Tag Archives: writing

November 10, 2011 · 6:14 pm

Laundromat of Souls

I’m in a laundromat right now.  So I can say for certain that Way #1 to get rid of lewd stares, nasty comments, tailing, and general feelings of uneasiness from creepy men on the streets and in various establishments is: push out a hacking, disgustingly sick-sounding cough, OR rip a giant fart.  I can usually produce a cough more reliably than a good fart, but sometimes I manage a twofer which is actually a foolproof way to get a weirdo to leave you alone and stop following you and talking about all the things he and his 4-foot 5-inch frame are gonna do to you, giiiiirl.

This morning I met this awful girl, and the moment she walked up to our group to say hi to the person in the group she knew, I got this nasty feeling like not only did I not want to meet her, and hope that she didn’t reach out and introduce herself, but I also wanted to get as far away from her as possible in that very moment and never see her again.  For almost no reason whatsoever!  I mean, she hadn’t even had a chance to DO anything stupid, she just walked toward us and my entire being went ARRRRGGHHHHBLERRRF!

Her name is Sally.  She has straight blonde Barbie hair down to her shoulder blades.  She was wearing black sunglasses and just about enough foundation and powder to make her face look like an art experiment or a crime scene that had been thoroughly dusted for the rapist’s prints.  Her voice was crusty and deep like she’d heard someone make fun of a deep voice once and and just re-created it constantly to be funny, but it wasn’t funny anymore!  Not to me, anyway!  She was over-layered in leggings, some kind of stocking that went over her ankles, ankle boots with snappies and clips all over them, a skirt, a long shirt, a coat, a hooded thing under the coat, a scarf, and fucking black leather bike gloves.  When she reached out to shake my hand, “HIIIIII I’m SAAAAALLYYY,” her tone condescending somehow, quickly looking away from me and to the next person in the middle of my introduction of MYSELF, I cringed because I had to touch her bike-gloved hand.  And I thought, “Well, of COURSE you’re wearing a bike glove you don’t need to be wearing.  Fuckhead.”

I found out she’s this art student from the most expensive and notoriously snobby art school in this city, a school this city is just about known for.  I’ve never met anyone from that school that I’ve been able to stand for more than two seconds, who hasn’t managed to make my skin crawl with their thick stink of pretention.  I mean, there’s this guy, who I ripped to shreds in the comments because I couldn’t fucking STAND that there are people in the world who get paid to regurgitate the pile of steaming shit this guy’s spraying (comments have since been deleted, THANKS INTERNET POLICE).  Then there’s this guy who read a story I published and proclaimed it shitty and proceeded to try to hit on me by telling me I owed him a meet-up since he was pretty sure it was based on his life, then changed his story and called me an idiot and reminded me the story was crappy, all because I called him on his ass crap.  Now we’ve got fucking Deep Throat Sally who, I’ve heard, submitted as her master’s thesis an art installation that was only 8 screens lined up, the same girl getting fucked in different pornographic ways on each.  That’s fucking art.  No, really, it’s fucking, and it’s also art, WHATEVER YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE IT’S SO VISCERAL.  We’re 0 for 3, shitty art school.  Things aren’t looking too good for you.

I’m totally over the fact that people pay any fucking attention to these ass fucks.  Author dude gets a STUPID amount of pussy.  I mean, every time I turn around, some chick I know is just slobbering out her hoo-ha, trying to get in his bed.  And Deep Throat is one of those girls that nobody seems to like and everybody says that nobody likes but their excuse for paying ANY attention to anything that comes farting out of her stupid face is “Yo, you don’t want to tell that girl you don’t like her, she is fucking CRAZY, man.”

Let’s remember, for a moment, that people usually think a woman is crazy if she talks, at all, about anything.  So naturally Deep Throat, who cannot shut her stupid mouth about how “visceral” things are, naturally fits that category, possibly through no fault of her own.  But I wish we lived in a world where people would fucking be honest with these stupid assholes.  Stop fucking them and stop listening to their fucking bullshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Walt Dick-me

I stayed home on Saturday night and heated up the ol’ TV TUBE because I was behind on about a million years of housework.  How lame is that?  Anyway, I have been staying over with The Pants for just about three weeks so every time I’ve dropped by my place I’ve just dumped shit on the couch or the floor, or just opened the front door for long enough to toss stuff inside.  Umbrellas, jackets, half-slips, bags of Cherry Sours.  It was time for a major cleanup.

So I turn on the TV and holler like my neighbor does when there’s some kind of sports on TV, because TBS is showing Disney’s Beauty and the Fucking Beast!  YES.  This delights me to no end because I only watched it about 60 million times as a kid so I know every word and distinctly remember every single cell of animation.  So I’m running around vacuuming the drapes and spreading potpourri in the drawers and other stuff that fancy ladies do, and I’m singing along to the chirpy giggle-pated Disney melodies.  Then I’m stricken by a very Adult Thought.

