Tag Archives: boys

September 1, 2016 · 1:40 pm

You will not forget this.

A lot of things have happened to me and every now and then, one of them bubbles to the surface and becomes the Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened To Me. Yesterday, it was the moment when I walked past one of those fire hose connection things that sticks up out of the sidewalk next to a building, and it had some kind of screw sticking out of the side, and that screw grabbed and ripped a chunk out of my dress. It wasn’t a special dress, or an expensive dress, or a fancy dress, but I liked the dress! And it had pockets, which did sort of make it a fancy dress and at least a good dress to wear to parties so I could have a place to put my beer while I ate chips with both hands. Anyway, I liked my cheap little striped Target dress that I frequently saw on other women on the same days I wore it, which usually makes me feel bad, but in the case of this dress gave me a kind of feeling of sisterhood, like I should nod in the direction of these women like, “We’re all in it (this dress) together, huh?” And they’d smile and be like, yeah girl. Way to accessorize.

At the moment I felt a yank on my dress and heard the fabric ripping, I thought WHY DID YOU WALK THIS WAY??, instantly blaming the ripped dress on myself and my choices. Like, if you didn’t want your clothes ripped, why did you dress like that?! Also, considering the various other shitty things that have happened on my afternoon walk, on that exact same strip of sidewalk, I felt that maybe I should have known that this was somehow a dangerous area for me and only me and that it was to be avoided. Here are the other things that have happened to me on that street, on my afternoon walks:

Approximately two blocks north of the dress-ripping screw, I stood at a red light under the Green Line stop. I stood behind and to the left of the little square at the edge of the sidewalk, because some disgusting, smelly liquid was dripping from the machinery beneath the elevated structure. Phew, I thought, I really dodged a bullet. That’s what I was thinking when the half-empty box of Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats hit me in the head, scattering its crusty payload all over my hair and shoulders, having been tossed over the railing above.
Approximately two blocks south of the dress-ripping screw, I felt a tap on the bridge of my nose. It turned out to be the dribbliest gob of pigeon shit from a pigeon who no doubt ate nothing but jalapenos and the shit of other pigeons. The gob ran down my nose and poured down the front of my white shirt, and I had no choice but to ask my work friend if this was, in fact, bird shit all over my face and shirt. He solemnly confirmed that it was and watched as I yanked off my cardigan and furiously wiped off as much as I could, screaming silently into the bottoms of my lungs as I scraped splattered bird shit out of the corners of my eyes.

Here I am floating in a pool of acid covered in bird shit because I went for a walk.

I feel like these two bad things are enough bad things to happen to one person on one stretch of sidewalk. Now that there has been a third Bad Thing on this route, I can either stop walking that way every day, or stop walking every day entirely, thereby resigning myself to an extra 30 minutes of soul crushing boredom in the freezing air conditioned office that will become my tomb. Because, clearly, if I go that way again, I’m fuckin’ asking for it, yeah?

I peeled off the ripped-up dress last night and threw it in the kitchen trash can, then sat there in my underwear having a major sad about it. I saw it again this morning when I pressed down on the trash can pedal and the lid flipped up, and I dumped coffee grounds all over it. I gasped because even though the sad little dress was ALREADY IN THE GARBAGE, I somehow felt bad about messing it up even more. I thought about taking it out and laundering it before throwing it away, then I realized that’s crazy and I should forget about it. Maybe if I spent more time forgetting about things than I spent remembering them and wallowing in how awful they are, I’d feel less like a target for all of the universe’s leftover cereal and bird diarrhea and more like a person just moving around in the world.

I tried to think about other wardrobe malfunctions I may have had, to prove to myself that, if I couldn’t remember any moments in which I ruined favorite pieces of clothing, it was possible to forget this one. The problem is that I remembered a different dress, at a different time, a dress that wasn’t ruined but somehow had the stains of a bad memory pressed into its cheap cotton knit fabric.

I was fourteen and I had this Sporty Spice t-shirt dress from Old Navy, from back when everyone was wearing stuff like that: stuff that looked like men’s professional baseball apparel had been stretched and fitted so women could wear it to parties. It was colorblocked in a way that I found very sexy: the back and the t-shirt sleeves were black, as was the front up to the boob area, which came together with a mauve and gray swoop that went across the chest and up to the neckline. The neckline, high and conservative like one of your grandpa’s t-shirts, was ringed in black. There was a fancy cursive Old Navy logo just above where my tiny left boob started. I wore it with my black foam platform sandals from the Deb in the mall and thought I looked pretty fucking rad.

Is it sporty or classy?! Guess what: it’s neither. THANK YOU, DELIA’S CATALOG.

My mom’s friend Laura* was not our aunt, but for some goddamned reason, we had called her Aunt Laura since forever. She was this skinny-as-a-rail, muscular, rootin’ tootin’ cowgirl lady. She sat on our porch swing smoking Camels, tapping her ash into the rolled up pant leg of her work overalls. I always thought she wore a lot of weird perfume but it turns out she was just always drunk as shit. Her skin was always the same color and texture of those brown leather jackets with the silk map-print lining everyone was buying. Her face, though, was shiny and red. I never could tell if she was sunburned or her face was just red from all the booze.

(Aunt Laura had seriously been around forever, forever forever, at least since my little sister was a baby, since I was seven or eight. I knew this because I remembered very clearly one night when I went from Very Asleep to Very Awake because my stepfather stormed into the bedroom I shared with my baby sister under his arm. He stomped up the stairs with her and snapped on the light, screaming and yelling something about how he would take them, he would take them away. The light was so yellow and strong and I was too shocked to move as he yanked back the Ninja Turtle covers and ripped my sleeping brother out of his bed across the room, tucking him under his free arm. The baby started to scream as my mother, just a few steps behind my stepfather, pleaded with him to calm down and hand her the baby and please don’t do this, but he would not relent, and the whole screeching parade left the room and stormed down the stairs: he with his two screaming children under his arms, their heads bobbing with each step, my mother behind him, and my older sister following in tears. I sat in bed with no feelings except a prickly sensation in my mouth that might have been fear but might have been something else, something angry growing tall vines through my chest. I looked at the wall by my bed, illuminated in the light from the brown-yellow bulb overhead, and stared into a tiny crack that led to a little chipped hole. You could see under the layers of chipped-off paint in the hole that the walls used to be blue. I stared into that hole and thought about putting my thumb into it and said out loud to myself “I should go downstairs?” I said it like that, like a question to nobody, to myself, and waited for an answer. The only answer was in that blue dot of forgotten, painted-over wall, and it said in a voice as loud as anything I’ve ever heard:

you will not forget this

and I didn’t.

It was decided by the less hysterical adults who later got involved in that evening’s display of domestic violence that each of the kids would be taken out of the house to spend a night somewhere else, somewhere quieter, where one parent wasn’t threatening to grab up his two biological children and disappear with them. We were asked to choose between our grandparents and Aunt Laura, and I chose Aunt Laura because I was curious about where she lived. All I remember now about her house was going out into her overgrown yard early the next morning and finding the remains of a rotted wooden chicken coop. A rusty handle was attached to the molded wooden slats on top, and when I opened it, there inside was the perfectly preserved skeleton of a chicken, featherless and sun-bleached, the delicate bones of its wings spread out like tiny hands, left forgotten for a century.)

Anyway, Aunt Laura stopped by one day to finish off the six pack of PBR she’d started in her truck on the way over and invite my mom to her fourth or fifth wedding, this time to a fellow drunk she’d known for about an hour. The wedding was going to be in whichever church allowed an all-denim cast of characters, followed by a reception in someone’s house out in the boonies, which would no doubt be a doublewide trailer onto which a structure resembling half of a house had been built, then filled with deer antlers and those tables and clocks made out of a cross section of a tree cut down long ago and shellacked to a high shine.

Hard to read or hang up right but sure looks purty.

I don’t know why I was my mother’s date for this occasion, but I was, and I wore my Very Fancy and Grown Up Old Navy knit dress and foam platform sandals. Aunt Laura spruced up a bit and wore a floral sleeveless dress that made her arms look like stringy pieces of fried chicken wings. Her fiance wore jeans and a white button-down shirt, that kind of Fancy Western Go-To-Meetin’ shirt that has shiny metal tip things added to the edges of the shirt collar, and some kind of lanyard with a medallion at the end of it, tightened up to his neck, because that’s what fuckin cowboys wear when they get married, all right?

