other.

The other day, I had to take a cab home to make it in time to show my apartment.  The Red Line was entirely blocked off at Clark and Division, and three surrounding blocks were lined with emergency vehicles, sirens wailing, lights flashing, police line tied between them blocking off sidewalks, a giant fan attachment sucking black smoke out of the entrance to one of the tunnels.  Still, cops stood around and shot the shit with surrounding crowds of crackheads and drug dealers, who seemed to say nothing but “shit, son,” and it seemed like this big futile emergency that everyone forgot to care about.

Both days, I went home and watched the news to see what the hell happened, and both days, the news (online and on the shitbox) said nothing.  I thought maybe it was some kind of exercise.

Then maybe I thought the entire city was the cast of extras in this movie that was being filmed, and nobody had told me about it.  Everybody was doing their best at acting hot and tired and pissed off and inconvenienced, and the fire trucks and cop cars were just spares, and everyone was in on it but me.

It was creepy.

bitch tongues

I have seen this same teacher every week, on the same night, for the past three weeks.  I have been forced to listen to her fake fucking high pitched voice boring through the walls each night, giving the EXACT SAME 3 hour long speech ABOUT HERSELF and HER NOVEL to four different groups of students there for four different classes.  Somehow, she has managed to do without changing her material once to fit the subject matter.

Fuck her.  Fuck her and her goddamn writing grants and her kid and her poet husband, both of whom she cannot stop talking about.

She is horrible.  And she has a big, fat ass.  And she hates me, I can tell, or is at least wary of me, because I do not talk much in her presence, and when I do, she shoots me down.  Tonight, for instance, she was going on and on to her class about how she can’t wait for Lorrie Moore’s new book.  So when I finished making copies of Lorrie Moore’s new story in The New Yorker, I handed them to her and said, “Everyone seems pretty excited about Lorrie Moore’s new story.”

What does this fucking cunt say?

“Wellllllll I guess it’s not actually a storyyy?  It’s actually an excerpt of her new novel.  Sooo.”

Honestly, people don’t know how lucky they are to still have their bitch tongues in their heads.

So I shutup. I’m not going to eat this bitch out.  I looked back at my computer screen.

“But yes, I suppose it comes out in, ohhh, September?”

I looked up, smiled, and nodded.  As in, That’s great.  Go away.

But the second I looked back down at my screen, she fucking says “Do you know?  Do you know when it comes out?”

That was a funny question coming from someone who I just overheard, moments before this conversation, when she didn’t know I was listening, telling her students the exact date when the book fucking comes out.  And she wants to stand here and play this fucking game with me, dancing around in her superior writer panties, mashing her writing-grant cooch in my face.

So what do I do?  Instead of just saying, No, I don’t know…I revert to the third grade tactic of completely bullshitting my way under her skin, and I say “Actually, I think it was delayed until November…Lorrie Moore is so weird!”

She turned on her heel and walked away quickly, threw over her shoulder something about how she never knows “what’s going on in publishing” because it distracts her from “this greater purpose of a body of work.”

Fucking….what?  I hate her.

Ugh.  I can’t imagine being one of those people who chomps at the bit for certain books to come out.  Like Lorrie Moore is a goddamn prophet or something.  At this point, I guess she could poop on a fifty cent notebook from Staples and call it her new novel.

Uh huh, uh huh.

I feel like the biggest asshole in the world, because every time he would go on and on about how much he loved Mary Gaitskill, and how she was the best writer everrrr, and how she “really captured the female voice,” and how she was “unafraid to write about the dark side of sex,” I would smile and be like, Yeah, uh huh.

I did that awful thing, AGAIN, that thing you do when you like a boy, so you try to ignore the fact that he’s kind of a dildo in a lot of ways.  You suspend your disbelief.  You try to appreciate, on some level, all the dildoey things he likes.

I cannot stand Mary Gaitskill.

She’s on the cover of Poets & Writers, staring blankly up and out.  She’s an idiot.  I’ve never read or seen anything about her wherein she did not mention her time spent as a prostitute, in the most nonchalant, dry way possible.  That’s like walking around downtown without pants on and being like, “I don’t know what the big deal is.”  That’s like the girl who sat on the picnic tables by the basketball courts at lunch in junior high, wiping her pink sunglasses on her shirt and saying loudly, “Yeah, I mean, I’ve given tons and tons of blowjobs for bags of Funyuns, so what?” pretending not to notice the crowd of pubescent boys gathering, digging in their pockets for a quarter.

