Tag Archives: douchebags

I don’t know who Subash is.

stinking cuuuuute

There are a lot of things that I consider to be difficult about having to go to work every day. Most of these things center around the fact that it’s just weird to be around a certain group of people all the time, for no other reason than that you all work toward goals that are somewhat the same, or in a bunch of interlocking positions. Otherwise it makes no earthly sense for you to be in a big room with those people all day. I really think those people who go to work and meet a bunch of really awesome people in their own age group with whom they want to be friends foreverrrr are lucky. Maybe it’s because I’m in a field that’s got a bit of an older demographic and is fucking FILLED with other awkward and aloney-on-my-owney introverts, but I have never really met anyone in my professional jobs who I’d call on the weekends or go to the movies with.

I guess that’s why it’s super weird to me when we celebrate each other’s weddings and baby showers, and even weirder when we show sympathy for family deaths and stuff. It’s not that I don’t feel happy for people when they have babies or get married (I mean, not SUPER happy, mostly I don’t care, especially if it’s a certain few). And it’s not like I don’t care when someone’s friend or family member dies. I just think it’s a more awkward part of working with groups of people. You’re bombing along, getting work-related stuff done, then a card for someone you’ve either met once or not at all and can’t even really picture in your head comes across your desk. “It’s Britney’s birthday!” “Subash is moving on!” And you’re supposed to sign it and cross your name off a list on the back of the giant manila envelope it’s concealed in (OH LIKE BRITNEY DOESN’T KNOW SHE’S GETTING A LAME CARD FROM ALL OF US) and the person who brought it in sneaks off into the next person’s office. And the cards are always really stupid, like sparkly rainbows or cartoon birds with briefcases, and they’re never funny, and I can never think of anything to write in them. Do you know how many times I’ve Googled stuff like “heartfelt phrase to write in stranger’s going away card”? Quick, Google! Get me something heartfelt! I have no fucking idea who Subash is.

Except for all the days when you showed up.

Except for all the days when you showed up.

 

Google says this stuff:

“It’s been a pleasure. Keep in touch!”

“Wishing you all the best in your new pursuits.”

“It’s been great working with you!”

“Glad to have met you.”

What if none of that shit is true, Google? WHAT THEN. I guess you lie your face off. Also, what if everyone else has written the same thing? This is often the case. If you’ve ever noticed, people on Facebook CANNOT HELP but to basically copy and paste the post from the person who commented on that birth announcement just before they did. It ends up looking like this:

“OMG CONGRATS she is so stinking cute!”

“She is so STINKING CUTE omg congrats!”

“Congrats on the stinking cute BABY!!!”

“OMG stinking BABY Cute congrats Baby!”

And on and on and onnnnnnnnnnnnn like nobody in the history of time has ever said anything but “congrats” and “stinking cute” about a baby. (What is it with that “stinking cute” phrase anyway? I feel like women write that a lot about babies, and I imagine them scrunching up their noses like something actually smells bad, and pushing the baby away, like UGH too cute.)

I am thinking about this today because I think most of the things we say to each other are meaningless and bland, endlessly repetitive, and boring. I went looking for a sympathy card that was recently required for a coworker. I stood there in a sea of lukewarm sentiment and I think a dark spot settled into my brain from which all the dumb feelings will now come forth, forever. Lots of suns peeking from behind clouds, rainbows peeking from behind clouds, frowny cartoon clouds, basically lots of cumulonimbus porn going on. Well, then there’s the religion-focused ones about God with glittery crosses on the front. Like the one JESUS DIED ON!

When my grandpa died and everyone kept saying “So sorry for your loss so sorry for your loss sosorryforyourlosssss”, I asked my mom what people were supposed to be saying, since it was like being stuck on a carousel with a crowd of 1000 sad clones around you. She said in that kind of situation, you should think about what would be comforting to you and say that to the other person. Man, she was way off. Because usually the things I would appreciate are completely nsfw and totally offensive. Also, when I think about what I’d want work people to say to me if I lost someone I loved, it would be: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The last thing I’d want to do is open a $1.99 grocery store card from work people and read all their names and repeat phrases and think of them sitting at their desks Googling something thoughtful to say to me, the last thing I’d want to do is read the signatures of the ones I was pretty sure didn’t like me anyway. Who wants to think about that?

I started to think maybe I should write my own greeting cards for all occasions, which I will never give to anyone since they’d just make people want to jump off a bridge. Anyway, here they are:

Card 1: Illness

Front – Picture of a cartoon giraffe in a blazer with a briefcase

Inside – It’s too bad you’ve been out lately, I’ve been wearing some great outfits.

Card 2: Illness/Bereavement leave

Front – Illustrated to look like a notepad. Things You’ve Been Missing At Work…

Inside – Are you kidding? Nothing. Fucking nothing.

Card 3: Bereavement

Front – Sun peeking from behind some clouds. We Heard You’re Sad

Inside – We’ve all been sad before, too. Well, most of us. Not Pat. Pat is a fucking sociopath.

Card 4: Baby shower

Front – Cartoon baby buggy in muted pastels

Inside – You told us you were having a baby so here is a card for that.

Card 5: Birthday

Front – Two dopey cartoon birds and like a coffee cup or a water cooler or some shit

Inside – It’s a good thing there aren’t birds inside at work. That would be insane. Happy Birthday.

Card 6: Wedding

Front – Raised shiny gold interlocking rings

Inside – Is it the guy you brought to that one thing last fall, you know the thing where Crystal drank too much and flipped over that tray of chicken chimichangas? Hahaha! No but seriously is it that guy?

Of Turds and Creeps

I’m mad now because I got a mocha instead of regular coffee for the first time in like 100 years, only because I was looking for something that would jack me up and keep me from crying all morning over nothing like I did yesterday, and that thing was so ass nasty I wanted to scrape my tongue and the roof of my mouth. It tasted like someone sprayed the inside of my mouth with bug repellent that had been flavored like Now & Laters. It was gross. I wanted to go throw it back at the girl who made it. I am pretty sure she fucked with it because the last time I was in there she accused this guy of cutting in front of me in line, and snapped “The line starts back THERE, sir!” and even though people are ALWAYS cutting in front of me and nobody ever says shit about it, this one time the person wasn’t guilty. So I said “Oh, it’s OK he was here first, I’m not in a hurry.” She glared at me and begrudgingly took his order and he didn’t even say thank you and now I have drunk a coffee full of rat poison for no good reason.

I listened to something really disturbing on a podcast on the way home yesterday. It bothered the fuck out of me and it’s called Of Birds and Boundaries, it was on Love + Radio. I keep looking for more information about it, or something to tell me how to feel or what to think. There’s really so little available about it. It’s not that I don’t know what I think (I will tell you in a minute), it’s that I feel so mad and annoyed and disturbed by it that I almost don’t trust my reaction, and want to make sure there’s not something I missed or misunderstood. I don’t think there is. I mean, it’s still possible, and it’s entirely possible that there’s something cultural I’m missing or being insensitive about. It’s art or whatever, so I think you’re just supposed to take what you get from it. But I’m mad about it!!!

So. Basically, this girl places a Craigslist ad for a Hasidic Jewish person “for research.” She’s non-practicing Jewish and wants to talk to someone about what it’s like to live in a Hasidic community in Williamsburg. I think that’s interesting enough of a premise, but what happens is this guy keeps trying to turn the conversation towards getting into her pants. I guess it’s possible you could come away from it without getting that impression, but if anyone’s ever tried to get into your pants, you can’t see this as anything else.