HAHAHHAHA WE DRESSED UP, Y’ALL

(This reminds me of one of my friends who married her first college boyfriend, JUNIOR college, at that–and the whole ceremony was Zelda-themed and the bridesmaids wore dresses made from Butterick Halloween princess costume patterns. The dresses had that obnoxious v-shape in the front center of the waistline, like an arrow pointing down to the pussy goods, and each bridesmaid’s dress was so poorly fitted and sewn that each time they exhaled, the little point of fabric flipped up and lay flat against their stomachs, so as the bride flounced down the aisle to the Zelda theme song, there was a little row of backwards pink fabric saluting her over and over again from the stage area as the bridesmaids continuously flipped them back down. The wedding theme was perfect, as far as her father was concerned, because he wasn’t wearing no goddamned suit, goddamn it, because “cowboys don’t dress up like fags,” and he insisted on wearing jeans but since she was his firstborn, he finally relented and wore this weird piece of brown felt she’d cut into the shape of a tunic, which was basically a rectangle of fabric with a hole for his head and a fringe at each end. He wore a belt with a huge shiny cowboy buckle over the tunic, and insisted on strapping a fucking gun to his right leg and carrying a sword he ordered off late-night TV on his left, because that’s what fuckin cowboys wear when their daughters get married, all right?)

Baby, you don’t got to be afraid o’ nothin no more.

Aunt Laura’s teenage son Brad** was the only person in the wedding who wore a black suit with a shirt and tie, and I thought that was hot. Maybe he just stood out in a sea of shitty Wal-Mart button-downs and Lee carpenter jeans, or maybe he actually was good looking. Either way, there’s nothing better than a hot dude who doesn’t go to your school, because nobody can tell him about all the times when you were weird. The group of pretty cheerleaders who harass you every day can’t walk up to both of you at recess and ask him really loud why he’s talking to you, making him question his choice in girls and deciding never to talk to you again (WHICH HAPPENED TO ME BECAUSE JUNIOR HIGH IS A FLAMING HELL HOLE OF FEELINGS AND WILL EITHER KILL YOU OR MAKE YOU AWFUL).

At the reception, in said half-trailer, half-house surrounded by gravel and cheesy lawn signs about how you’ll get shot with a gun if you piss anybody off, Brad, who was seventeen, was allowed to take part in the drinking, which began almost immediately. He proceeded to slam PBRs and gravitate toward me, and I’M SURE it had nothing to do with the fact that I was staring at him from the corner and I looked really cute in my Old Navy dress. Anyway, Brad asked me if I wanted to go for a walk, and of fucking course I did, even though everything within a 2 mile radius around the house had been covered with gravel, on top of which I had to sort of scoot in my platforms, kicking bits of rock out from where they were embedded into the bottom of my shoe with every step.

So we walked along the gravel and chatted, and I don’t remember a word he said to me except one weird question, which I must have thought was weird at the time or I wouldn’t have remembered it, but after about ten minutes of beating around the bush (HA!), Brad came right the fuck out and asked me if I was a virgin.

I was fourteen.

So yes, I said, of course I was. Because it was the truth, and if I knew anything about relationships from Seventeen magazine, I knew that they shouldn’t start with a lie. I also knew that good dudes would respect your virginity and bad dudes would resent it because, to them, it was nothing but an obstacle to that sweet teenage poon they walked around thinking about 98% of the day. I also knew, somehow, deep down in my bones, that if you wanted to get a boyfriend you had to play the motherfuckin game. So yes, I said, of course I was, but that status was negotiable, and anyway, it was only because none of the other teenage boys in my town appreciated how cool and hot I was. So even though I was a full on chicken shit (and should have been, I think, at fourfuckingteen) and this fact was definitely not negotiable, I dragged that shit out because I was going to force this dude to get to know me and take me to at least one single school dance before inevitably dumping me when I refused to take off my Fashion Bug underpants.

OK how do I get the “sorta” boyfriend?! TELL PLS

I was surprised when the walk ended suddenly after the Big Reveal, but I chalked this up to the fact that he’d made up his mind to date me and the interview was just naturally over. We’d exchanged phone numbers and emails earlier, and since I was going to play this shit until I had a boyfriend, I started calling his bedroom phone and emailing his Hotmail account like there was no tomorrow. I checked my email every five minutes for about ten weeks.

His responses to this assault were lukewarm at best. “Oh, heyyy” he’d say, then cover the phone with his hand until I finished telling him every little thing about my day, when he’d say “Welp, I’m gonna hit the hay.” He responded to 2-paragraph flirty emails with one or two totally blah, completely misspelled sentences. Sometimes he just answered “yeah.” He once invited me to a county fair to hear his band play (they were called CELOTEX, he said, a clever name he and his bandmates had come up with, which also happened to be the brand name of the insulation covering the walls of the drafty garage where they practiced, but that had nothing to do with anything). I went, and all I remember about it was waving to him as he set up his drum kit, and he looked kind of scared and sort of half-waved back and then didn’t look at me again for the rest of the night, which was all very My So-Called Life of him to do, thank you very much, I will now sit here and enjoy this Buffalo Tom soundtrack to my life, now that I have been Buffalo Tommed.

Garage Insulation Specialists, Garage Band Specialists

Once, I called him while his best friend was over. They were in his room playing video games, he said. I told him about the football game I’d gone to that day (which was something that I did so I could eat popcorn and Airheads). I mentioned that I’d sat with a girl I knew from school. I pretended that she and I were great friends, not letting on that this girl really just tolerated me because she was too nice to avoid me like her mean girl friends urged her to. I said her name and Brad repeated it. “I know her,” he said. Off to the side, he asked his friend if he also knew this girl. “Is that Dr. Chrisman’s*** daughter?” the friend asked. I confirmed that it was. “She’s hot,” the friend said. Then they both had to go because they were gonna hit the hay or whatever.

As traumatic as it is to play an endless game of desperate phone tag with a dude who is never going to like you as much as you like him, it’s about ten times harder to do this for the first time, because you can’t quite put your finger on what that feeling is that’s creeping up through your stomach and making you want to barf all the time. That feeling, of course, is doubt, and the sneaking, scraping suspicion that you maybe, perhaps, look like a fucking idiot. I was already starting to have that feeling, and was getting to a place where it was undeniable and impossible for anyone with even a shred of emotional intelligence to ignore. I couldn’t pretend like this was going well anymore because every day that passed when Brad didn’t pay any attention to me just made it more and more obvious. It finally broke me when about ten days, nine hours, and twelve minutes had passed and I hadn’t gotten a response to an email I’d sent him, so I just sat down on my bed and cried.

My mom came in and patted my shoulder. How I wish we could go back to that moment, and I could lean in from the other side and whisper to my mother just do that, just pat her shoulder, DON’T SAY ANYTHING unless it’s something about how there will be other boys and he’s the dumb one for not realizing how great she is. You know, mom stuff! DO NOT SAY ANYTHING BUT THAT STUFF. If I could, I would pop her right on the mouth a little bit, not hard, just a little tappy tap, like boop boop boop you’re about to fuck up! And then she would not say that thing that would be a fuckup and Future Me would disappear because there wouldn’t be a reason for me to have been there in the first place.

She didn’t say any of the right, non-fuckuppy stuff. She didn’t say anything for a very long time, but finally she did start talking and it was awwwwwful. She shared with me that she and Aunt Laura had been following the teenage romance of myself and Brad since its beginning at the wedding earlier that summer. They had both been really excited and hoped that the two of us would date, because wouldn’t that be so cute, but recently Aunt Laura had called my mother and let her know that Brad was a sexual guy, okay, and that he had confided in Aunt Laura that he really didn’t want to waste any time with a girl he wasn’t going to get to fuck. My mother didn’t say this in these exact words. What she did say was that Aunt Laura told her that Brad told Aunt Laura “that he was interested in young women with whom he could share a sexual relationship.”

IF THOSE ARE NOT THE MOST EMBARRASSING THINGS YOUR MOTHER CAN SAY TO YOU WHEN YOU ARE A FOURTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL THEN I’D LIKE TO KNOW WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE WORSE.

Here I was, crying over a dude, and my MOM reveals to me the exact reasons why the guy doesn’t want to date me, and they’ve been revealed to her through some fucked-up game of Drunk Telephone, and they’re SEX REASONS that HAVE TO DO WITH SEX and NOW YOUR MOM KNOWS ABOUT YOUR NONEXISTENT SEX LIFE AND SO DOES THE BOY YOU LIKE AND SO DOES HIS MOM AND PLEASE I WANT TO DIE NOW.

This was a Bad Thing. A very, very Bad Thing. But I did not die.

I wore the Old Navy dress several more times. I chased men who wanted nothing to do with me many, many more times.

I saw Brad one time in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen, when I was a junior in high school. He waved to me from a car window and I narrowed my eyes at him and said “What do you want?” Which was, I think, the appropriate response to someone who can’t be straightforward, who has to tell his mom to tell your mom he will only date you if tell him beforehand that he can fuck you.