That’s all Mary Gaitskill is.  I’m tired of hearing about prostitution like it’s no big deal, tired of getting illicit sex slammed into my head and being treated like an idiot for thinking it should at least have something to do with the story.*
So every time I see or hear about Mary Gaitskill, I want to punch myself in the face for letting that motherfucker get away with saying all that dumb stuff about how good her shit is.  Don’t fucking tell me who captured the female voice until you’ve had the female voice.  And don’t fucking talk about “the dark side of sex” when all you’ve ever done is explore the dom/sub relationship within a thirty-second rear-entry scene in your student film.  YAWN.
I think I might officially hate men.  Even the cool ones think they know goddamn skullfucking EVERYTHING.
*Why do dudes always do this?  Mary Gaitskill is sort of like a dude in this respect.  I don’t know how many times guys have gotten into the sex story part of the program with me, and countered with an irresponsible, disgusting, stupid, and shocking sex story of their own, then call me some kind of poser for reacting the way they wanted me to.  Or they call me a “big talker” after I show my honest, however openminded, reaction.  Being sex positive doesn’t mean you’ve fucking seen it all, or would even do it all, you dipshit.  I’m still allowed to think things are not my thing.
That’s like inviting someone to join you in a face-punching contest and calling them gay for getting a black eye.  Idiots.

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July 5, 2009 · 3:30 am

That shirt makes you look pretty ugly

There are a whole bunch of drink tickets on my kitchen table that I don’t want, so if anybody wants to swing by and pick ’em up, that’s cool.  I’ll leave ’em on my front step.

Last night’s alley firework battle was like being in Fallujah, or whichever city it is that’s right in the middle of all of the action.  There was a huge party of people in front of us, across the street, and a group of people behind us, in their part of the alley.  Every once and a while, the fireworks from either group would zoom into our little crowd, causing us to scream and scatter.  Or they’d just cross invisible boundaries on either side and set something off on the ground right behind us.  The boys did an excellent job.  And one of them had a starter pistol, which I got to fire (unfortunately after it was empty).  I think that’s the only gun I’ve ever fired, unfortunately.  I didn’t expect the trigger to be so heavy.  Are you supposed to do finger exercises when you’re a gun-shooting type of person?

Finger exercises…hahhahahah.

I think I may have a slight problem with rage.  Here are the two things that make me think this:

1. At the grocery store self-checkout the other day, I swiped my card and the entire fucking card reader popped off the base and clattered to the floor.  In pieces.  It was like it had exploded.  Everyone stared, of course, for a good hour or so, I bet, and all I could do was go, “Haaaaaa…” nervously, then grab my grocery bag, and bend down to the floor to press “OK” on the broken reader.  It printed my receipt and I stepped over it and left.  HOW did I rip that thing off the stand and SHATTER IT?!

At least it took my angry swipe on the first try.  Because I didn’t want to face the people who run the self-checkout lines.  One of them is this guy who looks like Grizzly Adams and rolls his eyes and stomps around a lot, like he pretty much hates his life.  The rest are annoyed overweight women who bark directions at you if you fuck up, and always say something like, “Naw, see?  You done messed it up now.  It’s messed up,” like by pressing “lemons” instead of “oranges” on the touch screen, you’ve started an irreversible chain reaction that ends with a plane crash into a puppy farm.

2. At work, everyone was talking about being tired, and how tired they all felt that day.  Someone said, “I just want a nap,” and I said, “I don’t want a nap, I want this, like, room?  Where I can go, you know?  And nobody else can get in it.  And there’s nothing in there, but the walls are sound proof.  And I can just, like, scream.  For hours.  Without anyone calling the police.”

Everyone just stared at me.

Well excuuuuuse me for thinking that was a common desire.  It’s MY desire, you jerks.

And here is a quote from a book I stopped reading because the high point was the top of a downward spiral into boredom.  But I like this:

Goodbye, goodbye! she called out in her head as she ran, imagining the other woman he would find.  She would be prettier than Jemma but stupider, and she would be the type of woman compelled to uncover the past lovers of her lovers.  When she heard the story of Jemma’s behavior she would be utterly unable to fathom it.

-Chris Adrian, The Children’s Hospital

I think he read my mind on that one.