First of all, he finds the ad on Craigslist. My creep radar went off immediately, just because Craigslist is like the basement of life where all the creepo cockroaches scurry around hiding from a naked bulb swinging on a wire. If you have to go down there, you fucking RUN to get back upstairs. Anyway, he starts talking about perusing other ads on the site, “you know, man for womannnn” stuff, but remarks that “most of that is like hookers or whores.” Ah. Right.

He drops references to make it clear that he wants to meet her, like how she should feel free to walk around the neighborhood and “maybe I’ll get to know you up close” and she says “Yeah maybe we can see a movie or something.” He asks her if she’s in a relationship, and he immediately asks how, “in the secular world”, is a man supposed to stay faithful to his wife when he meets someone who is “more hot.” He then talks about his arranged marriage and how his wife doesn’t dress pretty anymore and how he complained to his mother about her. What if he finds a girl that’s hotter?! “It’s hard for a man to stay with a woman.” She goes along with this, “Oh I’ve noticed this too!” So he gives himself the out that “men are like pigs” and generalizes with the example of Tiger Woods. Meanwhile my eyeballs are falling out and the eye holes are pouring blood because this guy just looks like a fucking predatory asshole. I’m sitting there remembering the time when my sister’s boss started complaining to her about his wife and telling her lots of personal things and then just straight up tried to fuck her. I just get annoyed with that approach, that “wuh wuh wuhhh I’m a man baby what am I supposed to do about my unhappy marriage OH I KNOW I WILL PUT MY DICK IN YOU.” Ugh, no. No. No.

So she shares her breakup story with “Marty” and it’s pretty sad and sounds like a rough time. The thing is, even while he’s consoling her and “oh wow must be heartbreaking,” I’m just thinking of his flat voice and how he’s probably got his hand on his dick the whole time. In the next portion, he wants to exchange pictures, she won’t, so he says “Oh well if you will please describe yourself.” She does, talking about her hair length and eye color. He says “What’s your body like, is your body like fit, orrr?” GROSS. STOPPPPPP.

He takes some video around Williamsburg for her, and wants to drop it off at her house. She has a friend go down to his car and get it from him. After that, there’s a segment where he asks her if she went on a date the day before. She says yes, and he replies “OK so I will probably not be talking to you in the future.”

This ended while I still had quite a bit of commuting left to do, but I just shut everything down. I couldn’t even stand to listen to any kind of palate cleanser, this bothered me so much. And I hate that there are people out there who would say “YAY ART YOU FELT SOMETHING” because I really just felt something I feel every day, which is that lots of men are creepy manipulative liars always on the hunt for poontang. I’ve been on the end of the creep stick (literally, you guys) and it’s awful. It’s predatory. I don’t ever again want to be in situations where men are talking to me like, “So why don’t we all take off our shirts and have a philosophical discussion about our favorite sex positions? Why don’t we just randomly start talking about the last time we had sex? If I make you jealous of another girl, will you describe your boobs to me?”

I guess it’s all part of some kind of grody sex dance that people do with each other, but I hate it. It’s full of shit and lies and bad intentions. That’s why this piece bothered me so much: this girl is looking for someone to talk to her about something specific and in walks this dude who basically passive-aggressively barfs his sexual needs all over her. It’s gross, it’s sad, it’s uncomfortable. And I hate that I really wanted to know what Hasidic life was like, and how the eruv worked, and where it was, and this guy fucked it all up by being gross. Now I’m just mad and I don’t care.

ART.

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The Wonky Almond

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

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

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

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

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

SIGH.

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

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

 

Something Awful

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

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

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

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

Eww what a total dog, huh?

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

The proper uniform for any Team Douche hopeful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Donger Need Food

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

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Day 43: Medicated

I just got to work and the dickholiest of dickholes is sitting here, waiting for me.  He looks at me, then down at his watch as if to say, “You’re an entire minute late and don’t think I didn’t notice because I did, and I’m very important, which you would know if you noticed that I am wearing not one, but two Bluetooth earpieces, but you probably didn’t notice because they are imported from Japan and are therefore very small and efficient, which you would know if you could afford small electronics.  So let’s get going because I have a lot of Very Important Research to do.”

Part of his strategy is that he regularly emails everyone he comes into contact with who he thinks might be good for networking.  He sends these weird mass emails, these “life updates,” which are just like “Hi, just checking in.  Took my son fishing off the coast of Malta last week.  It was really wonderful to get to spend time with him as he is quickly becoming a man.”  Fucking prick.  They’re like Christmas letters from the really rich extended family that you don’t really like.  Only they’re once a month.
Just to keep in contact.

Brain Ball

I took a Tylenol PM last night for a splitting storm headache, which I only get when the weather is hot and then suddenly cooler and rainy and dark.  It feels like a little ball above my right ear grows spiky tentacles, which snake out to wrap around the back of my brain and over the top, as well as under my right eye, where they anchor and suddenly retract.  My right eye feels like it will pop out and the entire right side of my head stings, even my hair hurts.  Then lightning flashes and the headache ball tightens its tentacles and the pain shoots through my teeth for about as long as the light is in the sky.

This sounds weird but I’ve decided that it’s all due to electrical energy.  My mom suffered from epilepsy as a teenager, which simply faded away as she grew up, but she still gets headaches on her right side when the weather changes.  She said that before a seizure, she would see swirling white balls of light through the peripheral vision on the right, light that would get bigger and rounder and she’d be looking for its source and then she’d wake up on the floor, tired and achey.  All of the brain is connected by electrical impulses and magnetic fields and shit, right?  The brain and the spine.  So I see no reason why nearby surges of electricity shouldn’t affect me in a totally fucked up, painful, hereditary way.  It’s kind of cool.

Two related/un-related things about this:

1. Joan of Arc is suspected to have had some type of aural epilepsy.  This condition can produce, pre-seizure, a feeling of calmness and well-being, sense of a presence, bright light, and disembodied voices.  She described having all of these symptoms when put on trial for heresy.  As sad as that is, how fucking cool is that?

2. When I was a kid, this little old lady lived in a house up the street.  She wore thin cotton flowered housedresses and aprons every day.  There was a trunk in her basement where she kept an old pair of galoshes from the 30s, charred down both sides and melted to shit.  They were the shoes her sister was wearing when lightning struck and killed her.  I used to think of her asking to keep the shoes, putting them in that trunk, moving that trunk around with her everywhere she went.  I want to be her when I get old, except with my magical electrical brain-ache.  When I feel it, I’ll tell all the children to run on home ‘lest they get struck by lightning.

Hello, Athens!

I don’t think that any amount of medication in the world could save me from being horrified by the monster that is Junk Butt.  I always knew she was fucking terrible in that way that the worst dark-hearted people have no idea that they’re sociopaths, because they don’t know what a sociopath IS so it means nothing to them, like everything else.  Things that have always annoyed me about her are as follows, in case you haven’t been paying attention:

1. Tells you you’re pretty then tells someone else you’re ugly.

2. Believes it’s her duty to stop and chat with everyone in the office at least once a day, so she can tell them that they’re pretty and tell the next person that they’re ugly, actually.

3. Has acknowledged her shittiness and fakery as a well-calculated and carefully produced front, an acceptable front for the rest of the meaningless world to have to deal with.

4. Has a big junk butt and talks about going to the gym all. the. time., but must be lifting weights with her junk butt because you could set your drink on that thing if you needed to tie your shoe.

5. Is just very basically a horrible, nasty person, and is pleased with her own horrible nastiness.

One time Junk Butt sat down in front of my desk and burst into tears.  She cried and cried, her face twisting into this strawberry-streaked cream cheese mess, her wet lips smacking and sticking together like slices of raw fish guts.  I sat there staring in shaky awe, somehow I knew that she wasn’t crying because her cat died or she stubbed her toe, she was about to confess something to me, and I heard part of my brain telling me to RUN AWAY, but then she made her confession.  The night before, the concierge, a sweet old woman from the U.K., had asked if she could have one of the countless pieces of cake set out on a fancy table for some event Junk Butt had coordinated.   “Noooo,” Junk Butt had said, probably in that sickening coo she uses on people she deems ultimately unworthy of the use of her Adult Voice (so….everybody), “That cake is only for guests.  Sor-ry!”  The concierge said she understood, grabbed her umbrella, walked out the door, and into the street where she was hit by a car and killed.

