If a Starbucks has nothing but coffee, and it falls over in a forest, is it really a Starbucks?
I don’t know. But what I do know is that I have to be at work at 7 every morning this week. It’s brutal enough due to the fact that it’s a week before the time changes, so getting up at 5am is like getting up at 2am: just as dark and only a little less stupid. And I know that it bothers me that the only espresso fill-up station on, near, or around my commute is an awful Starbucks in a grocery store next to the train (which is so weird to begin with: it’s like the train platform has a grocery tumor, and the fruits & vegetables section in the grocery store has a coffee shop tumor…some kind of creepy transportation/fresh food/greedy coffee chain fusion. People sit in the loungey area with their laptops out, messing with their iPhones and trying really hard not to look like they’re in a filthy chain grocery store coffee chain shit bin.). So anyway, the only point in going into one of these places is to get a fancy espresso drink. If I wanted a damn $3 cup of coffee I can brew at home for a hundredth of the price, I’d be an idiot and someone should hit me in the face. I want a Venti Somethingorother, dammit. I’m tired and I need a shock to my brain stem. So it’s really stupid when you walk up to the counter and give them your order and it takes a whole twenty minutes to say it (I believe I’ve mentioned that I’m an asshole), then they say “Our steamer’s broken. So only coffee and tea.”
I’d like to know how Starbucks is a Starbucks without steaming capabilities. I don’t see what now separates the grocery store Starbucks from a giant coffee-shitting anus. I’ll get my shit coffee at home, thank you.
Cupcake Masterpiece Theater
So yeah. I did a little search for “starbucks cupcakes” because I was going to point out that Starbucks really messed up when they stopped making the Vanilla Bean and Triple Chocolate cupcakes. After they knocked that one out of the park, they decided to roll it back a little bit and start making these awful red velvet cupcakes, and I guess part of making them is leaving them out on the counter overnight, and also adding giant spoonfuls of baking powder and not mixing it in properly. Those things are like biting into a rock that bleeds. A far cry from the cuppycakes of old:
Uh huh. Right there. Yeah.
Upon my search, I found the first cupcake, other images of which you can find at the blog whose credit I have left on the stolen Starbucks cupcake picture. If you can’t tell, I am not going to mention any names because I am about to make fun of her/him/it:
“As for the Starbuck cups, i did a google search to see what the Starbuck’s logo looked like since i never really studied it before. So after finding some great pictures, i begain the painstaking effort of slowly painting on the logos onto the cups.. which trust me is one of the toughest things I’ve ever done due to how tiny i had to make the Starbucks cup in order to fit it onto the cupcake. Trust me, painting on the logo onto a cup that is smaller than my thumb is not the easiest thing to do. I could feel my hand shaking with each stroke of my brush and i had to hold my breath every time i lay brush to cup. Whew!!”
Painstaking effort! It’s not easy! Trust me! TRUST ME!!!
Jesus Christ. “…lay brush to cup”??? Was that a cupcake blog or a Hallmark family drama? Oh, anyway, thank God Tammy got that Starbucks logo painted on all right. I bet she was so tired after, she had to sit down on the sofa and have herself a whole glass of 79 cent grape soda from the dollar store.
Then you’re outta luck, PAL.
At work, I am sometimes forced to get coffee at this place in the basement cafeteria called “Java City!” They’ve got this big round sign with a bunch of tall brown buildings on an orange background, I think that’s supposed to represent Java City With Exclamation Point. I don’t know about you, but just the logo for Java City! makes me feel kind of like I might throw up from caffeine overdose. Every time I walk by, I swear every fiber in my being gets really excited and then screams “OH NO” simultaneously, and hell, I’m surprised I haven’t suffered a seizure and collapsed on the floor in front of the Java City! kiosk simply because of their marketing.
There’s a Starbucks across campus (people around here say “across campus” to mean “in another building”…any building. It could be the building next door. It could be the adjoining building…which, in this case, it IS). So I went there for a quad shot. What do you know? Their milk steamer was working just fine, they were all using it to blow steam up each other’s asses in their downtime. They had a lot of downtime because the espresso machine was broken. So yeah, I had to walk my ass (which is fast taking the shape of my desk chair) ALL THE WAY BACK ACROSS CAMPUS and hit up Java City!