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June 25, 2009 · 4:57 pm

The Autobiography of a Couch

Lately I’ve been in this mood.  I’m not sure, actually, if I should be calling it a mood, which would imply that it’s something short, temporary, on its way through, like storm clouds or birthday parties or fingerless carnival ride operators.  I find myself hoping that it’s not a mood because it feels like something more important, deserving of some type of status that is less than fleeting.  But it settled on me like a mood, and it’s hanging around in that weird and wavy way, so for now that’s what I will call it.

I was thinking the other day that I’ve lost a lot of books by loaning them to people who lose them, or forget to pack them when they move, or just sort of dissolve out of my life until it would be kind of weird for me to call them up on a Thursday afternoon and ask if they know where they put that copy of The Virgin Suicides.  It’s something that’s occurred to me before, because there have been times when I’ve been proud of my bookshelf, and annoyed at the fact that something is missing from it.  So when this short list of loaned and lost books came up in my memory the other day, I surprised myself by not really giving a shit.  Instead, my next thought was how can I get rid of the rest of these???

This mood makes me want to sell all of my things, and all of the things I’ve had to buy to hold my things up off of the floor.  I feel the need to live as simply as possible.  I feel the need to be lighter, to be able to leave easily.  I often have the feeling that there is nothing for me here, in this city, that this is definitely not where I’m supposed to be.  But now it’s stronger than ever, and I just have to find out where the fuck I am supposed to be.  I need to do everything I can to avoid taking root in what I know to be the wrong place.

I know that this is what old people do before they die, and that creeps me out a little.

So, I walked around my apartment and mentally marked everything to sell.  I got to my couch and realized for the millionth time that it needs to be thrown away, that only an idiot would pay money for it.

When I was sixteen, I got it into my head that I wanted to redecorate my room.  I put wall paper on the ceiling, painted furniture, re-arranged my Tori Amos posters, and bought a futon.  It was this deluxe model with an innerspring mattress and a blue cover that matched my ceiling cloud wallpaper.  I paid $300 for the futon and the frame, and my boyfriend and I drove out to pick it up and pay the guy at the warehouse, who wouldn’t accept my check.  I gave him cash and left without a receipt, and my mom freaked out when she heard because she said I could “get screwed over.”

I put it together.  I slept on it quite comfortably all through high school.  I covered it with pillows to lean against so I could sit up and stay awake for each instalment of Anna Karenina on Masterpiece Theater at 3am, every morning, for a week.  I read all seven Harry Potter books on it.  It’s where my sister and I cuddled to watch The Last Unicorn one more time before I moved to the city.

I took it apart.  I put it in a truck and took it out of a truck and put it together again.  It has been disassembled and reassembled at least five different times, losing more little pieces every time.  At least three boys have “helped” me reassemble my couch from scratch, and each time I have let them give it their best shot before asking them to stand the fuck back while I build it from memory, thank you very much.  It has been nicked with screwdrivers and spattered with nail polish and all of the parts have been dropped separately.  I have made out with a few different boys on it in the last eleven years, and slept with a couple of them on it.  (If you have enjoyed sitting on my couch and think that’s gross, well, I don’t ask you what you do on YOUR couch, Princess.  If you have enjoyed me on my couch and thought it was a good time, well, you’re right on the money.)

Travelers have come from Seattle, the Quad Cities, St. Louis, New York, and various parts of Southern Illinois to sleep on my couch.  It has been voted Most Comfortable by all (with the exception of Seattle, quite possibly…due to the couch being quite literally on its last legs by then…).

At least two people I do not like have sat on my couch.  I did not like it.

At least one artsy, blurry, black-and-white photo shoot took place on my couch.

One fateful Laundry Day, I accidently left a giant bottle of laundry detergent lying on my couch, with the cap only half on.  The result was a big puddle of bright blue laundry detergent, which soaked through the cover and onto the black cushion underneath.  My best friend was visiting and when he saw what I’d done, he exclaimed my name really loud, and like he was sorely disappointed in me…like a father would be disappointed in you if you drove the car into a ditch or got a dumb pink heart tattooed onto your ass cheek.  And I didn’t think his reaction was weird at the time, because I felt bad for doing it to my couch, and for proving myself once again to be completely absentminded about things like lids and leaky fluids and a surrounding world of thirsty fabrics.  (Also, my best friend has always had a special place in his heart for furniture and rugs and wall art and lamps, so to commit a crime against a futon was to commit a crime against someone in his family.)

The detergent left a large, soapy, Mountain Breeze scented stain, and he would look for it every time he visited and slept on the couch.