“If only I had given her that caaaake,” Junk Butt wailed.  “If only I had given her that cake and chatted with her for just FIVE MORE SECONDS,” she wheezed.  I attempted to console her, but she refused to be consoled, kept insisting that it was her fault.  As the days passed, of course the accident was The Thing to Talk About among everyone, and eventually, everyone had been visited by a sobbing Junk Butt who just felt “totally responsible” for the death, and before you know it, people are stopping by to hug her and reassure her and stopping her in the hall to tell her what a great person she is and she should never ever feel bad about anything she can’t control and God and the Bible and strength and peace and basically you are a good person and what were we talking about?  Oh yes, the dead woman.  And you, dear, of course, you poor thing.  You’ve been through so much.

I think she picked up on the fact that I wasn’t buying her shit.  Maybe that’s because I would walk away abruptly every time she came to my desk and started to sniffle.  And she definitely picked up on it when I said “You need to go somewhere else.  I can’ t deal with this.”  That next week she made a crack about how I can’t handle emotions, “They make her uncomfortable at work!”  I wanted to jump on her like a wildcat and tear open her ribcage, eat her ashen heart while she watched, but I just smiled.

That was well over a year ago.  On Day 34 of my Medicated Life, I left work early to visit my friend in the hospital.  We’d all gotten an email weeks before that he’d fallen and bruised himself, and wouldn’t be at work for a few days.  I missed him those few days, thinking he would be back in front of my desk for our daily chat later that week, not knowing he was actually in the ICU with severe cranial contusions.  Finally we all got an email stating that he was stable, and that we would be encouraged to visit him so that his brain would be challenged to remember us.  He wasn’t sure what year he was in, who people were, what had happened, where he had come from and where he was going.  Apparently, you can expect this to happen to you if your brain suddenly and forcefully hits the front of your skull, then the back, then the front again.  When people enter your room in the Rehabilitation Ward, you’ll look at them like a deer in the headlights because it’s scary to not remember them, then you’ll decide you don’t care and go back to watching The Simpsons, which you never liked before.  The world outside is a total mystery, and the food inside is bad.

So on Day 34, I felt sufficiently able to handle this, and planned to leave work for a visit.  Two other people decided to come, and wouldn’t you know, one of them was Junk Butt.

People always talk about the antiseptic smell of hospitals, but I really hate how they always have some kind of really loud ventilation system, like five jet engines attached to the top of the building, howling all day and night.  The hallways are throaty and raw, everything is impersonal.  My friend’s ward has a library with a piano and several mismatched chairs and loveseats passed down from refurbished offices, a wide window looking down on a patch of the city that seems to be in perpetual tarp-blanketed construction, and a book on the shelf that says, in bold yellow letters, EVERYBODY DIES.  I walked by and saw this message, which was supposed to be comforting, but felt a bit like a command.  And of course I thought that this was funny because all of my emotions have been packed away neatly in a fire-proof box with sharp corners that pokes me somewhere around my liver.

Junk Butt goes in nervous, talking about how she’s nervous, letting us know that she’ll just not be able to handle it if it’s worst case scenario stuff, like what if his face is still bruised and what if he doesn’t remember me and ohmygoddddd I’m so nervous if I start crying just clear me a path to the door so I can just go be emotional by myself, NO, don’t follow me out, just let me cry somewhere off by myself in a romantically lonely corner of the yawning white hospital.  Really, I’ll be okay, because I’m a strong woman.

In reality, when she’s faced with the blankness, the disinterest in interaction, the half-closed eye of an individual submerged in the ocean of competing thoughts and bewildered by the shimmer of memories like bottle rockets, she is thrown so off-guard she’s unable to muster the strength to perform.  All she can do is talk about how nice the room is, in her most phony, high-pitched voice.  She glances at the stack of magazines on the bedside table and tells someone who is re-learning how to read how super awesome it is to have plenty of stuff to read.  She tells him he’s so lucky to be in a place that has such totally super great food, gesturing at the half-eaten cardboard pizza on his tray, which brings to mind that stuff they gave you in grade school with glorified ketchup for sauce.  “They’re takin’ good care of ya!” she chirps.  He stares back at her and barely nods.

This is when I realize that Junk Butt is only so awful because she’s bricked up behind this wall of fake asscrappery, so high and well-constructed that there’s never going to be a way out.  She might as well be dead in there because I think she’s at the point where she’s so scared of the world that she’s done for.  The more excited she appears to be about life, the more she’s actually screaming at you that life terrifies her.  I felt really bad for her in that moment, but I remembered that this wasn’t her hospital room.  I didn’t much care for her starting to do that puppet show she does where she sticks her own hand up her asshole and makes herself look stoic and unafraid and positive, so I moved in and sat down next to him, close to him, which was scary but which I needed to do.  It was scary because he had on sweats and these sad hospital-issued socks, scary because a woman at the table in the community area outside his door was bleating for someone to please come open her milk, scary because he looked lonely and locked inside himself.  I thought of Bauby’s therapist and my mother helping an old lady with her groceries once when I was seven and how nothing bad is going to happen to you for doing something loving for someone, even when you’re afraid.

“So,” I said.  “Did you hear that Pippa Middleton didn’t win that Best Butt award?”

“No,” he said.

“Yeah.  It was some other woman.  Some other woman named Carol.  You wouldn’t think a Carol could have a hot ass, would you?”  He agreed that Carol is not a hot-ass-havin’ name.  But I showed him some proof.

His therapist came in and asked him if he knew my name.  First, he called me Fag Hag, which I thought was hilarious, and so did he.  Then, finally, he said my name, my full name, and smiled at me like he was really just faking a head injury, like a sneaky kid.  Of course, when asked Junk Butt’s name, he said it was Esther Williams.

(Of course, Junk Butt took this as a compliment and thought it to mean that she was skinny, but I think it’s because she’s very…theatrical.)

Toward the end of our visit, Junk Butt struck up her happy chord again, tweeting about how great it must be to just get to lie in bed all day and not go to work.

As soon as she shut the fuck up, I said “This sucks.”  He nodded.  “I would be bored here, too.  It’s OK to be depressed here.”

“I am depressed,” he said finally.  “I just feel sad and they keep wanting me to do these stupid exercises.”

“But you got this awesome window to look out of!!!” Junk Butt chimed in.

“Do you like the pizza?” I asked, gesturing at the wafer of half eaten crap on his plate.  His therapist had told us that he kept asking for pizza.

“No, it’s awful!” he replied.  “And the cake is bad, too.”

“You ate it all!!!” Junk Butt squeaked like a Disney animated squirrel.  He stared at her.  I bet he was thinking, My God, when did Esther Williams put on all this weight and stop making any damn sense?

“Well,” I said.  “It will be good to get home.  You can order an edible pizza and I’ll make you some cupcakes.  I promise it will be less depressing, it will get a lot better than this.  Just focus on the day you’re going to get to leave here.  You ARE going to get to leave here, I swear.”

“I don’t know!” Junk Butt junk-butted in.  “I think it’s awesome here…like a hotel!  I love hotels!”  Apparently she didn’t realize that in hotels there’s not a package of adult diapers on top of your particle-board bureau for all to see, there’s not a cacophony of beeping and loud nurse voices and people moaning for their meds outside your open door at all hours of the day and night.