Back at the Java City!, they keep their workers imprisoned in a 2×2 pen, which is equipped with everything in the world you’d need to make anyone sick. The Java City! employees are not happy to see you because it means they have to take all their fingernails off so they can pull a shot. They announce your drink order, get it wrong, then when you correct them they scream THAT’S WHAT I SAID over the sound of the steamer. Then there’s that giant fake city looming over your head like it’s about to collapse on you.
So, another question: if everything you need to make floofy flavored coffee drinks can fit in a tiny booth, why the hell do we have Starbucks, hmmmmm?
Anyway. I think Java City! would be the city you’d go to if you planned to die from a stress-related heart ailment. Java City! would do it to you, for sure.
And if you sit in the Starbucks in the grocery store in the train station, sipping your latte, and you say into your iPhone “Yeah, I’m at the ‘Bucks…” then I hope you go find yourself clutching your chest in a Java City! sewer someday, pal.
I like my job for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I meet a lot of interesting people. This university attracts students from all walks of life, from across the globe, which is pretty awesome if you like celebrities and foreign people, which I do! And even though everybody’s got their panties in a bunch because Tom Hanks’ son is doing his undergrad here, I couldn’t care less because I just had the pleasure of meeting a very famous singer. I swear I’d helped her find three books and two websites on finance interview preparation, none of which pleased her, before she revealed that she had, in fact, WON ASIAN IDOL TWO YEARS AGO.
She didn’t give me a chance to say, “Of course! I knew I recognized you from somewhere! You are the most talented Asian I know! What are you doing at a business school in Illinois, U.S.A.?!” She immediately and without any hesitation revealed to me that her passion is SINGING. That evil Mommy-san and Daddy forced her to go to B-school, even after her triumphant victory over every other singing Asian in greater Asia, even after her tour of Asia with Asian Idol. “It’s not like-a I even wanta to BE HERE,” she said, and slammed a book back onto the shelf in the wrong place.
Then she got mad that I wouldn’t let her use my computer to check her Gmail. I guess you can’t have it all.
Minor Inconvenience
I was fifteen minutes to work today, which isn’t a big deal or anything. My boss is pretty busy walking around the office telling everyone how hard I work, anyway, so she doesn’t usually notice or care when I step in a couple minutes late. Unfortunately, there are some people who are really really put out of sorts when the train is late.
Today the train was late because of an accident involving a fall (or a jump, which is usually reported as a fall for a couple of days). The point is that some poor jerk made contact with the filthy, wet, stinky, and highly electrified tracks in the gloom below the platform, which is a shitty way to start your morning. The trains all had to share whatever tracks they could get, as power was shut off so the poor jerk could be peeled off the tracks and sent to the hospital to be pronounced one way or the other. Everything was slow, and running behind, and basically not where anyone expected it to be. When my train finally came, the stuttering conductor saw fit to let us all know that the reason for his lack of punctuality was “a accident involvin’ somebody jumpin’ on the tracks” downtown. So naturally, the entire car erupted with gasps and everybody started telling everybody else exactly what they thought about mass transit suicide. That’s when the lady behind me piped up to anyone who would listen:
“Why people always gotta kill theyselves durin’ rush hour? I know thangs is bad, but they ain’t THAT bad you cain’t wait until lunch time. Lawd.”
She proceeded to call all of her friends and let them know just how inconsiderate she thought it was to kill yourself during rush hour. She revealed during all three of these phone calls (on her pink Razr with BabyPhat charms dangling from it) that she had actually found out about the suicide only a couple minutes after it had happened, on her alarm clock radio, which is when she decided to roll over and sleep a little longer because the trains were going to be “all messed up and shit anyway.”
Ahahahahha! Total cunt.
It’s easy.
Basically all you’ve got to do is a Google image search for “cutest cupcakes ever.”