I’m just here for the goddamn sundaes.

I’ve heard that Brad has several children with several women, and is just as poor and as drunk as his mom, who divorced Husband #4 and has moved on to 5 and 6, maybe 7, I don’t know, I don’t live there anymore. I do feel sorry for him, in the way that I feel sorry for most men who rejected me or were mean to me when we were teenagers because I was ugly/weird/virginal, and are now meth addicts and drunks working in coal mines and struggling to make child support payments. I don’t like to think of my little teen self being treated like shit, but I also don’t like to think of these boys I dreamed about day and night being miserable old men. I wish there could have been some kind of balance, some kind of even playing field both then and now, and maybe a place where we could have all met in the middle.

I still see Brad’s best friend on social media, because I’m still friends (in that let’s share cake recipes and politely ignore each other’s political views social media type of way) with the Too Nice Girl from the football game. The night after the conversation with Brad and his friend wherein I mentioned her, Brad’s friend went to the next football game in our town and chatted her up. They’re married now and they have two kids. Her wedding dress was white and princessy and glittery and strapless and they did the thing where everybody jumps up in the air and the photographer snaps a picture just as they’re coming back down, all puffs of fabric and blurry limbs. In the background, near a bridesmaid with a blurred face, Brad floats back down to earth, and maybe it’s the suit or maybe it’s the anti-gravity, but he looks almost like the asshole teenage boy I was in love with in the summer of 1996.

*Not her real name

**Not his, either.

***Come on.

God and a Good Time

It’s listening…

The new Apple TV has a new feature that I’m sure lots of normal people would be interested in using but it only makes me more anxious. Or maybe I’m the normal person and all the rest of these freaks are the weird ones for talking to their televisions?

For starters, the whole remote experience is different. Where you once had a choice between three buttons, you now have a totally over-sensitive track pad, which is also a giant button. I’m so serious about this stupid track pad. If you so much as look at it, it pauses your movie or starts running it backwards at a seizure-inducing speed or just smugly turns the whole shebang off and drops you back into normal TV with a shudder, like oh fine are you happy now? Now nobody can watch HBO GO! The other buttons are the old Menu button that gets you in and out of apps, and the play/pause button, without which we’d all be stuck. I don’t have any fucking idea what that button with the little TV icon is for. I also don’t know why I need volume control when I already have it on the TV remote, but okay.

SPEAK TO MEEEEEE I AM LEARNING

The offending and most confusing button is the one with the microphone. You’re supposed to talk to your Apple TV now, as if that’s just the most normal progression of technology in the world. I feel like a crotchety old lady about this stuff, but I’m going to resist this movement because I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to get caught standing in my kitchen, screaming MAKE TOAST MAKE TOAST at the toaster while it says “Here is what I found for baked roasts.” So now there’s this button smack dab in between the two classic and most oft-used buttons, and I press it accidentally all the time and before I realize what’s happening, the screen has gone black and a terrifying little message comes up that says LISTENING… and I’m just supposed to be okay with that.

You’re supposed to take advantage of this and become even more lazy and thoughtless about your television consumption. Or maybe it’s supposed to streamline your iTunes purchases and Netflix viewing? I don’t know. You’re supposed to say stuff like “Val Kilmer” or “Movies with a strong female lead” or maybe “Movies with Val Kilmer dressed as a female” and it’s supposed to think about it and get back to you and tell you to watch Willow for the 3,000th time. I’d like it to stop listening to snippets of my conversations when I accidentally hit the button and telling me to watch Guy Ritchie movies. So I have made a list of things to ask it.

Things I want to ask the Apple TV:

I like movies. Do you like movies?

Can you find me two things on Netflix that are not total crap?

Find me a movie in which the weather is what it will be like here tomorrow.

Did Steve Jobs tell you any secrets before he died?

Is Steve Jobs telling you secrets now?

Why do you keep suggesting that I watch the movie “Ouija”?

Is the movie “Ouija” about Steve Jobs?

You are listening to me at night, aren’t you?

leg hunt

When I was in junior high, I spent a week out of every summer at the Southern Illinois Christian Service Camp, “Where God and a Good Time Go Together.” As I recall, what we did there really didn’t have much to do with service, but okay. I just remember being super excited about being there because we got to go swimming every day and we stayed up late at night and those things alone were worth putting up with the endless barrage of Jesus crap they made us eat. I mean seriously, it was God o’clock all the tiiiiime in that shit hole. And it was a shit hole, one year I was putting my sister’s New Kids on the Block sheets on my wafer-thin plastic mattress, and when I lifted it up, there was a pile of sand and a calcified white hermit crab claw under it, as if some poor unfortunate crab had been forced to chew its own claw off to escape the place. The bathrooms smelled like sewers and the shower walls were moldy, mold upon mold upon years of mold, so it was like showering in a greasy cave.

The kids there thought I was funny but otherwise did not take me seriously. I never had a Camp Boyfriend and it seemed like everyone else did. I didn’t wear makeup and I didn’t know how to do my hair and my only Cute Outfit was a pink and white striped t-shirt tucked into white drawstring shorts that I pulled up to my neck. I didn’t wear a bra yet because I had no boobs and I was pretty sure you waited until you had tits to strap them down. But according to the girls at camp, you wore one because you were supPOSED to wear one, because how else will anyone know you’re a girl and want to date you? They were so right, with their French braids and Eastland shoes and bras. Having struck out hard core with the dudes at home, who thought I was weird, and then believing I could be totally different with a new group of kids a few hours away but falling flat on my face there, too, I realized that I would just have to deal with the fact that I was perpetually a weirdo and did not fit into any social groups. I was okay with being the funny kid, but I vowed to study what the others did that made them so successful with one another. Boys did sports stuff and said dumb things to make people laugh, and girls were mostly quiet and did their hair really good. I learned this by following around the established couples and taking pictures of them, which I would develop and study later, which was, admittedly, a bit weird, so maybe that’s why most of the kids and adults there thought I was a creep. It could also have something to do with the fact that one summer I found a pair of perfectly good Airwalks that someone had thrown over a power line and spent hours throwing rocks at them until they unraveled and fell, then wore them around even though they were two sizes too big for me because having nice shoes is one of the main things you have to do if you want a junior high boy to hold hands with you. So basically I was a church camp kid (strike 1) shuffling around in gigantic power line shoes (strike 2) taking clandestine photographs of prepubescent lovebirds and studying their hairstyles and mannerisms (I’m out. Fine! Okay.).

OPPORTUNITY: Don’t wait for your shoes to fall. Throw shit at them for a while.

(Now that I’m remembering all of this, I’m realizing I should have been nicer to the fat kid at school who told all of us one day that he had a girlfriend but we’d never meet her because she lived in North Dakota and her horse training job kept her too busy to visit. I should probably have recognized that he and I were mired in the same pit of total middle school despair and been kinder to him, or maybe I could have laughed a bit quieter, or not at all, but really I didn’t want to think that he and I were anywhere near one another on the spectrum. Because he was near the garbage end, in constant threat of being shot out the sphincter and joked about for the rest of his life, and I, having considered the old Fake Boyfriend storyline many times before, was by proxy only a hair’s breadth away from the same fate. I guess that’s why everyone is such a fucking asshole in school, though: everyone identifies with everyone else’s struggles, and it’s just too scary to think about so you say something mean and feel a little better? I’ll never be like you because I’m laughing at you! AHHAHAHAHHAHA cryinnnng.)

OK but anyway, Jesus Camp. It was really just a microcosm of the school experience, but God Was Watching All The Time so everyone had to be nice at least on a phony level. Like the really nice girl who came up to me at the pool and very nicely pointed out that I should start “shaving, you know, down there” because we were at the age where we were starting to get hairy and “you’re a little bit hairy now so you’re only going to get MORE hairy and I’m just letting you know because everyone is laughing” and everyone was laughing because now everyone was specifically looking for my crotch fluff at the most secret edges of my teal one-piece Wal-Mart bathing suit with the scuffed-up butt. Anyway, she said it really loud because she wanted to make sure God could hear her being so nice to me. It was a lot of stuff like this, interrupted every few minutes by a chapel bell ringing, meaning we all had to run to church and watch videos about Jesus or listen to a preacher talk about how touching each other was “Playing with FIYAHHHH” or watch skits about how to be friends with each other. There were these little classes we had to take during the hottest part of the day, where we sat wilting under shitty little awnings, listening to stories about Jesus and doing activities that were supposedly sanctioned by Him but conveniently came out of little workbooks that the camp counselors read from. You were supposed to be part of a giant group prayer about every five minutes. Every night, we suffered through Cabin Devotionals, which were just about the worst thing ever, because the best part about church camp was staying up late in the dark and not having any adults around to tell you what to do. But before you could do that, you had to sit in a circle on the floor and the counselor would tell you God stuff you were supposed to think about.