He looked back at the TV and said, “Amy Winehouse is on.”  Amy stumbled around on stage, hollered “Hello Athens!” to the crowd in Belgrade, and we got our things together and left.

Through the mouth-breathing halls, Junk Butt couldn’t stop talking about how sad everything was, how she was just going to have to take a long, long time to get over this.  How he would “never be the SAME” and how everything was just awful awful awful.  I just kept thinking how it was kind of nice to not feel like that anymore, to have my feelings chemically enclosed in this place that isn’t exactly unreachable, but is definitely not the first place to look for substantial feelings.  I was thinking how much better I felt and how able to spread emotions out and look at all of them, turn them over and think about their edges instead of just running to the bathroom to sit in the bottom of the shower and cry about everything.  I wonder how much easier it would be to be around Junk Butt if she found some magic pill that allowed her to process her fears instead of turning them into a billboard, or a crown of thorns for herself, with a bunch of pink sparklers attached at the top.

There was a dog tied up to a bike rack outside of the hospital.  It looked bored and hot, and I pointed at it.  I asked Junk Butt, “What do you think that dog’s thinking?”  She blinked at me, like she couldn’t believe I was talking about a stupid dog at this horrible and terribly sad moment in her existence.  “I bet he’s thinking something like,” and here I said in my best old Western movie sheriff voice, “Ah sure wish ah had me a taco right ’bout now.”  I’m pretty sure Junk Butt was horrified.

Welcome to Whore Island

The Pants got this weird deal through AT&T which allows us to watch Season 5 of Dexter on Showtime On Demand.  That’s good enough for me.  But, amazingly enough, the deal also includes access to Showtime After Dark On Demand.  This is the channel that they put all the sexy silicone soft core shows on.  The first of these which I watched was The Devil Wears Nada.  It has taught me a lot about women and life and sex that I didn’t already know, but am glad that I know now so that I may protect myself.  Now I will share it with you!

So Candy Cane is this young sexy part-Asian girl (all the sexy parts are Asian, at least) who is looking for her big break into the television industry.  In the meantime, she’s kept herself busy designing sexy underwear.  She hopes to work her way up from the title of lowly assistant to a powerful and bitchy titty magazine publisher, I forget her name, so we’ll call her Bitchy McTitties.  Bitchy McTitties is really hard-core and apparently gets pissed off a lot at her current assistant for having lesbian fuckfests with all of the bikini models out by the pool all the time, and getting pussy juice all over her company-issued Blackberry as a result, or something.  So the company’s brand is pretty basically falling apart and Bitchy McTitties wants to be sure that Ms. Cane can turn shit around without expecting to get paid very much.  It turns out that McTitties hires Candy Cane on the spot because not only does she wear a leather bustier to the interview, she also is totally cool with letting McTitties mash her tits around to make sure she’s assistant material.

Here's Candy, modeling her new creation! Later she has to wear it to work because that's all that's clean.

(I bet you didn’t know this, but the way lesbians have sex is that they roll around and grab each other’s boobs and play with each other’s hair, then one bends the other one over and humps her doggystyle and they both fucking love it.  Just don’t think about the mechanics of it, okay?  You’ll ruin it.)

So eventually Candy Cane is running crazy trying to keep up with all of her work and only has time to have booby-bouncing softcore sex with her boyfriend like 4 times in a 30 minute span.  Also she’s having to keep a lot of things from her boyfriend, like the fact that when McTitties pages her, it’s usually because she needs her to have sex with some hunk that just showed up and won’t fix the pool skimmer until he’s been paid in poon.  And sometimes McTitties herself needs a good pubic-bone-to-butthole banging before she can get inspired to tell people what to do.  God, the things an assistant has to do!  It takes her forever to put on real clothes, so in order to get out the door and into her Lamborghini really fast, Candy has to wear stuff she puts together in the dark, made of motorcycle parts and the straps from a million complicated bras. She runs into the mansion where Twatty Magazine has its offices and photoshoots, like a sexy little deer on 6 inch platform heels, and wouldn’t ya know it: someone is always waiting right there to grab her by both boobs and swing her around and bang her.

(I bet you also didn’t know this, but if someone grabs a girl’s tits, her clothes fall to the floor and her eyes roll back in her head and she has no choice but to let them bone her.  This is what I’m saying: walk around with your arms across your chest unless you want to be totally helpless, y’all.  And don’t take a job working under [or on top of] McTitties.)

Candy’s life is falling apart.  All day and all night spent getting raw-dogged by random people, virtually no time to see her oily boyfriend or have her period.  She keeps re-scheduling for both, but McTitties always calls at the last minute and needs her to bring her vagina over real quick because the bikini models have refused to take their bikini tops off for the midnight pool shoot until someone settles the dispute over which one is the best lay by fucking each one of them and then judging them on their performance.  Candy!  What are you gonna do, girl?  You can’t go on like this!

Thankfully, Candy gets a new job, or something.  I don’t know for sure because I had to go pee and I didn’t bother pausing the movie.  One of the random dudes who banged her at one point apparently figured she had a lot of talent and made her a success, because later he wears a suit and bosses her around for like four minutes.  But she stresses that while she totally hated the grueling schedule of working at Twatty, the constant fucking on camera was a total plus and something she was not averted to doing in her new job as a network executive and part-time underwear designer.  So they have a sexy board room encounter with the girl who brings them some coffee and all is right with the world.  Actually, that might not be how it ends but that’s when I decided to turn it off.

The photographer for Twatty Magazine deserves a shout-out in this synopsis, and I can’t find a single mention of him in the many recaps for this movie that exist online, except for one, written by Showtime, which describes him as “the comic relief.”  See, things get really intense a lot of times in movies.  (If it was just 100% dying of heart disease in Beaches, nobody would watch it.  Instead it’s like 47% dying of heart disease, 26% heartbreaking love triangle, 10% cheating husband, 10% leaving husband, and 7% of big old goofballin’ Bette Midler.  Case in point!)  If you were just expected to sit there and jerk off for 77 minutes, The Devil Wears Nada wouldn’t become a family favorite because nobody likes to sit around with sore genitals.  So you need to jerk off, laugh, jerk off, laugh, repeat.  This film artfully handles this necessity via the character of the nameless flamer who does a variety of weird things for God knows what reasons.  For instance, he wears the same outfit every day: a purple beret, a long white flowy shirt, sparkly Hammer pants, a blue jacket he borrowed from his friend in the circus, with long glittery tails, and a gigantic floppy red bow tie from the joke shop.  He’s a big man, and he flitters about the mansion with both pinkies in the air because, you know, how else would you know he’s gay?

(You can’t be funny in a lesbian butt-humping movie unless you’re gay.  And don’t even try to point out that the lesbians are gay–they’re not.  They’re working.)

This photographer doesn’t take pictures of anything, he has a hunky assistant who holds the camera and shoots when he says to shoot.  He also has this weird stick with a feathery bird stuck to the end of it.  He uses this to wave at the bikini models so they know where to look.  He also does this thing he learned about on Leno where you ask people really random easy questions about American history and stuff and decide that they’re stupid when they don’t know the answer.  Seriously: if you like quiz shows, you will love this movie.  He stops photo shoots like ten times to swing his bird stick around and ask one of the girls, “What’s the capital of the United States of America?”  Destini or Sugar or Kitty then bites her lower lip, tilts her head, and says “Ummm like, California?”  Homogay cracks up and looks directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall as if to say, “See?  They’re just big stupid titty sticks!!!  And I’m just a big old funny fag!  HAHAHA!  Now for some more sex.”