Are you serious? You can't be. You are, though.
If you happen to be in Japan, you should do a Google image search for “cutest cupcakes ever,” only in Japanese. And you’ll get this:
HIYOOOHHHHHH!!! Hihihihihihihihihihihihi!!!
Someday I will build a cupcake library, in which I will preserve one of every type of cupcake ever made, along with metadata to help future cupcake artists with their research.
I can do this kind of thing because we live on a fantastic planet, and it is covered with stuff that’s cute as shit.
God DAMN I wanna eat that tiny toast made of frosting SO BAD.
Feliz Naviblog
My best best friend friend Patrese has started a blog about how much she loves Christmas, and Christmastime, and pretty much all things Christmas-y. I support her endeavor because I am a good friend (thanks, thank you…stop it!) and because starting in October it’s really cute to watch her get all ramped up for the birth of little baby Jesus and then celebrate it by buying every little baby Jesus she can find and gluing it to her front door.
OK well, so she hasn’t done that yet, but I think this might be the year.
Anyway, I think Patrese likes Christmas so much because her family always made it into a big sparkly happy soiree full of love and Sunday gravy. Which is so cute I want to poop glitter turds and Sweet Tarts!
I’m indifferent to Christmas because my stepdad celebrated by screaming at me to get the fuck out of the Goddamn tree before I fucking ruined everything. Then my grandma took too many pills and had a meltdown because some bitch at church wore heels she didn’t agree with in the Christmas cantata, and my cousins cried while they watched us open our presents because my aunt loved God too much to buy things at the end of December. Then they told us we’d probably be going to Hell because of the Play-Doh Snack Shop.
Shit. If I’m going to Hell for a toy, it’d better fucking be the baby blue plastic four-door ’59 Caddy my slut of a Barbie used to roll around the living room in. That would be worth it.
Today.
I finally figured out a way to spill Arizona green tea in my hair and make it look like I meant to do it. Holy hell, I smell like the stairway to Heaven. Or Arizona.
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!
This week I got a fancy little surprise: Pinky Links said some very nice things about this here blog!
“Well, while sneakily and silently stalking Steven’s site (see what I did there? with all the S’s?), I came across this total gem. Cupcake Heartbreak. I love reading new blogs, because at first it takes a little bit of time to figure out if they’re male/female, streyt/ghey, peoples of what color/country/background, liberal/conservative. So, this is me welcoming Cupcake Heartbreak into our (Katamari!) neighborhood. She’s so cunt-centric, I digs it. She also has a mouth/keyboard like a sailor.”
It really made my day. I didn’t have to talk about myself so much that day because other people did it for me. Thank you, Pinky Links bloggers!!!
Also, -Z- mentioned Katamari, which is my most favorite game to play on PS2. I even play it on my phone (a tiny, tiny, tiiiiny version called Rolling with Katamari! that is super fun and has made me miss my bus stop more than one time). When you fail, the king says “Like a lollipop…YOU SUCK.”
I used to play that game so much that when I’d get in the car I’d want to just run over everything…and, uh, everyone. I drove really fast. And if my boyfriend was driving I’d be like “OHHH YEAHHH!” when people were ambling innocently over a crosswalk. It was not very safe.
Here is some of my favorite Katamari-inspired stuff, plucked from the Web:
Katamari checks! Do your best!
THIS IS A FUCKING CAKE.
I love how Jesus and the Apostles are like, "What...the fuck?"
Everything sticks to these shoooooes!!!
I am sad today because I found the Katamari Dunks, and every asshole who had featured them on their blog made it sound like you could get a pair if you dropped enough money. Unfortunately, I traced them to their source, which is just some dude and his Katamari-lovin’ wife who bought a white pair of Dunks and hand painted them for her. So you can’t buy them, you stupid fucking jerks. I should sue you for making me think I could.
Now watch this:
Fucker.
There are a couple of things that I think are really funny, and when I think of them during the day, I just crack up laughing and people look at me weird. I’m not sure what triggers them, but they’re sort of always floating around in there and sometimes they just pop into my immediate consciousness. Like, when you call my friend Agent Orange a fucker, he says “You fuck her, you brought her.”