One year, our cabin counselor was a lady with one leg. Leigh Anne had that crinkly yellow 80’s hair that always looked wet with bangs that looked like some kind of scouring pad stapled to her forehead. She usually wore a prosthetic leg with a white New Balance shoe attached to the bottom of it, walking with a single crutch on that side to help her along. Sometimes, she went without the leg and zoomed across camp on two crutches, the empty flap of her shorts dangling loose on one side. Leigh Anne was nice, but she scared me because she had one leg and I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to talk about it or not.

My, what a nice and also realistic leg.

The leg was nice, I guess, but definitely not a top-of-the-line model, as far as prostheses go. It looked like it was made out of the same material as those stretchy ankle bandages you wrap around an appendage when it’s sore but not broken. It was the same color of No. 2 pencil eraser, too. It was always a little bit dirty and it smelled kind of bad from the stump sweat and it sometimes had one of those scrunchy ribbed socks on it, the kind that you pull up then push down like some kind of poofy ankle decoration. Sorry to linger on the smell, because I know these things can’t be helped, but the thing definitely counted as a stanky leg.

One night during Cabin Devotionals, Leigh Anne lowered herself to the floor by sitting on a bunk and then scooting herself over to the circle on her butt. Her sweaty stump stuck out from under her nightgown and I was so glad when she sat far away from me, on the other side of the circle. Of course, that treated me to a view of the stump, but it was better than having the stump brush against my arm or being able to smell the dank air coming from her crotch, where the prosthetic had been situated all day in the 100 degree heat. As the leg looked on from its post, leaned up against some poor unfortunate soul’s bunk across the room, Leigh Anne shared with us the sad tale of losing her leg to cancer when she was in high school. She’d done a cheerleading stunt and landed on the leg, breaking it. The doctors found the cancer in her leg bone and amputated the leg and God and Jesus and “now I’m super happy to be here serving Him!” If you had asked me, which no one did, Leigh Anne got a shitty fucking deal. I’m pretty sure everyone else thought that, too, thereby missing the point of the devotional, but most girls were hung up on the whole “I used to be a cheerleader” thing because when you’re in middle school, that’s still a viable life goal and solid career path so the idea that there were such things as former cheerleaders, and through no fault of their own, now that was just too much to handle.

On the last night of camp, there was usually a scavenger hunt. We ran around in the dark with flashlights, screaming at nothing. My team had some clue about getting children to school, so OF COURSE we had to venture out to the old broken down school bus sitting at the edge of the property (doesn’t every church camp have one of those?) and look inside. We drew this creepy moment out longer than we had to by following the suggestion that maybe whatever we were looking for would be outside the bus, in the grass, maybe? So we shined our flashlights all around the bus, behind the flat, cracking tires, in the tamped-down weeds, but realized we’d have to look inside. So we reached up and yanked back the screechy bus door and climbed inside. I remember walking down the aisle of the bus, flashlight beams shooting around in all directions, when one of the girls near the front of the line screamed and ran out, quickly followed by the rest of us, but not before we’d all had a chance to lay eyes on it. There, in the last seat on the bus, by the exit door, was Leigh Anne’s stanky leg, foot on the floor and bent at the knee, as if some legless person had been sitting there when the rapture happened. You’re not going to sit here and tell me that rapture mindfuck wasn’t intentional. You could practically hear one-legged Leigh Anne cackling from some dark room where they’d hidden her during the scavenger hunt.

Get in! Jesus wants you to.

What was my big fear about the rapture anyway? Loneliness? A lake of fire? Maybe I wasn’t afraid of it, after all, because they never scared me bad enough to make me one of the kids who broke down crying and allowed themselves to be baptized in a giant tub in the chapel after dinner. Maybe I realized that earth after all these assholes would be slightly better than the assholey place it was at the time. You could wear whatever you wanted to the pool and have all the blow-up pool toys to yourself. You could break into the canteen and eat all the Whatchamacallits and WHO’S GONNA SAY SHIT? There won’t even be anyone left to punch your canteen card and keep track of what you owed. Boom. Sold! Later, y’all, have fun in heaven.

So, the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen was a prosthetic leg on a broken-down bus in the dark. These are the kinds of horrors reserved for your children at Christian church camps. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Tagged as boys, childhood, church, middle school, tv

January 28, 2011 · 5:52 pm

Unicorn Butt Meat

My stomach has been gurgling out of control all day. I’m at the point where you’d be yelling “What do you WAAAANT?!” at it if it was a small child screaming its head off. I really wouldn’t mind my stomach screaming its head off, but the thing is: it sounds deep and heavy, like a wet fart pressed against a leather jacket under a pile of blankets. And it seems to be activated by my surroundings, i.e., people. So everybody I’ve talked to today thinks I’ve been trying to control wet farts, and failing.

We’re friends, in that way that we’re not, at all.

I found this girl on Facebook I used to be friends with in real life, or “face-to-face book.” I said hi to her (on Facebook), told her how good it was to see her, and asked her how she’s doing. That was like 2 months ago and I still haven’t gotten a reply. Either:

1. I am way too invested in Facebook, and so fail to realize that other people are not, and so fail to realize that other people do not consider the total ignorance of a wall post equal to ignoring someone who’s just said hi to you in front of a room full of people,

2. She has reasons not to talk to me that I don’t know about.

The last time I talked to this girl was like 6 years ago. She called me and asked me if I wanted to go out that night. I was 600 miles away, something she would have known if we had talked recently. So I said I couldn’t that night, we’d have to schedule for another night when I got back into town. I told her I was happy to hear from her and that I really couldn’t wait to see her. I left her a message when I got back to town, but she never called back–and it was one of those things where you kind of knew that the person wouldn’t.

Imagine my surprise when I’m getting my hair cut and the guy doing the cutting is like, “Oh yeah, we had to reschedule your other appointment because I was at a baby shower.” Turns out it was for my friend/notfriend.

Five years into the future and we’re officially both on the opposite side of a fast-moving river. She’s over there with those mystifying girls from high school who are already grandmothers, people I worked with in fast food joints who lost their minds and stole cars and disappeared during the Juggalo weekend, people I worked with in retail joints who lost their minds in a more regular sort of way, and family members who are certain you killed your grandma by thinking gay is A-OK. I just hate it when there’s people I LIKE over there.

Actually, one thing I hate more than that is when uninvited creeps come dragging back across to my side, sliming over in their little turd boats, powered by their disappointment in their lives, failed relationships, and fast-sprouting gray hairs they’re sure weren’t there a minute ago. Maybe I’m the uninvited creep for this girl. If so, she should have followed my usual tack and not accepted my offer of friendship.

Countdown to Pitiful

I could set my watch by ex-boyfriends, I swear.

First they run right out and date someone else because they couldn’t give a shit about you, then they do their best to make you notice that they’re dating someone else and they couldn’t give a shit about you, then they want to know what you think about the fact that they couldn’t give a shit about you. Then their girlfriend tries to get a bunch of her friends to let you know that her boyfriend doesn’t give a shit about you. Then, god dammit, you bitch, why won’t you REACT to how HARD we’re not giving a shit about you while we’re busy being in LOVE OVER HERE?

Then they break up because maybe he not only gives a shit about you, he might have sent you a couple of text messages suggesting otherwise, to which you did not respond, but still, you’re a BITCH for getting them! You homewrecker!

Then they get back together because really, when you think about it, stunted emotional growth and complete denial are things that most men in their 30’s struggle with, so what can you do?! Hahaha! That’s life! LOLOLOLOLOL

Then they break up again, and what the fuck do you know?

Hi Ex Girlfriend,

It’s time for me to suggest in a chirpy, upbeat way that you and I work on our friendship because I’m lonely, gray-haired, I hate my job, I just got dumped because I never appreciate what I have when I have it, and I’m basically a big old goopy emotional wreck of a person right now and I think it would be helpful to me, I mean you, haha! if we start to be friends again four years later, and you listen carefully to my complaints and distract me from all of my woes. Other than that, EVERYTHING IS COOL AND I’M REALLY HAPPY HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA YAY

No? You refuse to do this for me?!

Well then FUCK YOU, bitch! I couldn’t give a shit about you!

I mean, I’ve always said no to this same request. It’s one thing to be friends with an ex, it’s quite another to be friends with an ex who can only seem to put aside his vitriol when he’s not sure he’s going to get his cock sucked sometime soon. But this time around, last weekend, when the most recent request came in at 3:54am on a Saturday morning…I said no in such a way that suggested that a certain person’s testicles might be removed from his groin, baked in a tart, then ridiculed for their post-roasting size if I’m ever approached again.