Okay, know how all the ladies in town are all about Gaston, and he’s clearly a piece of crap on his inside parts, where the feelings are?  Imagine how jealous they were after the horrendous, ferocious Beast gets turned into a hot dude?  Because he hasn’t been a normal dude for a long time, he’s been basically a gigantic wolf/lion/dog man.  Superhuman strength and all that.  And judging by the fact that he can stand immediately after his transformation, his muscles haven’t atrophied or been harmed in any other way during his human-to beast-back to human metamorphosis.  So he’s probably got some pretty good strength and muscle tone, amirite?

Look, what I’m getting at here is how awesome it must have been to get your bones jumped by a supermodel who was very recently a full-time werewolf.  Just think about it for a few minutes.  If you need a Kleenex or two to ball up under your bathroom area, go and get them now.  I’ll wait.

Man.  Belle really got the nice end of the deal.  Hot beast on-all-fours lovin’ with Disney’s version of Alcide from True Blood, and a whole library of her own.  The kind with rolling ladders.  GIVEN TO HER.  Like, this is your library.  One can only hope that the royal collection policy from back in the day included some good YA and that Belle didn’t pay for the library in beastly urinary tract infections.

Could I trouble you for a more accurate description of a stillbirth?

When I was in college I had this creative writing class with a girl who was like Narcissus when it came to her own writing.  She was pretty much convinced it was the greatest poetry anyone had ever written and she COULD NOT BELIEVE it came out of her.  Here’s how the class went: either 3 poems or 1 short story were passed around to the class every week.  The next week, we’d all be ready with positive feedback, as well as any constructive criticism we had for the story/poem.  So we’d go around the room and everyone would talk about what they liked (which was sometimes so painful, “I really loved the cover page you made for this!  It’s so SNAZZY!  Do you use Corel WordPerfect?”).  Then we’d go around the room and everyone would pretend that they didn’t have anything negative to say about a short story called “The Pool” or “The Fountain” or “The Pool by the Fountain” that basically consisted only of a girl who died of cancer and a guy who vowed to never marry another person…you know, the kind of story Boyz II Men would write if they just put their lyrics into paragraphs instead of stanzas.  So the instructor would start us off on that part every week by offering some really polite criticism that could be taken or left and usually ended with “didn’t work for me but maybe it worked for someone else.”  Then we’d all meekly take turns with our gentle, easily ignored, well-masked non-criticisms.

So about halfway through the course, the cellar doors got blown way the fuck off this little organization and the shit pretty much hit the fan when this girl brought in her poetry.  She had made it clear that she’d been writing poetry for a really long time and reading e.e. cummings pretty much all her life and so she was actually a PRETTY good poet so if we could just skip to the compliments part, please.  She gives us the customary reading aloud of her work, the week after it had been given to us to take home.  Then she sat there almost pooping her pants with excitement, wriggling in her seat, pushing her hair behind her ears compulsively, clicking her pen, waiting in dire ecstasy for each next polite little gem of attention to trickle out of someone’s mouth.

As for the poetry, it wasn’t that good.  It just wasn’t.  The ones that weren’t straight-up parodies on the cummings style were just failed attempts at really deep, aching love poetry that just swirled down the toilet of cheesiness the moment she brought her boyfriend into them.  That’s because her boyfriend was this wheezing, zit-encrusted sack of dung who delivered pizzas for Domino’s and she chronicled their love affair by making silly little plays on words and cutesy references to him as her “knight with white pizza boxes.”  I mean, the poems were just hilariously bad.  And it was sad because I think if she hadn’t taken herself so assfucking seriously, they could have been really good.  Fuck yeah, write a poem about a guy who delivers Domino’s pizza and has zits.  I’d read the hell out of that.  But there was something about it, her demand to be placed instantly on the level of Walt Whitman & Co., that was just really off-putting.  It all stunk of little effort and great expectations.

(I also wrote some really horrible shit in that class.  Partially because I was also taking myself very seriously, and I thought I was hot shit because I wasn’t as bad as Narcissa, Queen of Pizza.  So on my week I submitted a story I’d written in 3 hours, a fact I thought was a testament to my excellent ability as a writer, in the week before I’d started my period, when I was experiencing some of the weepiest, whiniest, most sentimental pre-menstrual syndrome I’ve ever experienced in my life.  Anyway, my story was about this girl who got knocked up by her boyfriend and her mother wanted to force her to have an abortion and she wouldn’t, so she ran away (waaaaah!) and hid from her evil mother, and her mother made her think her boyfriend didn’t love her anymore (aaaaaaaagh!) and then he came to rescue her and then she gave birth to a stillborn and they hugged it and later got married.  The End.  I would like to say I have never written anything that crappy again—as I deserve to be punched in both eyes for making people read that schlarbage*).