And one time in high school, my best friend (who was a total troublemaker/smoker/school cutter/bad influence all around, so that’s why I said BEST friend) interrupted a biology class by grabbing a giant coconut out of this wildlife display cabinet the teacher had, held it high over her head, and yelled over everyone to him, “HEY MR. SMITH…WANNA BUST A NUT?”
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, I just laugh and laugh. That’s funny stuff. I should collect the funny stuff I’ve witnessed in a book or a blog. It will be called Remember That One Time?
More from the Boy Swamp
I’m not surprised that it happens to me, but yeah, okay, it’s a little bit annoying when I’m just trying to have a good time.
I am no stranger to the fact that boys often bang up against each other to see who’s the top dick. I’ve seen it happen tons of times, you just sort of stand back so you don’t get Axe body spray splattered all over you (it stains, you guys). But every now and then, one of these dudes comes scraping out of the dude swamp and wants to play “I’m Smarter Than You, You Girl” with me.
It’s like I’m the minotaur, and they’re these boysies with wimpy-ass swords and dangling, tattered loincloths trying to hack and bullshit their way through the labyrinth. There’s a damn pile of them outside my door. It is getting hard to open my door!
Here is a little excerpt from an experience I wrote about in my old MySpace blog on Tuesday, July 24, 2007:
I was tired after, but we had started so early that it was only about ten when everyone was crashing. It seemed a waste to go home and pass out when there was the St. Alfred’s party at Empire, and even though we’d all said we weren’t going to go, pretty much the entire Pumafia showed up. I’m glad I took the time to freshen up and change out of my barbecue sauce-encrusted jacket, because that place was “going off,” in the way that those parties do when all of the boys put on their biggest hats and flashiest grills.
There wasn’t really any dancing room, it would have actually been very dangerous to try, since every time you moved, someone was trying to push past you in that really annoying way where they just hold their drink out in front of them so it gets spilled all over someone when they get pushed. So we kind of stood there, nodding our heads, whatever, and eventually friends of friends were nearby, and some guy in that category was sitting right by where I was standing, and when I took notice of him, he reached up and tapped his glass against my bottle. I nodded my acknowledgment. Had the interaction ended there, I think everything would have been fine.
This dude stood up at some point, and he was a freaking giant. Almost Andre the Giant. Huge. He could have touched the ceiling. He was trying to communicate with this little spider monkey of a boy who I’ve been around before and have never really been impressed by. One of those guys who just darts around everywhere, acting completely stupid in the hopes that someone will look at him. And despite his obvious attempts to gain people’s attention, he seems to hate all of them. I think he’s had a disgusted look on his face every time I’ve seen him. So the Giant and the Monkey were speaking some language they taught each other, waving their drinks around, getting all excited, leaning across my friend and myself. I suppose it was done in an effort to get closer to the Giant, to somehow cut across the limited space between us and stand where I was standing, but at some point in their conversation, the Monkey reached out, placed both tiny paws on my collarbone, and firmly pushed me backwards.
You can imagine how I felt about that.
I stepped forward just in time to see the Giant spatter some of his girly drink into my friend’s hair, and I immediately reached out to wipe some of the droplets away. In doing so, I’m afraid I drew attention to the fact that the Giant had committed some sort of faux pas, and though I fully understand that these things happen all the time in crowded bars, I’m not the kind of girl who ignores drops of liquor on her friend’s head just to keep some dude from feeling bad. A brief apology is in order, of course, even if it’s just a drunk-guy-in-a-bar type of apology, the kind they throw out, say, when they hit you in the mouth on their way to request Fergie’s “London Bridges.” First of all, they don’t really mean it, and they say it just to keep from feeling bad, and they say it in a way that suggests maybe you shouldn’t have had your mouth in their way. And besides, they just really want to hear “London Bridges.” Still, they say it.