Why do my ex boyfriends have such awful track records? What does that say about me? I think it means I’m a total idiot. The evidence:

One of them is bankrupt and living with his parents.

One is building up a lovely collection of sobriety tokens. 196 days and counting!

One was nearly bankrupt and should totally be in rehab.

One of them clearly invested in Ed Hardy hats.

One of them buys electronics at Target, or did at least once 2 years ago when I saw him there with his girlfriend, the kind of girl who does her hair and makeup before she goes to Target, which made her match him really well. Which is absolutely 100% right with the world, in my opinion.

One went off the map doing the fucking gaywad young Che Guevara motorcycle tour of the safest places in the world for white men that still kind of look dangerous in pictures. There is very little that is more horrifying than having to read about how spiritual and amazing and life-affirming it is to touch a goddamn near dead elephant they’ve dragged out for the whitey tourists to prod, when that person has touched your vagina and never said a fucking WORD about how great THAT was. Shit.

(And one kind of went off the map when his dad got caught getting blown by an 84-year-old woman in a local nursing home last year, which was first an alleged rape, until they came out to everyone as having been a secret couple for the last 30 years. Which I think is amazing, but the guy’s wife and his son didn’t find it as interesting as they did devastating. So it goes.)

Typographical Errrrs

I mean, I know that there are people who probably think I just did this to be an asshole:

To Whom it May Concern,

I’m writing to let you know that the cover of one of your films includes a serious typographical error. The film is “Chocolate Sundaes presents Live on Sunset Strip” (featuring Katt Williams, Kevin Hart, and Aries Spears). The banner across the bottom of the cover reads “Comedy At It’s Best.” Unfortunately, “it’s” represents the contraction of “it” and “is,” so technically the cover of the film reads “Comedy At It Is Best.”

I noticed this DVD on the shelf at my local Blockbuster, and I thought it wise to point this out since this film could possibly still be in reproduction, and this error could be corrected in the future. If that isn’t possible, at the very least this is notice to the graphic design or copy editing department at Cinevision International: using this word incorrectly appears careless, unintelligent, and uneducated.

Thanks for your time.

COMEDY AT IT IS BEST

I didn’t do it to be a jerk! I just don’t think it’s healthy for anyone to be misusing contractions, especially on the cover of a DVD that people already expect to be stupid. Then they see that and they’re just like, “Oh, yeah, of course they fucked that up. Just check out the look on that guy’s face. It’s saying ‘I ain’t be lissnin in school when we be talkin bout contranizzactions. Bitches! Weed! Gun jokes! HAHAHA!'” And that’s racist.

But don’t worry…John Krashna at Cinevision International has assured me that it’s going to be taken care of:

Thank you for your comment we will forward to the appropriate people.

Best

John Krashna

I mean, pay no attention to the fact that John missed a comma in the above sentence. I’m sure that’s why he’s forwarding a typo notice to another party. He knows he’s not the best to handle these matters.

cancer pants

Let me see if I can get out of the valley and up on the hill again.

What’s new with you? Nothing? Well that’s stupid! I’ve been busy doing some baking:

Rainbow Cupcakes

Steel Magnolias Cupcakes

I made the rainbow cupcake by being awesome and also by mixing food coloring into the batter and pouring it in bit by bit. But mostly by being awesome. It was like biting into a unicorn’s butt meat. Then, a work friend requested what he thought was the impossible in asking for a movie-themed cupcake. He got pumpkin cake with pink icing and Steel Magnolias references on top.

So I baked. And I knitted. And I started writing down every food that I ate. I also started making these really crazy lists with arrows going in every which direction, branching out into sub lists and sub sub lists. And I’m not talking about lists of sandwiches! Hur hur hur!!! I started reading a free subscription of Self Magazine and based on Self’s advice I even whipped up Heidi Klum’s signature salad: which consisted of a whole head of fennel (or ass of fennel, as it’s kind of a root) which has been chopped up “into little choppies” (according to Heidi Klum’s directions). That’s mixed with olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper, and it’s FUCKING GROSS.

The article was about how much Seal loves it when Heidi’s up in the kitchen chopping choppies of fennel, and I thought, I really need to make that salad.

Me: I need to go to the grocery store for some fennel.

My sister: Why?

Me: I want to make Heidi Klum’s Fennel Salad from Self Magazine.

My sister: Shut up

**my sister has gone offline**

At the end of the day, you can’t rely on Seal’s taste in salad. The man is married to a supermodel and has a jacked up face. Something about that says, “Oh well of COURSE he loves hard crunchy roots that taste like puked-up licorice.”

I read in a book once that there are two types of depression: depression caused by inflation, and depression caused by deflation. Well, that makes sense to me. Sometimes you get too high and then everything seems shitty in comparison. And sometimes you just feel like your insides were scraped out and you can barely move. Of course, this book was read over the shoulder of a person on the bus (which I try to NEVER DO and also try to give the shit-eye to other people if I see them doing it to someone). But that’s why it took me a while to realize that this book wasn’t about emotions at all, it was about finance. It still applies though, so yeah.

At the end of July, I went to the doctor for routine checkup stuff. She left me a voicemail three days later about “abnormalities” and diagnostic procedures, and the whole thing was said in that “Gosh darn it, you hurt your little finger, didn’t youuuu!?” way that your grandma says things. (Unless your grandma is my grandma, who yelled SON OF A BITCH when you got stung by a wasp and broke open one of her cigarettes and licked up the tobacco and stuck the tobacco spit wad to your sting because that’s what they did in 1944.) At any rate, I showed signs of stuff that COULD BE other stuff that HAS BEEN KNOWN TO develop into CANCERRRRRRRR AAAAAGGHHH OH MY GOD but don’t panic, stupid. So I had to freak out for a month and a half, waiting, then I had to go in and basically do backflips for some nurses in Baby Phat scrubs and they had to cut out parts of me and put them in jars and mail them and test them and then tell me

“Meh. Not as bad as we thought. But…IT COULD GET WORSE. Come back in six months and we’ll see if it’s grown its own teeth and hair. That’s pretty fucked up, huh!”

Yeah. Huh.

So a smudged bill of health later and you’d think I’d be having fewer panic attacks. Instead I started baking and knitting and writing down every food I ate.

Anyway, it’s a shit excuse, but when you’re pretty sure you’re going to die every single day (and you have a tendency to be a bit dramatic about these things anyway), it’s REALLY hard to imagine that a blog has any point. Special thank-yous to the kind souls who think that it does, and told me as much.

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Tagged as big scissor, boys, cupcakes, the crazies

February 11, 2010 · 2:50 pm

Stevie Nicks and Mayer Dicks

I’m kind of awesome, ladies.

I mean, I get it. I know that in order to be happy and comfortable, lots and lots of boys and men out there need to think, no, believe, that your idea of the most beautiful thing in the world is what they blast on the side of your face (and maybe a little bit into your hair) and get all over your sheets. I think there’s a bit of that to every dude, because hey, that’s part of human sexuality. And sure, baby, if you’re happy, I’m happy.

But holy dong juice do I fucking hate John Mayer all of a sudden. I’ve never even considered him before, and I couldn’t name a single John Mayer song if you asked me to, because I don’t listen to the radio, at all, ever, or read about music, or watch the music parts of Saturday Night Live, even. But I do get bored at work, and clicking here and there brought me to what’s now been officially labeled a “controversial” interview with this motherfucker that was released by Playboy yesterday. In it, the guy fucking brandishes his own cock like it’s the goddamn Power Sword and talks about women like they’re the occasional sock that gets stuck inside your pants in the dryer.

Fuck this asshole, if I had a He-Man sized cock, I’d slap him in the face with it until his pretty little puss had a big red cock welt on it.

Here’s why:

PLAYBOY: At this point, what’s your ideal relationship?

MAYER: Here’s what I really want to do at 32: fuck a girl and then, as she’s sleeping in bed, make breakfast for her. So she’s like, “What? You gave me five vaginal orgasms last night, and you’re making me a spinach omelet? You are the shit!” So she says, “I love this guy.” I say, “I love this girl loving me.” And then we have a problem. Because that entails instant relationship. I’m already playing house. And when I lose interest she’s going to say, “Why would you do that if you didn’t want to stick with me?”

PLAYBOY: Why do you do it?

MAYER: Because I want to show her I’m not like every other guy. Because I hate other men. When I’m fucking you, I’m trying to fuck every man who’s ever fucked you, but in his ass, so you’ll say “No one’s ever done that to me in bed.”