So after the initial round of friendly “I like the, ummm….title!” comments, during which everyone took what you were going to say so you didn’t want to puss out and be like “Oh I agree with everything that’s been said, ” we started in on the negative.  Nobody really needed a prompt, but we got one from the instructor.  I don’t have the copies of this girl’s poems (which I kept because I kept everyone’s work because I keep everything), but I remember that one from that week went something like this:

I am

in the garden

r-e-s-t-r-i-n-g-i-n-g

my mother’s purple necklace

that she gave

to me

…and so forth, and so on.  So the instructor was like, “I just don’t really feel like you’re using your own voice, and that’s a shame because you have such a strong voice,” and of the other poem, which was the famous pizza delivery lover one, she said “It just feels at the end of the poem like it’s more of a limerick.”  To Narcissa’s horror, people agreed with this sentiment.  That it seemed like a cutesy little fart about a relationship that would probably better fit in a prime time sitcom.  Of course, she told us why every last one of us was wrong for feeling the way we did.  She basically said we just didn’t get good poetry.  It was just so far over our heads, we couldn’t understand a word of it.  Her poetry was going to stay that way and that was THAT.  And the next week she emailed us all a poem she’d written about our criticism, a meta-poem, which basically re-iterated everything she’d spat at us in class that day, but this time, it rhymed!  Also, she made a point to say something truly crappy to each of us on our review day, just because.  (On my big day, she said “And I don’t know if anyone’s bothered to like, tell you this?  Or if you even bothered to do any research?  But your description of a dead baby is way off.  That is SO NOT what a dead baby looks like.  My mom’s had two stillbirths, so I know about this.”)  So that was the end of the polite orchestration.

Maybe that was for the better, as it was my last taste of honest criticism.  I went on to get a writing degree at an arts school where I hated everyone (save 1 or 2 women) and just about broke my teeth from grinding them every single day, surrounded by people who were just like Narcissa Princess of Pizza in that they thought they were great, their parents thought they were great, and then they came to school every day at this open enrollment arts institution and they were told, yes, in fact, you are great, possibly even the greatest that ever lived.  So they’d just walk around shitting out of their mouths and writing down every goddamn thought that ever crossed their minds and you’d have to sit in a class and listen to them being filled with sweet-smelling smoke, purchased with tuition dollars and pumped right up their fancy little b-holes.  It was during this time of my life that I came to be really uncomfortable with praise.  There were absolute clowns in my classes who were just fallen all over and assured that they were THE shit.  Like this guy Patrick: he couldn’t be bothered to spell his name correctly, and wrote “paTRtiCk” in pen on the tops of all of his short stories.  He complained about things like how he’d been telling his mom all morning that he was going to puke, and she kept saying he wasn’t going to puke, and then he PUKED!  So the teacher would nod politely and then tell him how impressed she was with his work (which was about a girl who got cancer so her boyfriend brought her a stuffed cat and his mom threw it at him, the end), then she’d tell all the rest of us how much she loved our work.  I mean, how could anyone trust that logic?

I started to really want someone to rip into me.  I felt like I was ready for it.  Tell  me I’m crap.  Tell me what doesn’t work.  Tell me who I’m trying to be when I write this!  Make me find my voice!  THROW THE STUFFED CAT AT ME FOR CHRISSAKES.

Where was I going with all this?  Oh yes.

I mentioned my own idiocy in commenting on a blog post last week, which I knew was a bad idea because the post was written in this glib, flippant tone, a tone that just suggested to me that this person didn’t want to discuss, just be agreed with.  It was a tone I should have recognized since I’ve read so many of Narcissa Pizza Princess’s poems!  JUST NOD AND THINK I’M COOL FOR THE WORDS I SAY GODDAMMIT.  But I offered my two cents, which were that marriages that end are not all failures, and that when we’re sad about things that happen to others, it usually means we’re sad about something we fear for ourselves.  That’s all.  So my reply spiraled into, I think, the writer taking offense with me even bothering to suggest that, so she followed up with this post, which was meant, I think, to express that you’re a dummy if you think she gives a shit about anything that comes out of her own head:

I didn’t think it’d be necessary to say this but here it goes… Sometimes, when I write about something, it’s because it’s a noteworthy occurrence. This doesn’t mean I necessarily care about the item at hand.