The Giant saw fit, instead, to ask me why I was such an asshole. He reminded me, because I had forgotten, that I was not in a library. Oh wait, I believe it was a fucking library that I was not in. “This isn’t a fucking library, you know.”
True, Sir Giant. This is not a fucking library. I understand that fucking libraries are usually very quiet and full of books, which readers may borrow for brief periods of time. If you would like, I could give you the address for the library in Logan Square, and you can see for yourself that it looks nothing like Empire Liquors, and we will both laugh and laugh when you realize just how silly it was to tell an intelligent person that a bar wasn’t a fucking library. Haha! Silly Giant! And then maybe we will read something besides that worn-out copy of The Best of Vice you carry around with you. I will try to find you something that has a few pictures of designer sneakers in it. You know, to keep your interest.
So I ignored the guy. I let it roll off, I was tired, and I’m never really sure how to answer that question. I didn’t think you were supposed to. I thought I’d just made an enemy out of some enormous hipster, who would forget all about me on his wobbly bike ride home. Secretly, I hoped he would remember me just when his face grated against the pavement, and then forget me, but that was just wishful thinking. Instead, he loomed around for the rest of the evening, and every time I looked up, he was staring at me, staring in that weird way that’s more just watching someone, where you can tell they’re still looking at your back when you turn away. I didn’t even feel like dancing anymore when it cleared out a bit in there, because I’d look up and this fuckasaurus would be sitting like a retarded lump, giving me the most repulsed and confused look I’d ever seen.
So the Giant thought that maybe the best course of action would be to ask me again, later, why I was an asshole. Again, he was met with polite indifference. So he held out his hand, ten times the size of mine, and said “I’m ——-.” I shook his hand, immediately forgot his name, nodded, and said hello. That wasn’t enough for the Giant.
“No, see, that’s not how introductions work! They’re supposed to be reciprocal. This is how they go: I say hello, I tell you my name, then you do the same thing.” Whilst Giant was yelling this into my face over the music, I do recall thinking it a little odd that talking to this dude was like being yelled at by my stepdad, which made me even more uncomfortable with the situation, if such a thing is possible. I remember thinking how maybe this guy should consider himself lucky that I’d been drinking since five, and was falling asleep anyway, which meant I wasn’t in top form and not in any shape to actually tear into him. I also found it very interesting, as he stood there completing his oratory on proper introductions, that the Giant obviously had a firm grasp on etiquette, so I wondered why he had prefaced our introduction, which was becoming more and more important to him by the minute, by referring to me as an asshole.
I also thought, wait a minute…I’ve never even talked to this guy. Just how the hell did he know that I’m an asshole?!
So here’s this enormous guy, jabbing his finger in my face, spitting all over the place as he struggles to explain to me just how I should be behaving in a bar that’s not a fucking library, and he actually holds his hand out, pointed down at my chest, and says, “Now we’re going to try this again! My name’s ——-!” As far as I understand, it’s a certain unalienable right to decide who you want to meet and who you don’t. So I looked at his hand and said “No thank you. I don’t want to meet you.”
Oh, I’m sure it would have been more acceptable, as far as relations between friends and friends of friends go, if I had just giggled and smiled and shaken his hand, told him my name, and then bitched about him all the way home. But I’m not afraid of people like that, I can’t think of much he could do to me that hasn’t been done, so I wasn’t really surprised or shocked when he spent the rest of the night calling me a bitch, telling me I looked like a whore, asking my friends why I was such an asshole. I wasn’t at all surprised when the Monkey joined in, actually sitting on the Giant’s lap (oh, it was perfect!) and started his yippy jeering in my direction because it meant that maybe someone would notice he was alive. The Giant kept reaching around his monkey friend to say, “Truce? Truce then? Truce?” and hold out his big hand again. And I said, “What’s the point? I don’t want to know you. Forget about me. There is no us.”
I think it’s funny that I was wearing a shirt that said on the front, “I don’t have a gun,” and on the back, “but I can get one.”