I don’t think John Mayer realizes how fucking typical he is. I think I’ve slept with two or three John Mayers and definitely dated one for a couple of months. These are the boys who fuck you and immediately ask you how it was. I mean, I’m put off by that question to begin with. You may as well hand me a printed score card from the stack on the table next to your bed, and one of those little half-assed pencils they let you use at the library to fill it out with. But the real issue with this question is that, when you’re fucking a John Mayer, it don’t matter what you say, baby. All he’s going to hear is that it was the best time you’ve ever had, and when he tells someone else what you said, he’ll describe how you were actually so hot for his dick that your face exploded, and when he tells two more people, he’ll talk about how you had four heads that were all just begging him to fuck you. Just the fact that this particular John Mayer is going ahead and reporting to Playboy and its readers that he feels he is capable of giving a girl “five vaginal orgasms” (expressly pointing out that they’re “vaginal,” you know, the real kind, I’m the kind of guy who knows about stuff like this so mehh) is so totally ICKY.

(Besides. I’m of the opinion, now that I’ve thoroughly studied the Ray-J and Kim Kardashian sex tape, that celebrities and their bedmates have the most fake sex in the entire universe. You got old skinny-dick catfish-mustache Ray-J up there jabbing away at the realm beneath this girl’s enormous ass mound, and she’s practically whining into a pillow about how hard she’s coming, oh baby, yeah, uh huh, I reeeeeeally aaaaaam. And he’s just like Yeah. You are. Baby. What a fucking snore fest.)

And what’s with wanting to fuck other men in the ass while he fucks you? I swear. Sometimes all it takes to get a John Mayer hard is to talk about a crappy ex-boyfriend. And it’s not like showing that ex-boyfriend up has anything to do with you. It has everything to do with how tiny they feel, until they see an easy opportunity to at least be better than someone you think is crap. Apparently the real John Mayer would like to use the women of the world as a big old jizz can to stand on and talk about how much better he is than other men. Fuck you, I hope your jizz can falls over and spills everywhere and everyone laughs at you, stupid. Don’t you dare stand on me, I’ll snap your dick off.

Then he goes on, after listing all the things he considers to be amazing about himself and his treatment of the women he dips his cock in, that the problem is an instant relationship. He lures the little birdies in with a plate of hot sex and an organic omelet, then slams the fucking window on them. Whoa, hey, I really love the way I feel about how you feel about me, but can we just be friends? So that I can continue to get what I need from you?

“Look, I know I’m awesome, I know because I try to be. I know I’m like, wayyyy better than other dudes. What I need you to do is lay there and make me feel like that, okay? So can you just love me and not expect anything from me? God. Sometimes it just hits me how wonderfully I treat you. Come here.”

Oh, then he loses interest. As some boys do when they feel like you might actually want them around.

Yeah, one of these douchewads used to make me breakfast. For some reason, the John Mayers of the world fail to realize that all they’re doing is aligning with this Sensitive Man image, this bullshit fucking dating website cliche. Which is why I always left before breakfast. 99% of the time the John Mayers of the world are just setting a mid-morning bear trap. If you’re not stupid, you realize they’re just trying to get you to fall in so you’ll freak out when they dump you and they’ll soar on that high for weeks. If you are stupid, you’ll hang around and play the game after you’ve figured it out.

Yeah, these are John Mayer cupcakes. Whoever made them needs to be Taken Care Of.

I guess Playboy is the perfect place to go if you want to talk about the incredibly hot women you’ve fucked and your resistance to “settling down.” But I’m seriously going to puke if I have to read one more article about how some dude isn’t ready to be “tied down.” No fucking shit, of course you’re not, you’re full of more hot cum than the trash can by my gay anorexic Evangelical cousin’s bed. But is it so fucking hard for people to understand each other? I mean come on. I had a John Mayer buying me presents and making me free range eggs with olive oil and chicken sandwiches with little star-shaped cucumber slices from his faggy little porch garden, but if I were to say, I don’t know, “Want to come to a party at my friend’s house this weekend?” he’d be all “OH MY GOD I NEED SOME SPACE. I’M ONLY 29. I DON’T WANT THIS RIGHT NOW.”

At the time, I would banter about this with Agent Girl Detective. We would laugh our asses off at the twats we were “seeing.” Hers actually said “I don’t want a relationship right now.” So she says, “Good, me neither.” And he says, “Actually….I do want a relationship right now.”

What do you bet that this would have just gone on and on forever? OMG JOHN MAYER INFINITY. “I’m 32! I’m only 32! I don’t want to settle down! I’m 32!!!” Kind of frustrating if you have enough intelligence to look at dating someone as the opposite of the end of the road. And, fuck, the point is: I don’t want to settle down either! Why are the John Mayers of the world so convinced that their magnetic cocks have the fucking Midas touch when it comes to making women want to nest? I am so so so SO tired of dipshit boys acting like they’re running for their lives around the Battle Royale island of the sexes, and women are these sad, bloodthirsty beasts who they feel “really bad” about depriving of their food.

Ugh.

I’m sorry.

But I’m going to have to show you what happens next:

PLAYBOY: Do you do something different in bed than other guys?

MAYER: It’s all about geometry. I’m sort of a scientist; it’s about being obtuse with an angle. It’s sort of this weird up-and-over thing. You gotta think “up and over.”

I sure am happy that this information has been made public, finally. I hope every dude in the universe gets a chance to read it. Because, as you know, every woman in the universe has the exact same anatomy, to which the exact same “geometry” has to be applied.

Something I also hate:

“I’m sort of a scientist.”

Self-aware pieces of shit who can do nothing but talk and write about The Things They Know They Are. “Like, I know I’m really great at art and stuff, and I knowww I’m going to be really famous someday, but…”

This son of a bitch might as well be saying that he’s just reeeeaal good at sex and knows it. And I think anyone who knows they’re good at anything is actually not very good at all. If you *know* it, well, you’re doomed to suckage, my friend.

Also, what the fuck is up with these dudes wanting points for getting women off? It’s like when they put a tip jar out at Starbucks. You’re supposed to take my order for this six dollar cup of shit, so fucking take my order. I don’t want to hear another word about it. Stick your tip jar up your ass.

Fuck you, John Mayer(s). I am so sad that you’re smart enough to talk.

Every time I think about the Buckingham/Nicks breakup, I smirk to myself that Stevie’s song about it was soooo wayyy fucking better than Lindsey’s. Go your own way, dickhole, I ain’t gonna stop ya.

Yeah! Stick it to em, you hot bitch!

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Tagged as Agent Girl Detective, boys, celebrities, dating, douchebags

September 7, 2009 · 1:21 pm

These Shits Is Yummy, Yo.

Why is it that poor people always have somewhere they HAVE to BE at six o’clock? Is there some kind of poor people deadline every day? While I’m working, are poor people jumping through a complex system of errand-running in order to survive?

I’m on the bus at 5:50 and stay on it until just after six, so every day, I have the perfect vantage point from which to view poor people freaking out over their soon-to-be-missed all important deadline. There’s lots and lots of yelling into outdated cell phones, screaming about who’s going to pick up the kids and who’s got the check and please yell down to the basement and tell Marcus that the bus was twenty minutes late and I’ll be there in just a minute. There’s always a dude pacing up and down the bus aisle, leaning at the front to see through the windshield, reporting each street that passes to someone who must be urgently waiting for his arrival. “Western! We just passed Western, dog.”

I am going to conduct the research. I am going to get to the bottom of this. I will find out why everyone in sweatpants loses their damn mind circa 6pm every day.

der Footenwaren

I just found out that the shoe company I used to work for was started by someone who was active in the Nazi party. Seriously. You can look it up on Wikipedia and everything. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I mean, not great, but when it comes down to it, isn’t the entire world run by three giant companies? And every other little company is a part of one of the big ones? And how do we know what’s in the closet and the origin of every person who started every one of those companies?

I always thought that the company-penned company history was a little vague. It starts in 1948 with a guy who decides to make a running shoe, and that same year, it just happens to get big. Uh huh. Like there were no other running shoes that year. Apparently, and in reality, this guy was a Herr Bigdickschtein in the SS or something. And his brother, also an SS guy, went on to start his own shoe company, too. Therefore, the “adi” in Adidas stands for “Adolf.” Adi for short (and for PR reasons, no doubt).

I just think it’s interesting that a formerly Nazi-owned shoe company has a store in the middle of the most upper-class Jewish neighborhood in this city. And all of those old Jewish ladies stop by after hitting up the deli next door to pick up some fly kicks made by Cambodian women and children (you know, where they HAVE labor laws, but no one to enforce them).

It makes me wonder how often someone buys an apple at a farmer’s market that was grown and sold to them by the ancestor of someone who killed and cremated their ancestor. I’m sure that in some nasty way we are connected by the things we buy.