Two in the mornin’ and the party’s still jumpin’ cause my mama ain’t home

I just found out you can text the police in my city.  If you see a crime happening, you whip out your SmartPhone and take a picture or a video and text it to this special cop number.  Then the cops show up and bust it up and everything is OK again.  I thought about doing it the other night at 2 in the morning when the neighbor teenagers were having a Scream Meeting out on the front stoop of their building, beneath the open windows of everyone on the entire street.  SO I TOLD THAT BITCH, I SAID, BITCH, YOU AIN’T SHIT.  You know, hardass stuff like that.  Instead of each of them smoking their own cigarette, they kept lighting single cigarettes and passing them around, like a joint.  I think it was just for how cool the passing action looked, and how often they got to use lighters.  Anyway, for a second, I got all these really inappropriate thoughts, which I’m going to be honest about, even though they made me feel like an asshole and a Republican and a racist and stuff.  I thought, “I wish they’d shut up so I could get some sleep so I can get up and go to work and pay for their Section 8 apartment with my tax money.”  OH MY GOD.  THAT’S TERRIBLE ISN’T IT???  But that’s what I thought.

And I didn’t tattle on them with a cop text.  I just turned on the air conditioner until it drowned them out.  Mostly out of guilt and the fear that when I’m old I’ll be an asshole, like for real and not just for fake.

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God-Forsaken Party Building: The Beginning of the End

Unfortunate Ponytail Accident

There’s a girl who rides my train at the same time every day.  She wears awkwardly placed versions of Target’s idea of hipster clothing, and though she’s no svelte figure, they still seem to fall off of her in the wrong places.  Her dark cigarette jeans become almost baggy around her butt and hips, sliding down, giving the effect of giant wayward breasts that have somehow been knocked around to appear tacked to her lower back.  They slide down at about the same time that her thin knockoff Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones re-print distressed concert tee (see below) slides up, aided by the shifting strap of her quilted crazy-print all-the-rage-with-suburban-moms laptop bag.

Nice try, Target. You win the Zany and Thirty Years Late award. Oh, and ten bucks.

One who walks behind her is subjected to a view of her panties (and they are “panties,” a word so icky that I usually reserve it for the type of floral print underwear they sell in groups of 6 in plastic bags at department stores, usually with a picture of an otherwise sexy lady on the front, laughing it up, conveying to all who handle the panty pack that yes, 25-year old women do wear, even enjoy, the Hi-Cut Brief–while I get puke in the back of my throat simply by Googling “hi cut brief”).  The Panties serve this girl as a type of spangled butt crack tent, saving her from the scarring she would no doubt endure if someone saw anything more than what she’s cool with showing, that is, the skin between the top of her sagging jeans and the bottom of the leg holes of The Panties.  She wears them like the dude on the corner by the bus stop wears his boxers: up higher than where pants would be, pants creeping slowly toward the ankle.  However, she, like the bus stop guy, always wears a belt of some type, tightened juuuuuust enough to keep the pants above knee level.

GAH! Nothin' "brief" about em, Mama.

When she alights the train, she begins a furious dance down the street, known to some as walking, but when she does it, it looks as if her legs are tiny catapults fired from behind.  One arm secures her quilted bag, while the other flaps crazily out at her side, like she’s swiping her way through a crowd, swatting at giant flies that are already mostly behind her, her arm the only oar rowing her tubby tug boat forward.  She reaches up at intervals to straighten her knockoff designer glasses, cheap gold metallic plastic “D&G” glinting in the sun, and in doing so pretty much only manages to disturb them from where they’ve slipped, miraculously, to the top of her nose, where they should be perched.  It’s like the glasses, wise beyond their price tag, are saying “This is for your own good, you know!!!”

Her hair is the color of the edges of a scab when it’s too small to be there, brownish yellow, and just as crusty.  It looks as if it’s been in an unfortunate ponytail accident: chopped to a quick without a moment’s notice.  She bumbles past the door I enter every day, on to some other place, I imagine she’s a literature student writing some disgustingly complicated work that will never be understood on any level by anyone, and will be published for that very reason.  Else she’s a student of some type of earthy science, where you spend ten years discovering things other people have discovered a thousand times, in the off-chance that you might find out something different about it, whilst some aging professor on the verge of giving up on the effect of radio waves on the migration patterns of the African gypsy moth, silently cheers you on with his mock indifference and lack of ability to express emotion.

When I see this girl, I can’t look away.  All of the above makes me regard her as her professor would regard some rare moth, the common, yet complicated, Dorkus totalus, otherwise known as the Wingless American Nerd.  When I see this girl, I get the sense that I’d like to nail her to a tiny board and put her under glass, I’d write a million papers about her that will never be read because they’ve already been written.

Everyone, everyone, I would like to announce that I’m So Difficult.

At least, according to the leasing agent in charge of renting my apartment, I’ve recently been a bit difficult.  Which serves to be confusing to her and the legions of potential renters she parades through my apartment, as normally, people enjoy paying for a place to live separately from others, while under the constant threat that total strangers may come in at any moment, without notice.  Many of the moments in my apartment are Bra-Less, Pants-Less, Leaning On Pillow Eating Taco & Watching Bridezillas types of moments.  I do not enjoy constantly listening for a click in the front door lock.

I also do not enjoy coming home on a Saturday afternoon after a showing to find my back door standing wide open, as if a ghost was taking out the trash for me and would be right back.  When this happened, I immediately called Leah, the leasing agent from The Company That Owns My God-Forsaken Party Building, Where People Walk on the Roof Shirtless With PBR’s  In Hand Every Night, Where The Fence Might As Well Be Made of Road Bikes Covered with Ironic Stickers.  She spluttered at first, feigned ignorance, admitted (because she had to) that she’d shown the apartment that morning, but denied ever taking anyone out the back door.  “Look,” I said, jutting words in edgewise, as that was the only way to halt Leah’s blubbering damage control, jiggling around on the phone like a pan of Jello on top of an old rickety clothes dryer, “I don’t like the idea of people walking in and out of here all day long, I don’t know if it was you who did this or another apartment company–”

“YEAHHHHH,” she foghorned, “Because those apartment agencies are SHADY, dude.”  (She over-enunciated “dude,” like she was coming to my school to talk about drugs and turned her folding chair backwards and straddled it to show me that she was just like me.

“If they’re shady,” I said, “whyyyy are they being allowed to show my apartment??”

Leah jibberybabbled something about how the Company That Owns My God-Forsaken Party Building has no control over the people who come in.  How it could be “anyone!” from any one of the city’s apartment leasing agencies, where all you need to get into real estate is a car that was made post-2006 and a willingness to bullshit people into signing a year of their lives away to a place more expensive than they can comfortably afford so you can collect their first month’s rent.  “SO!” Leah blared, “What I can dooooo is I can put a note in your file that you ONLY want our company to show your apartment.”

“Fine,” said I, “Perfect.”  Normally I am wary of people who say they will Put Notes in My File.  I’m aware that my file doesn’t exist, in that way that electronic files kept by magazine distribution companies do not exist.  It’s a place where they type in whether you lost your temper and called them an asshole so that the next person you call about the fact that it’s been 6 months and you haven’t seen your refund check yet will know how to handle you.

Apparently Leah didn’t put said note in said file, as I continued to get calls from leasing agents allllll week last week, asking to show my apartment at random times.  I kept saying no, and they, keys to my place in hand, protested.  “It’s illegal for you to say no,” one particularly jerk-offy, self-important douche named Ted snipped.  Another asshole, high on his title of “Leasing Agent,” the fact that his picture is on a website and that he gets to work in some hip converted loft apartment with a Starbucks machine in the corner, huffed “You’re making things really hard for me, Girl.”