Take Monday night, for example, at Agent Balboa‘s birthday party. An old friendgirl we used to work with came and brought with her the foppiest, greasiest little punk rock prom queen I’ve seen in a long time. He had that slicked back Dave Navarro hair that sort of flips forward and makes the wearer look like a Yorkshire terrier*, and the half-assed little skinny goatee that looked like it was glued onto his face with Elmer’s. He wore tight jeans and pointy shoes, and a striped shirt rolled up at the elbows with extra little pieces of fabric that folded up over the rolled-up sleeve and attached to the button. You know, in case he was going to be doing some serious lifting and sawing and hammering and wouldn’t want to be bothered with rolling his shirt sleeves up again and again. While he was talking, I could only imagine him folding up those little button flaps, and, with his nimble, precious fingers, pulling the tiny pearly button through the hole. Of course, the whole look was tied together with a skin-tight black vest, so I half expected to look up and find myself on a steam locomotive in 1924 with this asshole demanding to see my ticket.
I thought he looked stupid, sure, but it wasn’t until he opened his big dumb flappy mouth that I knew he’d be a pain in the ass. At first it was just his two cents here and there during my portions of conversation, little peeps, little burps, like the bubbles that come up from the bottom of the toilet when the clog is about to recede. I’d be talking about something, or answering someone, and he’d interrupt with his commentary on whatever I was saying, and what it meant about me. “Oh so you’re like THIS” or “OHHHH so you’re THAT GIRL…Oh I see…” That was my first clue that he was picking up on certain aspects of my personality and probably wanted to tie our wrists together for a knife fight in the alley. He had a big fucking mouth and wanted me to slash it open wider so he could fit more cock in it.
So he tries to joke with me. He sits next to me and tells me my cupcakes sucked. “I was like, this is the worst cupcake I’ve ever eaten. It’s crap.” I told him I was happy my crappy little cupcake was about to get revenge on his ass and thighs. Buttercream, mother fuckerrr. I won’t sit here and recount the entire conversation, it just went back and forth like that for about twenty minutes, him trying to get my attention with his pathetic limp-dick insults, and me being as nice as possible about setting him gently in his place. I was being very nice, because I love the friendgirl who had brought him along, and it was hard to tell what, if anything, their relationship was. It was so HARD to reign it in, though, because it was like there was a big goddamn joke of a man in front of me, saying, “Oh, I seem to have dropped my ass…would you please hand it to me? And feel free to mop the floor with it first.”
It went too far when he started to talk about his band. And here is how he did it:
Pure silence. Then, out of nowhere,
Him: “Sooo, I’m in a band, soooo…”
Me: “Oh yeah, cool.”
Him: “Yeah, we’re called ———–. We’ve played a few shows so far, we were featured in the RedEye a few weeks ago.”
Me: “Mmm.”
Him: “Yeah, totally. Do you remember the one about Christian Bale and Johnny Depp being here for a movie premiere? Yeah, we were in that one.”
Me: “So you got overshadowed a bit.”
Him: “Yeah. I mean, well, not really because it’s kind of a big deal to get into the music section. Soooo that’s cool.”
Me: “Are you…advertising to me?”
Him: (Obviously angry and embarrassed about my disinterest) “No! It’s not like this is costing you anything! God!”
Me: “Uh, ‘advertising’ doesn’t necessarily mean that money changes hands…”
Him: “I know! I know! I’m just saying that like, you know, I’m in a band and you should check us out.”
Me: “Uh huh. And what would that be called?”
Him: “…”
Me: “That’s what I thought.”
Him: “I heard you were kind of a bitch.”
Me: “I’ve been advertising.”
That twat. He went off in a huff, and later, as we left, he said rather loudly to our friendgirl, “Your friend was hatin’ on me for telling her about my band.”
I said, “I wasn’t hating. I just wasn’t listening.”
“She’s a bitch!” he pouted to our friendgirl.
She smiled and said, “I tooooold youuuu!”