I have taken countless naps on the couch.  I have watched endless epic television on the couch, and endless crappy television.  I slept on it when I was mad at my boyfriend or when I was just too lazy and sleepy to get up and go to bed.  I have stayed up late on the couch, and gotten up early on the couch.  I have sat on the couch while thinking about how great the couch is.

Last fall, the couch uttered a plaintive creak beneath me, more than once, as I innocently curled up on it.  I ignored it for as long as possible, but it’s hard to ignore your couch when it crashes to the floor in pieces under you.  I tried to fit the parts back together.  I got new screws that looked a lot like what I remembered about the original ones.  I used duct tape, Superglue, nails, stacks of crappy books, and rope…and still the whole thing would clatter to the floor, creating a fluffy mattress slide that would just roll me down onto the rug, gently, but firmly, as if the couch was telling me to move on.  Not one to let go of something I love without a bitter fight, I borrowed a power drill and bought a bunch of bracket sets at the hardware store, and though the parts of the couch that were meant to fit together do not even touch, meaning that the only thing holding the couch up is little skinny brass bits, the damn thing has held on and allowed me to enjoy it for just a little longer.

But in September, it will have to go.  And I will miss it, but I will be happy to have one less heavy thing in my life, and I will not buy anything to replace it.

At work on Wednesday night, I looked down at a to-do list someone had left on the desk.  All of the to-do’s were crossed out, so I’m pretty sure that the dog got food and copies of keys were made for the new apartment, but the last one was left un-crossed, and it said, in all caps, “SELL COUCH!”

It is quite possible that, out of all the stuff I own, this couch will be the one thing I miss.

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June 17, 2009 · 9:04 am

The Wet Dildo Brains Book Club

As I was leaving, Mung Face asked me what book I was reading.  She leaned exaggeratedly around my right breast, where I was holding the book with one arm, trying to read the title.  I told her the title.

“Ohhhh.  What’s it about?”

If there’s one thing I hate it’s small talk.  If there’s another thing I hate it’s small talk with people who have wet dildo brains.  Especially when they’re acting all interested in something they’re going to forget within ten minutes, and you’re just trying to get the fuck away from them.

I also hate telling people what books are “about.”  Especially when they’re idiots like Mung Face who read action adventure paperbacks about sea voyages.  That kind of shit is easy to sum up: look at the fucking cover where there is a picture of a boat on water and you GET it.

This had to be written by two people because it was too much "riveting" for one person.

This had to be written by two people because it was too much "riveting" for one person.

(The weird thing is that Mung Face is clearly in the middle of her action adventure paperback, because that is where she opens it to start reading, but then she talks straight, pointless bullshit to whoever will listen while she holds the book in front of her.  THIS is why people think I’m open to conversation when I’m reading, because when dumb motherfuckers “read” a book they don’t even pay attention to the letters and words and sentences within it.  They just sort of, you know, hold it out, turn the pages.  I don’t understand this.  I wish they would stop, so that people would understand that silent reading is not an activity that should invite idiotic conversation.  I’m not open to it.  I consider you coming up to me and starting a conversation about your new flip flops from Old Navy to be an interruption of a very important conversation I am having with my book.  Now fuck off.)

So, yeah.  It’s dumb to try to explain the plot of Bel Canto, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, to someone who reads Clive Cussler paperbacks.  And I’m not even saying that just because she’s a total idiot and I’m a smartypants.  I mean, that factors in, of course, but I don’t see why I should waste my breath on someone who doesn’t even really actually care what I’m saying.  So here is what I say:

“Oh, uhm, it’s uh, it’s about a dinner party.  And some terrorists take everyone hostage, and they’re hostages for a long time…”

And here’s what Mung Face, that fucking pleasant piece of dumb shit, had to say in response to my answer to HER FUCKING QUESTION:

“Oh uuhhhh, WEIIIRD!  Whatever!”

Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you.

So, I wanted to say, “Eat fucking shit and choke on a rotten, diseased cock, you twat from Hell.”

Instead I just smiled and told her to have a good day.  Sometimes my tongue hurts from biting it.  So. Hard.

Today I got my new dress in the mail.  It’s super cute:

This girl is not in the dress, I am in the dress.

This bitch don't look half as cute as I do in this dress.

I didn’t have a date for Agent Balboa‘s upcoming birthday celebration, so I bought a new dress to wear instead.

I have decided that it is best to throw money at my dissatisfaction with my late 20s until it goes away.

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