So fuck Leah, I thought.  Obviously something was amiss.  I didn’t mention any of this to her when she called to set up her own showing, and asked me “Have we found the culprit yet?” like all this time it was me who was supposed to be fucking dusting my apartment for prints, me who was responsible for going over the books to see who had accessed my apartment listing on that day, between the hours of 11am and 12:30pm (mind you, after Leah had left, Leah, who never fucks up and leaves doors standing open).  “WE have not found the culprit,” I said.  “I don’t know.  See you later.”

I hung up and called Leah’s boss, who at first attempted the same cavity-inducing damage control as Leah.  I thought about alerting him to the fact that I’d very recently gotten lip service from Leah, and had no need to have my lip re-serviced by him, but as I told him the things Leah told me, that the company had no way of knowing who was coming in or out, that those leasing agencies were “shady,” blah blah blah, his end of the phone went quiet.  “Well,” he finally said, “I guess all I can say is that this is all news to me.  We personally check out each of the keys to our apartments, and log who goes in and out.  It’s very easy to find out who was in there that day, and those agencies won’t be allowed into our properties again.”  Of course, he then saved Leah’s ass, which she’s been having a hard time covering lately, by reinforcing that no one in OUR company would EVER leave a DOOR OPEN.

Right, so, that’s why Leah went into a tailspin of pretend ignorance, why she suddenly didn’t know how to use company protocol to find out who was in my apartment, why she treated it as a problem that just downright sucked for me, but was my problem alone.

I think it’s probably my phone call to Leah’s boss that shifted the tectonic plates of Polite Looking The Other Way that she’d hoped I would stand on if she was chirpy and nice to me.  Some shit must have hit the fan, because the tone of Leah’s next phone call to schedule a Saturday morning full of momentary visitors to my home was decidedly terse.  At that point, I was on a roll of Renter’s Rights, and I denied Leah her earliest request.  “I’m not going to be up at 8am on Saturday,” I said.  “I’ll be in bed.  Sleeping in.  They’ll have to come later.”

“Oh, it won’t offend me if you’re sleeping, I don’t mind,” she said, as if it was her feelings I was trying to preserve by not having my sleep interrupted by 3-5 sets of eyes at the foot of my bed, surveying my closet space and measuring the distance from wall to window in increments of Ikea furniture.  “All I care about is just like, getting this apartment rented.”  Like that had been unclear to me.  But still I said no, have them come later.  No, no, no, and finally, no.  Later, or no deal.  She grudgingly said she guessed she’d caaaall them baaaaack (people seem to hate to inconvenience someone until they’ve got a piece of paper that says that someone will legally have to pay them a certain amount every month.  Then you can be inconvenienced until the inconvenient cows come home).  She left me a voicemail later that she’d set up the first viewing for a whole hour later than previously planned.  “Hope that works for you,” she said into the chasm of my voicemail, then clicked her END button with as much fury as she could muster at 6:30pm on a Friday afternoon.  I thought about leaving her a voicemail that said, “Sure that works for me, because I’ll be heading over to  your apartment at 9am, I’ll be peering into your shower, opening your closet, tracking cigarette butts and street tar into your living room.  Me and a whole bunch of people I’ve just met will be standing around in your bedroom at approximately 9:15am, looking at your used Kleenex and a thong freshly peeled off your butt and Post-Its from your boyfriend.  And if you don’t smile about it like Frances fucking Farmer on the pony ride at the dime store, I’m going to call you at the end of every long work day and leave you a pissy voicemail.  Sure, that time works for me just fine.”  END.

Cut to Saturday, when I’m trying to make myself invisible as people wander aimlessly through my apartment, politely pretending not to notice me as I sit there and catch up on paying the bills and filing the evidence that I’ve done so, the most bland and impersonal ritual I could come up with at short notice on a Saturday morning.  I’d told Leah after the first showing that I’d be gone before the next, so imagine her surprise when she’s standing on one side of my front door, apologizing to who she hoped would be the Replacement Tenants, for the fact that I’d been “So Difficult.”   Imagine her surprise when she walked in and there were her words, above my head, glittering in a spiderweb hanging from the ceiling.  SO DIFFICULT, they announced, and the wide-eyed visitors to the fair indulged in the awkwardness of the whole situation.  Upon seeing me, frozen in time with my bag on my arm and my sunglasses in my hand, on my way out the very door into which Leah and her big mouth were barging, she stopped talking and immediately seemed very very happy to see me, as people are when they’ve just been talking about you and are horrifyingly certain that you heard it all.  She looked at me like I’d been presumed dead for ten years and finally made it down off that mountain and God I love that dress and those are cuuuute shooooes where’d you get your sunglasses? well I guess I better let them look around and get out of your way KTHANKSBYEEEEEEE!

Leah the Uncertain Leasing Agent, whose very name is unsure (“Le-uhhh?”), is now officially dead to me.  I’d like to tell her that there’s nothing wrong with being So Difficult when you pay money to have the keys to a space you can control for the period of 1 year, where you can be as difficult or as do0rmat-y as you want.  The deal is supposed to be that I give you money and you leave me the fuck alone unless something breaks or I stop giving you money.  The deal is not that I pretend you never make mistakes and that I take part in entertaining groups of total strangers for seventeen minutes at a time for free.  This ain’t a booth in the freak show, and even the bearded lady got a quarter every now and then.  So the next time you wonder, Le-UHHH, why people are being So Difficult, you should probably put a fucking cork in that blowhole you call a mouth and blast it out your asshole instead, an emission which, I assure you, will be far less of an affliction to the delicate senses of those around you than your blaring, broken-oboe blast of a voice.

But enough about Leah.

About this “so difficult” stuff.  I would like to point out that even though it’s illegal for assholes to party on my roof, even though the stomping around kept me up, then woke me up repeatedly, last night, as I live on the top floor, I did not call the police.  I didn’t even yell “SHUT THE HOLY FUCK UUUUUUUUP” out the window, as I was tempted to do at 1:37am.  Because I am not So Difficult, I am just the normal amount of Difficult, just a touch of Bitchy and Tired of This Shit.  I don’t like paying for things that other people get to stomp all over and disturb all night long, but what the fuck, I thought.  Party tonight means quiet tomorrow night.

On the other hand, I understand where Leah is coming from.  Most people are so goddamn POLITE that they lose the ability to COMMUNICATE.  I was supposed to buy Leah’s story that fucking Zorro could have gotten the keys to my apartment and left the door open, that there was no way of knowing what actually happened.  Because that would be The Polite Thing to Do, that would be Doing Her a Solid.  Unfortunately, the more solids you do for people like that, the more laptops and cash and TV’s get stolen out of apartments.  Bitch is lucky everything was still there when I got home.  Bitch is lucky I’m not actually crazy, or I would have called her boss at home and demanded she be flayed and tanned and made into a chair for me to sit on while I watch them burn her family’s  house down.  I did something that was somewhere between Playing Along and Losing My Shit when I called her boss and was honest about what happened.

So fuck this Shutup and Be Nice business.  I quit.  It puts you in very real danger of being people’s stairway to a paycheck.  Not that I don’t want you to get your paycheck, Leah and the Army of D-Baggy Leasing Agents, there’s nothing I want more for you.  But if you’ve got to inconvenience me to get it, you’re going to have a difficult time.  Nobody’s ever described me as “laid back” and “down to earth” and “goes with the flow” or even “totally cool.”  I think that’s because I open my mouth quite a lot, and 26% of the time something not entirely stupid and not entirely incorrect comes out.  Y’all just happen to be getting the brunt of that 26% right now.  Don’t be so difficult and deal with it.