This is an interesting theme that has emerged in my life. Usually, stupid assholes who talk a bunch of shit hear that I’m an asshole and get a few drinks in them and want to wrassle. When they fail and face public humiliation, they think that calling me a fucking bitch will redeem them. I’ve had boys hurl all kinds of insults my way after situations like this. They say “I was just joking with you! I was just kidding!” and I say, “Well, me too, dude,” which they don’t understand because the girl is supposed to roll over and put her knees in the air and laugh like a dipshit at everything he says, the boy is supposed to be the funny one, the smarter one, the quick-witted one. So they get mad, and they tell me that I’m the way I am because I “never get any,” I’m bitter, I’m bitchy, no one will eeeeever want me because I’m such a bitch. It’s like a script that dumb boys follow.
Then there are boys who enjoy it, who don’t run off with their tails between their legs, but who I end up dating and getting in stupid dating fights with, and start crying or whining about something pointless, as one naturally does during a dating fight, and so disgusted are they with tears and frustration and anything other from the token lack of concern and laid-back sarcasm they’ve come to expect from me, that they say “I thought you were tough! You’re not tough. What was that, like, a tough act?”
I am fairly certain that people are only interested in other people who only have a single aspect to their personality. You’re one way, or you’re the other. Seems like it would be easier. This shit just goes on and on, over and over. Boys who talk to me are either one way, or they’re the other. Do they know how fucking stupid they all are?
Unfortunately, my personality is like a katamari.
I’m sure this blog post could be filed under the category of tooting one’s own horn. “She really thinks she’s something. Look at her, talking about herself like that. Well well well.” I’ll have you know that this is nothing like horn-tooting, as I am against personal horn tooting. Horns should be tooted by others, if at all. It is more fun that way, duh. What I’m trying to point out is the frequency with which boys come to me looking for a fight. It’s not like I’m standing here grabbing at my dick every five seconds like I’m on the basketball team or something and I need to make sure everyone knows it’s still there. SO SHUT UP.
*When I was a kid, my grandma had a Yorkshire terrier. She named him Prince Toby and fed him from the table and took Polaroids of him, which she kept in a photo album and wrote things like “Stop feeding me ice cream or I’ll get fat, Mom!” next to them. He returned the favor by pissing all over her house. You would walk around in your socks and they’d be piss soaked. You would lie down on the floor with a pillow to watch TV and roll over into a puddle. She made a regular practice of letting the dog out into the yard to “go pee pee!” but he treated the yard with indifference and trotted back in with tangled hair to piss on the carpet. Someone suggested to her that she have him neutered, and even though he was a full blooded dog with papers, and a mother with a name that was seven words long, she decided to do it. She remarked that she’d “turn ‘im into a girl and start callin’ him Princess Toby if I have to!” When I heard her say that, I got really scared that my grandma was so dumb that she thought it worked that way, that the dog would be a girl if she had him neutered. It gave me anxiety. I also hoped she didn’t believe that cutting a dog’s balls off made him stop pissing in the house. I wanted to tell her that they only stop doing that if you tell them to with violence. Anyway, Prince Toby never stopped pissing in the house, and when my grandma died, he lay down in a puddle of water and drowned himself. THE END!
I am in a shit mood today. Here is my mood in cupcake form:
RAAAAAAARRRRRRR!!!
I just turned on my TV for the first time in about a week. “Win A Date With Tad Hamilton” was on, and I only saw about four minutes of it before yelling “OH GIVE ME A GODDAMN FUCKING BREAK.”
Now I remember why I stopped watching TV for a week. It’s not even entertaining from an anthropological standpoint right now. I either have no idea what’s going on, or I just don’t care.
Why do these dumb ass movies always have gag reels to some kind of Sugar Ray song? I don’t want to hang out with these people, anymore, or ever. They’re not funny.