Yesterday at work, I heard this woman talking about how her trip to Europe went. She was telling everyone that she’d really reaaaaalllyy been wanting to see the concentration camp sites, but getting there was “just a real hassle.” She talked about how convoluted the transportation system was, “Just bus after bus and so many trains!” I think they should take all complainy visitors and cram them into a cattle car and bang ‘em off to Bergen-Belsen in the old-timey way.

If you’re lucky, you get to make the trip in winter, when you can pay someone with the gold watch you stuck up your butt to scoop some snow off the window sill for you to eat.

Seriously. Don’t be such a fucking deutschbag.

Bring in the big guns.

So last night, new roommate Agent Big Guns and I went half a block or so down to my favorite little bullshitty dive bar to play the jukebox and pour Hacker Pschorr down our throats. I was happy to get Big Guns out of the douchetarded neighborhood where she lived before, and into the hipstertarded neighborhood where we are now.

We weren’t there for ten minutes (standing at the jukebox, our backs to the door) when I realized that this boy I hung out with once last year and his roommates were sort of hovering by our seats. Trapped. So we went back to our seats, and this dude saw me, and remembered me, and spent the rest of the night making it as awkward as possible. He didn’t say anything to me, of course, but expected me to approach him, I suppose, because when I didn’t, he started saying loudly to his friends, “OHHH YEAHH, SO LIKE, I’M NOT EVEN HERE. AWESOME. NO, THAT’S COOL. THAT’S FINE. I LIKE, DON’T EVEN EXIST, OR WHATEVER. SURE. FINE. I LIKE, WON’T EVEN LOOK OVER THERE. LIKE THAT SIDE OF THE ROOM? DOESN’T EVEN EXIST ANYMORE, MAN.”

It was gruesome.

I don’t even remember anything about this guy, just that he stared at me for about two hours one night, then came up to me and put his beer bottle down between me and my friend, then just stood there. Tired, drunk, and wanting to continue with my conversation, I said, “Did you want my number or what?” And I gave it to him. And he called me the next day, and I told him where I’d be hanging out that night. He came out with all of his roommates and sort of hovered nearby. He complained about how early he had to get up the next morning. He mentioned that he was 23. He had that fluffy ironic crinkly Jesus hair and skinny hipster stache that all the Skinny Jean Club boys are after. He had the worst dog breath I’d ever smelled. He was about four inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than me. I mean, he was nice, but holy God in a pink car in Heaven, nuh uhhhh.

So when he called me the very next day, I didn’t return the phone call.

Sitting there in the bar, with the Spurned Date Show going on in full color behind my roommate’s head, I started thinking about how maybe I should have called him back and told him I wasn’t interested. But I can’t imagine how that conversation would have gone. Probably not well. But then he would have known I wasn’t interested, and probably would have refrained from making a drunk telenovela scene in a dive bar on a Sunday night. So I was thinking about both sides of it, and how the Text-Messager sort of pussed out, and how that felt, and how from now on I am going to be totally upfront with this kind of shit.

I mean, it happens. Someone turns you down (or leaves you hanging, or develops a crush on someone else simultaneously…all completely legal in the game of Dick-Around Dating) and you spend a day thinking you’re the ugliest, fattest, sluttiest person in the world, and completely worthless, and then you come out of your bedroom and eat a piece of cheese or something, and while you’re standing there at the kitchen counter, you remember that you’re kind of cool, and then stuff the person said or did that you thought was dumb but chose to ignore at the time becomes REALLY OBVIOUS.

For instance, I think every guy I’ve ever hung out with has made the comment, at one time or another, “Oh, so you’re that kind of girl.” This comment is prompted by everything from how I like my coffee to what I watch on TV. It’s like they’re trying to nail you down or figure you out, or fit you into one of the categories in the filing cabinet of females in their heads. Like if they can’t put you into one of those, you’ve got some kind of power and control. You’re a fucking space alien until they have a label for your forehead. Well, that’s goddamn weird and annoying. Lots of people like their coffee with cream and sugar. THAT IS WHY THEY PUT CREAM AND SUGAR ON THE TABLE AT THE RESTAURANT.

So my response for that is usually, “I’m not a kind of girl…?” And they look at me like they’re thinking “oh, so you’re actually THAT KIND of girl…” It goes on and on, over and over. Like you are perpetually just a facet of a million different girls who are a total possibility for them.

I think some of this might stem from the way people describe themselves, how they try really hard to fit into certain categories to make it easier to connect with other people. Like matching DNA. Like building a Lincoln Log house. People just want things to be easy, to fall together. They don’t want to know anything.

This is why, on that terrible online dating service, men swap around and mix and match the following phrases, in abundance, to describe themselves:

career oriented

pretty laid-back guy

easy going

look on the bright side of things lol

passionate

sincere

don’t take things too seriously lol

down to earth

driven

focused

sarcastic and funny

love the city

new to the city

looking for someone to show me around the city

know how to treat a lady lol

lol

The BNDs

We live across the building from a bunch of bros, the Bros Next Door. They have a ping pong table in their kitchen, on which they eat and iron and play ping pong. They invited us over for a barbecue, but we didn’t go because all of them have their ass cracks hanging out and their beer bellies hanging over their pants and while they talk they scratch their dirty fingernails through their beards. But last night they were blasting some Ludacris, which filled our kitchen, so you know, they’s aaigh wit me.

Stay away from them scrapeys.

Here are some conversations I overheard during my now slightly longer commute:

Fucking spaced-out hippie man, to chick with wilting dandelions stuck in her nasty hair:

“When I was doing my ummm…teacher training. I had to do these observations. Uhhh. Umm. This one teacher was like, You should think about cutting your hair and shaving your beard before you go out to look for jobs. Worst advice I’ve ever gotten. If I had done that, the kids would have missed out on…on so many learning opportunities. When I come in, in the winter, and my beard is long, they can see it, you know, growing. And they learn how hair grows? And then you know, I put my hair in a ponytail, and they learn like gender stereotypes. And what they are. And then when I shave my beard on the first day of spring, the kids always, always say, “You look like a girl now.” Because to them, long hair is for girls. You know? So that, you know, breaking sort of that gender stereotype is something that’s really valuable to their learning experience.”

Two loud black guys, fucking screaming at each other with only one seat between them:

NIGGA I GOT THIS T-MOBILE SHIT. FOR REAL. IT’S FOR REAL. THIS SHIT, THIS SHIT, YOU KNOW I GOT VOICEMAIL! INTERNET! MOTHERFUCKIN TEXT MESSAGING. CALL WAITING! YOU KNOW HOW THAT BE LIKE? I BE LIKE, TALKING TO ONE OF MY GUYS. MY PHONE RANG. I SAY HOLD UP! PRESS A BUTTON! HELLO? HEY SHAWTY I’M TALKIN’ TO DE’SHAWN. LEMME CALL YOU BACK. I’MA SEE YOU AT THE CRIB LATER. YOU KNOW? WHATEVER. PRESS A BUTTON AGAIN AND I’M TALKING TO MY GUY DE’SHAWN. I GOT EVERYTHING. LIKE FIFTY DOLLARS A MONTH AND SHIT.

YO BUT FUCK THAT. MY COUSIN, MY COUSIN HE GOT THEM, WHAT THEY CALLED? SCRAPEYS? MY COUSIN GOT THEM SCRAPEYS. HAD EM ALL UP ON HIS BALLS AND EVERYTHING. HAD TO GO GET EM REMOVED. THEY LIKE THESE LIL BUUUUGS AND SHIT. THEY BE UP UNDER YOUR SKIN! THEN THEY COME OUT! AND WHEN YOU SCRATCH EM, THEY GO HIDE! THEY HIDE UNDER YOUR SKIN, DOG! NAW, HELL NAW, THAT’S NASTY! YOU GOTTA STAY AWAY FROM THAT SHIT!

Turn to the left

I am tired of fashion bullshit. It’s really really really dumb. Do people know how dumb it is? I don’t think they do.

There’s this one girl who works for the RedEye. She rides my bus. She has the boy-style middle-part bowl-shaped haircut I had when I was eight years old, only now it’s fashionable or whatever. Her clothes look more like an experiment in a high school sewing class. Her column is this little half-page spread where she copies and pastes phrases like “new looks for fall” and “spring ing to spring with oversized sunglasses.” The page is splattered with pictures of clothes you can buy, if you’re so inclined, and where to buy them, and how much they are. Guhhh. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, she stands there, in her Outfit, reading and re-reading her own column, apparently for inspiration for the one she’s going to write that day.

This season’s hot looks

Check out these sweet picks for summer sandals

This year’s fashion faux pas

Hit the town in these day to night looks

I can’t stand it. It doesn’t end.