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Bullshitty Crap

The Bird Cage

So the guy with the unfortunate task of being on the office birthday celebration list opposite the program director accidentally slept in this morning.  He arrived late to work empty-handed and sat dopily at his computer for half an hour before realizing why the buzzards were sloooowly slinking past his office door, giving him the eye.  It finally dawned on him that they were going to spread mayonnaise packets from the break room condiment slush bucket all over his ass and eat him for breakfast if he didn’t do something, and quick.  He ran out and bought four entire cases (CASES) of donuts from the bakery down the street, and two boxes of cupcakes.  He spread them on a table in the library, assuming there would be no students or resource needs for the entire morning, I guess.  The birds settled in and began picking at the boxes of sugary dough wads, laughing and yapping noisily as they joked about having seconds, hahaha, wouldn’t that be funny if I had a second?  But I won’t, oh no, I won’t…wait, are you going to?  I will if you will hahahahhahahahahaha.  But really…

No sooner had the birds flapped away than the power turned off, and the wolves descended.  Literally moments after my screen went dark, the shadows of the ten-ton bitches from Admissions darkened the doorway.  Guess who wanted to sit in the library and talk about minivans and eat donuts?  One of them even looked at me and said, “We’re looking for the food…is the food here?  We heard it was here.”  I pointed toward the darkened corner where the trays of donuts lay, a fatty dream: to eat a globule of shimmering fried dough in the dark.  They sat and sat and talked and snacked and joked about seconds and ate seconds and thirds and the moment the lights came on, they were gone like those black pterodactyls in that space movie about how it’s not safe to be in the dark because your ass’ll get eaten by black pterodactyls.

The allure of the donuts was lost on me, they smelled weird and looked like they’d been sprayed with glue and raped by everyone in the entire building.  So I picked up a chocolate cupcake with white frosting and crumbled up Oreos all over the top.  I struggled to bite through the chalky outer surface of the cuprock only to discover that the inside cake wasn’t halfway worth the effort, it was just as dry and crumbly as if they’d put a turd in a toaster oven for thirty-five minutes.  So basically what I had in my hands and all over my face was one of those horrible, poorly-baked pieces of shitty cake with a really fancy topper, made yesterday and left overnight in a bakery case and called a cupcake.  For shame.  I mean, does the coroner go around putting fancy hats on people who get splattered all over the road in traffic accidents?  Well, maybe he does, I don’t know, but he shouldn’t, because they’re still dead and splattered and nobody should have to look at them.

Well what if the poop looks like a cupcake, hmmmm?

I hate *everything* lately.

….everything.

But that doesn’t mean that the things I hate haven’t been worth hating.

For instance, I do realize that I’m hard to get along with.  I totally understand that I’m not the easiest person to be around.  For real.  That’s because I am very open about it when I don’t want to be a person that people be around.  And I’m hard to get along with because I hate crap, and I see no reason why I should keep my mouth shut and sit around and withstand bullshitty crap because that’s the friendly thing to do.  Well, who said I wanted to be friendly?  You suck.  Go away from me.  Let’s not be friends.

It’s just the worst when you’re around someone who cannot stop using your attention as their sounding board for who they think they are.  Someone who not only talks about themselves constantly, but who obviously spends hours every day reading celebrity gossip news, announcements of new works of fiction, film, and theater, every article on Wikipedia, and also has their ear to the ground on whatever it is that you’re interested in, and not only knows more than you do, but can’t wait to tell you just how much more.  And why it’s stupid that you’re into it.

I hate being interrupted.  I hate being one-upped and talked over and eye-rolled because I like something or don’t like something else.  It got to the point recently where I just have to go completely blank: I refuse not only to look this person in the eye, but also to state anything that could be relatively construed as anything resembling an opinion.  I tried not to make it sound like I knew anything at all about anything ever, because if I did, well oh boy, I’d be stuck in a corner with this asshole barfing everything he knew all over my face.  And it’s not as if I’d be stupid enough to come out swinging and challenge someone like this on anything they think.  It’s the simple act of breathing that sometimes sets it off.

Ick.  And it’s totally the type of person who listens solely to a very streamlined and specific group of musical artists, and knows eeeeeeverythiiiing about those artists, and carries around their fucking CDs, for chrissakes.  Who carries CDs?  The last time I saw someone carrying CDs, it was this forlorn, overweight, Nirvana-identified pre-Goth kid in high school who was desperate for everyone to know he’d just purchased that gaywad mini box set that the Smashing Pumpkins released with their singles in it.  He carried that goddamn thing like a purse.  Now I have to put up with this son of a bitch who actually knows SO MUCH about MP3 players that he has decided they’re a useless technology and is going to stick with compact discs.

Really, I’d like to make a game out of it.  I’d like to sit this person down with a panel of people who know what’s up.  You get points for getting him to talk about certain things.  Not like that’s hard, but it gets interesting when you get to the point in the argument (for every conversation with him becomes an argument) when he starts citing fake sources to support whatever claim he’s making (opposite of yours).  And holy mother of Christ, whoever wants to challenge him to a battle of early 90s music knowledge wins the fucking trophy.  Game over.  Now just try and shut him up.

I’ve always wanted to ask a certain five people I know if they realize just how much of a character they are.  I mean, you know that all of the characters from The Office are based on real people, right?  How does that make you feel, you shitbag?  You do realize that you are that annoying, yeah?

The bottom line is that some people are all around users: they’ll use your tab for some drinks, your coat pocket for some cigarettes, your car for rides, and worst of all, your ear and feigned attention for their sense of self.  And what’s worse is when they do all of the above and you’re expected to suck their dick for it, and if you decline, well, you’re the asshole.

So maybe I don’t hate everything.  Maybe I’m fucking exhausted and I need a sabbatical from people and how fucking…overwhelmingly…constant they are.

Maybe if I turn off my phone and pull the covers over my head for the rest of the day and night, I’ll be able to bite the inside of my cheek enough to hold onto a fake smile for fifteen seconds the next time I’m being told why my favorite author isn’t that great, actually.

Things That Are Currently Making Me Want To Have My Head Smashed Like a Berry Between Two Massive, Sharp Rocks

Volume 1

I went to undergrad with her and endured her listless slumping about in the hallways, her outdated, comical green chunks of hair, ironic nose ring, and overall punk rock prom queen attitude, and now I have to look at her books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and read her horrible blog.

When one of our classmates died, she waited for his birthday to come around to post this on his MySpace:

Happy birthday. I got the advance copies of my book yesterday and would have loved to give you one as a birthday present. You really didn’t have enough birthdays. I’ll have a drink in your honor tonight. Miss you much.

Well.

How…thoughtful.  “You’re dead.  Let’s talk about me, though.”

Commence the smashing, please.

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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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This is a stapling emergency.

All right, so, Staples is officially weird as hell.  And I’m not just bitter because they didn’t have a note card organizer with enough tabs to accommodate all the classes of html tags I’ve written down.  I’m not just saying that because all of their business card carriers were ugly and totally made for corporate dudes.  I was very bitter about my office supply shopping experience, yes, but that is not why I was really freaked out by the mutants that run that God-forsaken shit bin of paper clips and ultra white copy paper.

It’s because, when we were standing at the register so Agent Big Guns could pay for her stuff, we were approached by the store’s mascot.  He was wearing his Staples polo shirt, which had been washed one million times, and his pleat-front dress pants, which office supply store people always wear in that no-really-I-always-dress-this-professionally kind of way.  Of course, it was a sneak attack, so it wasn’t his attire I noticed first, it was his honking voice, as he came up behind us and screamed, “HOW WAS YOUR SHOPPING EXPERIENCE TODAY LAAAADIES?  DID WE FIND EVERYTHING WE NEEEEEEED?”

Now, I don’t know if I’m just naturally filled with guilt, but when he talked to us in that super-positive, overly-loud way, I immediately thought that one of us was going to be accused of stealing and tackled in the doorway.  It was so upbeat and loud that I thought for sure something was about to catch fire and kill us all.