Live action is much more entertaining. Last night I watched a bunch of drunk girls in their party-dress finery attempt to dance to this trance-funk-hip hop fusion on a wet concrete floor. They were doing that drunk-girl-in-heels dance, bopping back and forth, holding beer glass nonchalantly, stepping side to side on bent legs like big floofy swamp birds. It was all fun and games before one of them misplaced a stiletto and belly flopped onto the floor, sending her glass flying and shattering in front of her. As the crowd in the back yelled a simultaneous “OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” she lay there, pretending to laugh, then rocketed back up as cutely as possible, trying to play off the floor slam like it was nothing. Her friend ran to her aid, and they had a momentary embrace in the middle of the now-deserted dance floor, painfully aware that everyone was still staring at them, and would be staring at them until they made a move. They mashed their faces together, and the one who had fallen suddenly got verrrrrry serious and said, “I canNOT believe…”
She attempted to make her exit, but not without slipping on her little silver heels and hitting the floor once again on her way around the corner to the bathroom. Oh, the humanity. It was way funnier than anything I have ever seen on TV ever. Ever, ever.
Why is it so funny when people fall down? I shouldn’t talk. I haven’t fallen for a long time, so I’m probably due for a good one pretty soon. I guess I shouldn’t say under my breath “please fall, please fall, please fall” every time I see drunk girls or people on rollerblades.
Oh, hey! Here is a boy I like to look at:
Let's kiss!
If I had a poster of him in my bedroom, it would be on my ceiling. Right above my bed. Aww yeah.
If I were the queen of Norway I would make him be my slave.
Last night I had a dream in which my entire family, even the weirdo Tennesseean outback ones who don’t love me because I think there’s gay bars in Heaven, was in the car with me, and I played my favorite song for them and they all LOVED it. It wasn’t my favorite song in actuality, it was a John Martyn song that I hold pretty dear and I think is a great song, but the point was that my whole family like the song a lot and thought I was awesome for bringing it to their ears. They were all clapping for me and showing their appreciation when the alarm on my phone went off. The phone was on vibrate, and was in a drawer, and was buzzing against something in such a way that did not exactly wake me at first, so in the dream the sound translated as an earthquake. So the dream version of me yelled from the back seat of the car, “Oh COME ON.”
It seems that I am always having these dreams where I’m in a car with my family and there’s some kind of natural disaster but the family member in the driver’s seat simply refuses to drive away from the tornado/acid storm/earthquake epicenter, and the whole family is kind of like, Meh, let’s just wait it out, see what happens. Jeez.
I have the BIGGEST zit today. It’s like a nipple on my chin. I might as well draw a little smile and a pair of sunglasses on it. And it WILL NOT GO AWAY. And it hurts a lot. Good thing the chin strap on the mask for my cupcake costume covers it. I wouldn’t dream of going out and terrorizing Gotham City with a shiner like this on my jaw.
When you order an “Italian Soda” from the menu at this Starbucks/NotStarbucks, they give you a Pepsi in a Starbucks/NotStarbucks cup. I know because I SAW THEM POUR IT OUT OF A PEPSI SODA PUMP. Italian soda, my ass. Really? Really? What are they trying to pull?
I should have ordered a Vanilla Bullshit.
Now that I am a part-time employee, I am no longer eligible for hour-long lunch breaks. I am told that this is the law, but whatever. I have calculated that it takes approximately 17 minutes to order, pay for, and receive food on one’s lunch break, plus or minus two minutes walking time, depending on where you go. This means I end up with 10-13 minutes to slam whatever I’m trying to eat.
I really miss having an adult job, with a desk and an office and an ass load of little green office supplies to make me smile all day long. But mostly I miss being able to decide when I am hungry, where I want to eat, and when I want to come back. I miss being treated like a 27 year old who can handle herself. I will come back to work, trust me. I will be reasonable about my unpaid lunch time. Fer chrissakes.
It’s winter in Chicago still…right now it’s only 62 degrees and overcast, and the only good thing about that is the metal eaves of the sushi restaurant across the street are not reflecting the sun’s rays and fucking blinding me everytime I look up.
Here are some cupcakes:
Ro-Bros
They are really cute but they look like they are the kind of icing that is really sugary so it hardens all crunchy on top of the cupcake, so you peel it off and throw it out so you don’t get a toothache. What a buzz killington.
Who the hell would post a missed connection like this?! Gosh, I don’t know. Sounds like a crazy bitch.