I mean, I know people who are into what they wear, and how it’s worn, I’m just kind of sick of people who obsess about dressing themselves. Or people who hit on a theme and fucking run with it. And I hate when I go to a bar and there’s a chick there who is so far into her Look that she could pass as Madonna on Halloween. I can’t stand people who just go out and buy everything they need to put together their Fashion Costume, and they end up looking like goddamn clothesfags.

Like the girl who always wears Accessorieeeees! She read an awful article in Lucky magazine once (the article they run on every page of every issue) about How to Brighten Up Your Look with Fun Accessories! Try These Quick Fixes to Spruce Up Your Fall Look! So on the page there’s a scarf, a hat, a shitload of bracelets, and some fake glasses. So now every time I see this girl, she’s wearing a different fake glasses/big hat combination. And everything that comes out of her mouth is about as useful to the human race as a fucking dog fart.

Or the girl who’s obsessed with “vintaaaaage!” And when you tell her you like her dress, she says “It’s vintaaaaage.” Like when something is old, it’s automatically cooler than something new.

Yeah? Well, my dead grandma’s asshole is vintage, but I’m not going to wear it around my wrist and talk about it like it’s a “serious find.” Ugh, shut up. Be into that shit all you want, but shut the fuck up.

And now that I’ve done nothing but be a salty motherfucker, check out these shits:

I'd eat the shit out of these shits.

5 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as Agent Big Guns, boys, dating, douchebags, drinking, neighbors

August 23, 2009 · 11:09 pm

Asshole Party

Dear Ms. Seelig,

Your boyfriend, Mr. Michael S. Gellar, just hit me up on a dating website. Where he has a profile. Which he uses to describe the type of women he would like to meet and date.

Miiiiight wanna look into that.

Love,

Cupcake Jones

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:

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.

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??

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.

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!

4 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as Agent IWSI, Agent Ventura, boys, complaining, cupcakes, dating, obama, the crazies, white trash, work

August 17, 2009 · 12:36 pm

Ball Grinder

Last night I got dumped via text message. And it fucking SUCKED.

It’s made me think about some boys I haven’t been interested in, whom I may not have treated the best. I mean, I could have come out and been honest. I could have given them a phone call. Text messages are just so blow-offy and passive aggressive. They say the wrong thing all the time, no matter what the actual text says.

So I propose that we all adopt a new system of telling each other we aren’t interested: more of a round-table discussion type of thing. You just go to this place with a bunch of booths, you meet up for about half an hour and tell each other what’s up. Then you shake on it. Can you imagine how much better these things would be if people just did that? I mean, I guess the concern was that someone would lose their shit and fly through the roof and be a scary bitch, but in most circumstances I think it would work out pretty well.

I can confirm that this type of severance would be much more manageable than a 10pm Sunday night text message. But I guess this is what you get when you go around grinding boys’ balls into the pavement and laughing about it like a maniac. Someone comes along and grinds yours.

My inbox hurts!

4 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as boys, dating, heartbreak

August 10, 2009 · 9:30 pm

Ugh.

SERIOUSLY?

I FUCKING HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!

This vanilla chai tea tastes like hot pee.

Like hot alcoholic dad pee.

And I’m sorry I’m drinking it.

This is my next to last night at Job 2, and so far, the following has happened:

-A door-slamming man slammed the front door, waved his hand in my face when I tried to tell him which room his class was in, walked into the wrong room, slammed door, walked out, slammed door, walked into right room, slammed door.

-A member complained about not getting his member gift after watching me show another member her gift options, and when I said “Okay, well then which gift would you like?” he pulled his glasses to the end of his nose and stared down at me through them, then responded, “Well WHAT ARE MY OPTIONSSSS??”

-A co-worker copied the wrong page for an instructor, and I had to figure out how to make GoogleDocs recognize an image as a document and print it. It was not easy and it was also kind of dumb.

-A woman reported a terrorist attack because someone left a cart with some boxes on it by the front door. “And there’s NO ONE around!” I promised to get “Maintenance” on it right away. In my mind, Maintenance is this bald guy in a blue jumpsuit with an eye patch who just waits in this closet down the hall that says “Utility Sink” on the door until I call him on a special phone. Which I have no intention of doing. (Because he is not real…did you get that part?)

I gave my notice at Job 1 this morning. My boss looked genuinely shocked for just a moment, then quickly masked her feelings with falsity, as she is apt to do, and her mouth just hung open in mock surprise for an uncomfortable amount of time. So I said, “Sooo…” to jerk her back to reality. She pushed hard for me to tell her exactly where I’m going and what I’m doing. I gave her a really rehearsed answer which told her nothing at all, which pissed her off. She told Veggie Tales the Dickless Wonder that I had just resigned, and he immediately began digging for information on where I was going. I gave him the same story, and he continued to prod me. “So, is it like, a lateral move, or what?”

So, do you know like, how inappropriate and unprofessional you are, or what?

I’m not trying to be a bitch, I just don’t want them to know because I know they’d immediately want to tell me exactly what they think of it. And I don’t want to hear it anymore.

I’m at the point in the job-leaving phase when I feel like I deserve to say “No” and “I’m not going to do that.” Fire me, you dick shit. Fire me and go fuck yourself. So basically this is the part in the job leaving where I burn the bridge, just to be sure that I can never go back. So the snarky side is showing a little bit more at work. Which is always fun for my co-workers.

I have a really bad habit of looking up and to the left when people ask me a question and I’m trying to answer it. It keeps me from getting my thoughts all tangled. I’ve been warned that it’s a bad thing to do, by the folks at Job 1, mainly, who are all about improving communication by pointing out what’s wrong with yours and “coaching” you on stopping it.

The problem is, I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down for a conversation on my performance or my development, and I’ve used the wrong word (“but” instead of “however,” because “but” is “more negative sounding”) or broken eye contact for a moment (makes the other person feel like you’re not being honest), and I have been stopped, mid-sentence, INTERRUPTED, only to be told exactly what is wrong with my communication skills. A ten minute diatribe about the use of the wrong word or the wiggling of a foot or a facial expression ensues, and at the end of it you are supposed to remember what the fuck you were talking about.

How about I tell you what’s wrong with your listening skills?

It’s called a Sexy Mooch

Is it inappropriate to call someone and ask them if you can come over and make out with them and then watch their TV? Because I would really like to. He could even stick around for the TV watching if he wanted. That would be kind of nice. Because it’s cable.

(It might be inappropriate because I told him a lot of dead baby jokes in the middle of a Panera and he might not call me anymore. MIGHT not.)

TV Ride

There’s this one channel on my freak television that is kind of like a TV guide. It’s actually called TV Guide Network, and it’s actually on two channels, 4 and 5, but 4 is a little fuzzy. Anyway, TV Guide Network gets its jollies from showing really old reality shows and then placing a hot model on a runway somewhere and having her talk about “ooooh what’s going to happen on Big Brother Season II? Stay tuuuned!!!” Lately they’ve been showing nonstop episodes of Punk’d. Remember that show? It’s basically where Ashton Kutcher would leap around and poop in his pants and talk to a camera in some backstage area while a nearby celebrity would be stepping into a practical joke set up by Ashton and about 12,000 other individuals who should probably have spent their time in some other way. The practical joke usually involves the celebrity messing up in a way that will really be a PR nightmare, or indirectly messing up in some way that will cost a lot of money. It’s funny, though, that every time a celebrity is accused of doing something really crappy, they first deny it, then try to blame their assistant, then try to buy their way out of the mess. Or if they’re Ashley fucking Simpson, they beg their friends to say they did it.

So I’ve been catching glimpses of these episodes of Punk’d, and I’ve begun to wonder what one has to do to actually get punked. Do these celebrities know each other in some circle outside of going to the same awards shows and buying drugs from the same guy? Do celebrities hang out with each other? If they do, I’m going to puke right now. I guess I just wonder, while watching these shows, who the hell would ever want to play a practical joke on Hayden Panettiere? The girl has the personality of an empty trash bag. Why don’t they just spend less money, go to her house, and ask her to do her “disbelief” look. She’d do it, I bet. Just shine a big light on her and holler “DISBELIEF. ACTION.” Done.

But I guess they’ll take any excuse to put her on TV because everybody watching the TV pretty much wants to ride her face.

I have been told that in Ye Olde Ancient Roman times, a “punk” was a young boy who served an older man, both as an apprentice on all things manly, a house servant, and a cum dumpster. To be on the level of “punk” meant that you were being auditioned for upscale, polite society, and if you were a good punk to your master, you would one day have a punk of your own.

In that sense, to be “punked” was to be owned and screwed by an older man. Basically you were in a very low position of servitude, the lowest, just above slavery.

I’d like to watch someone punk Ashton Kutcher. Oh yeah I would. You just got punked! And punked again, and again, and again…

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