So Big Guns says, “Um, good…yeah,” and I say “Yeah, thank you…”

The freak in the polo just stood there, staring at us.  JUST STOOD THERE, STARING AT US.  I don’t know how else to describe it; it was standing, and it was staring.  There were a few jerky, robotic little nods of the head here and there.  We both just looked at him, then at each other, then back at him, then more nervously at each other.  It was fucking out of control.  I looked plaintively at the check-out girl, who didn’t seem to notice that the entire world was sinking into a bog of awkward.  I think we stood there for about six and a half hours, this guy just staring us down.  All right, no, I don’t want to be over-dramatic so that everyone thinks I’m exaggerating the whole thing.  I will be 100% honest and say that it was a good 30 seconds of standing and staring at us.

Finally, finally, the bastard spoke up again.  “Oh!  Don’t thank me!  It’s MY job to thank YOU!  You’re the customer!  We wanna see you back here again!”

I hate it when retail employees say that shit.  It’s like, I get it.  I understand how it works.  If I don’t come in and buy stuff, the whole thing grinds to a halt.  Me Consumer, you Seller.  No doy, Staples.

So he’s standing there, and he’s said his piece, and Agent Big Guns and I sort of smile in that really obviously uncomfortable way, that makes you look like you haven’t been able to poop for two weeks.  There’s more nodding, more staring, and FINALLY the Office Prick just sort of melts away, into the background.  That’s about when, in an empty empty EMPTY (except for me and the tumbleweeds) store, another Staples employee (a short, skinny, cornrowed young man with his forearms held high, bent at the wrist) sashays past me, grazing against my back, and says “Essscuuuuuuuuse me?!”  I reacted by looking into the void that existed in the ten foot radius all around me, to be sure I wasn’t misjudging the amount of empty available space through which he could have walked.

And that’s when the slowest checkout girl in the universe started complaining about the fact that Prince was playing over our heads in the store.  “Is it like, the nineties or whuut?”  She stared at us and we both grimaced again.  Less than a yard away, the first crazy was yelling at another set of poor customers, “DID WE HAVE A GOOD SHOPPING EXPERIENCE TODAY?  IT’S MY JOB TO MAKE SURE YOU GUYS HAVE A GOOD SHOPPING EXPERIENCE.  WE’LL SEE YOU TOMORROW THEN, ALL RIGHT?!”

I can only think of one scenario in which you might go to Staples the day after you go to Staples.  It involves a stapling emergency which happens overnight and causes you to run out of the ten thousand staples you bought the day before.

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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

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.

I'd eat the shit out of these shits.

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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

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Get out of my house.

I’m watching Diane Sawyer on “When Daddy Becomes a Mommy” and it’s a pretty horrible way to wake up in the morning.  Or awesome.  Depends on how you look at it, really, it does.  I looked at it on mute and it was much better.

I had a job interview yesterday, for a job I really want.  I feel like a douche now because I kept saying, “WOW, everyone is so nice!  Everyone seems like they LIKE to be here!  I can’t believe…”  The lady who set up my interview, who would be my awesome boss, assured me that not every day was magical.  But I couldn’t exactly describe for her how absolutely awful every single day of my working life is at my current job.  I interviewed with seven different people over the course of 2 1/2 hours, and during that time I was asked no less than seven times to describe my current job.  I expertly wove a tapestry of shimmery bullshit about how “ohh, you know, it’s retail, but I love the people I work with…” and “I just don’t like the whole selling aspect of it.”

I have another interview tomorrow morning.  I swear that the sky opened and rained job interviews on me, just when I was starting to completely lose my grip on the reality of possibility, just when I was starting to think that I might be better off staying in bed every day.

If I don’t get one of these jobs, I’m staying in bed every day.

Alohomora, asshole.

Can I just say how awesome and great Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was?  Yes, I CAN, because this is my blog and I do what I want.

It was soooo great.  It was SO GREAT.  And awesome.  And I don’t want to hear any more mean-spirited criticism of the little cry session I had toward the end.  And the very little bit of a cry session I had at the very beginning.  Look, this is what happens, all right?  I have a LOT OF FEELINGS.

Awwww little magic bayyybyyyyy!!!

Awwww little magic bayyybyyyyy!!!

For Harry Potter, that is.

It’s funny, I often daydream about the short list of people I’d like to stab in the throat, and the longer list of people I’d like to hit with blunt objects.  However, show me any scene of Harry Potter, wherein Harry feels lonely and sad and like he can’t go on, and my little Gryffindor heart melts.  And that’s what it did, and that’s what it will always do.  So.

Enter Baldyballs

I showed my apartment all day on Saturday.  It was quite an experience, I must say.  The worst part was when this short, stocky dude with alopecia all but let himself in my front door, when I had been expecting a girl at that time, and started barking questions at me.  The girl hung back in the hallway, didn’t even introduce herself.  She was this timid chick with adult braces, still in her ill-fitting black work suit.  They both had on Chase bank nametags, and she introduced the completely hairless little ogre in my face as “my boss.”  Well, her boss proceeded to tear through my place, saying things like “Well, it is definitely cozy,” with an air of contempt, as if I’d lied to him personally about the square footage or something.  He spat so many questions at me, I finally had to say, “Wait, hold on, hoooold on a minute.”  I hate it when people ask you six questions in a row, or ask you any question and then continue to talk.  It makes me want to ask, “Sorry, do I even need to be here right now?”  Eventually, I got enough of Baldyballs’ superiority complex, his “we’re-probably-not-interested-so-get-nervous” act, and just said to the girl, “You know what, Vanessa?  There are a lot of people interested in this apartment,” (as there was a girl actually sitting AT my KITCHEN TABLE filling out an application at that very moment) “and it doesn’t sound like the place for you.”

Vanessa responded by cheerily saying “Oh, well, I’ll email you if I’m interested!”  But Baldyballs got the point and they left.

Ugh.  Get the fuck out of my house.

What the fuck is with the guys who work at Chase banks?  Is it like that at every bank?  Holy God, I hate them all.  They’re all such loud mouthed douchebags.  WHY?  Is it a prerequisite for getting that job?  I mean, there’s obviously no education requirement.  I bet they just put you in a room and see how loud you can talk and make sure you can write your name and then give you a polyester blend suit and a paycheck.  Going to a Chase bank to get anything done is, for me, like being in a terrible Viagra Triangle bar, only it’s during the day, and all the lights are on, but somehow I feel even more like I should protect my ass and not bend over to pick anything up.  Waiting in line, I get the unmistakable feeling that assholes are checking me out.  It’s because THEY ARE!  And they make no attempt to hide it!  They storm around like they’re busy and powerful and the latest contestant on The Apprentice, followed by a trail of CVS NightStorm cologne, they actually stare at you like you’re some kind of merchandise.  And they YELL at you.  I can’t go into a Chase bank without getting screamed at by some spiky-haired jagoff “YOU BEING HELPED?  ALL RIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!  YOU SURE??  JUST HANGIN’ OUT, HUH?  LEMME KNOW IF YOU NEED ANYTHING!!!”  It’s that, or I submit myself to the mercy of the angry black women tellers.  They flash their ridiculous nails at you and mutter everything while looking in any direction but in your eyes, and scream at you when you ask them to repeat themselves.

Conclusion: the bank involves a lot of yelling.

Anyway, there are two people currently fighting over my apartment.  I assume that the girl who is on unemployment will not be the winner.  And while it makes me sad to leave my cute little single bunny-hole, I can always comfort myself with thoughts of all of the life-sized things made of chocolate that I will soon buy with the money I’m saving.

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