That annoyed me.  Sorry to bother you by prompting a discussion on your post!  I didn’t realize you didn’t give a shit.  Just tell me that, then!  In the comments!  Where I’m trying to talk to you!  “Oh, actually? This was all some crap I wrote but don’t really, like, CARE about.”  Why start a whole new dramatic post and tell the wooorld?  Then I looked over the rest of the site.  I saw a lot of that thing I don’t like, that thing my old supervisor Turdburger used to do: he’d say things like “Well I’m rockabilly so I like this and that” or “I’m rockabilly so I’m totally not into that.”  He’d call himself out as part of a group and tell you to your face that his personal style, which he’d absconded from masses of other people with the exact same personal style, dictated his choices in music, movies, cell phone carrier, and every other goddamn thing you could possibly think of.  So here I saw a lot of the same thing: indie this, indie that, hipster, indie, hipster blerrrrrrf.  Band name, music style, band name band name band name, music style.  One of the tags for the post was even “unpopular opinions in indie,” which is pointless because what does “indie” have to do with anything?  Nothing!  It’ s a buzz word.  There’s also lots of self deprecation (“I’m a slut!”), and lots of talk about how much drinking, etc. the writer does.  Oddly enough, the exact same shit I used to write back when I was 3 years younger and single and just drinking and fucking around and writing about it in grand detail just to titillate and tease and attract and push the envelope and be this carefree, don’t-give-a-fuck, hardcore, badass version of myself that I now realize probably annoyed the bejeezus out of a lot of people.  I mean, to the letter I wrote this stuff.  (Except the “I don’t actually care about what I write about” part.)

Now I could probably write a paper about the phenomenon that is Young People Who Feel The Need To Discuss Their Use Of Alcohol and Sexual Experiences, Completely Unprompted By Others.  And I’d be the first one to submit data to my own study: if you could read my old blog and somehow not know my favorite kind of beer and how much vodka I’d consumed on a particular night, and how badass that made me, woo doggies, you must not have read my blog.  You must have just looked at all the pitchers of me in tight clothes!

Are we all destined to be forced to watch copies of our younger selves flap around in the same ways we did?  In five years, will I read something like this that someone else has written and be like, “Oh, you stupid twat.”  It’s like getting a Delia’s catalog when you’re 35, I’m sure.  What the hell is all of this polyester crap and why did I ever buy it?

Also, on another note, if there’s one thing I can’t stand more than people who label themselves, it’s librarians who label themselves.  I don’t know how many times I’ve seen “punk rock librarian” or “super nerd librarian” or “hot librarian” or “snarky librarian” blah blah blah used as a personal description for speakers in conference flyers, About Me’s on professional blogs, or every fucking where else some younger generation dipshit librarian is told to describe him/herself.  Then you meet these people who fancy themselves the hot one that everybody wants to fuck and also have intellectual conversations with, and they have mustaches and wear Twilight t-shirts with pit stains and kilts (for the irony, not for the heritage) and they stay at home every night petting their cats and blogging about the ice cream they made and how it was the bomb.  And because they are a stark contrast to the older generation of librarians, who have mustaches and wear sweaters with apples and schoolhouses and candy appliques and stay at home every night petting their cats and reading, they are suddenly, immediately cool, and they christen themselves “Indie Librarian.”

There’s this one librarian who refers to herself as “punk rock,” and she’s quoted on just about every librarian’s blog, and she’s totally smart and knows what she’s doing, but what rubs me the wrong way is that she tries to come off like she’s Iggy fucking Pop or something.  Then I met her once in the real-worldosphere, outside of the blogosphere, and she’s fucking bald and 6000 pounds and wearing a pilled, saggy dress shirt with a scooped front and snowflakes embroidered around the waist (in March), and it goes so low in the front that one of her wide, flat tits is hanging out of it.  She was just this big slob who spent more time writing about the image she wanted you to have of her than she did just being her whip-smart fucking self.

Oh, it’s just a mirror image of real life, isn’t it?  If  someone cannot stop talking about how cool and different they are, they’re just pissing themselves inside, just all over their insides, because they’re boring even their own brain.  And it just goes to show you that you should not trust an internet presence, especially when a person has a lot of things to write about what they’re like and what they think of themselves.**

*schlock + garbage

**Case in point: I am a cyborg.

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November 3, 2011 · 1:08 pm

Indie Graveyard

So the Indie Interweb is shrouded in thrift store finds and plodding down to the indie graveyard in their limited edition Toms cordones and Anthropologie dresses to begin their mourning period. Because Zooey Deschanel, America’s sugar tit, is getting a deevorce! And people who refuse to identify themselves as “indie” or “hipster” are trying to distance themselves from it, like “I don’t really care because I don’t really like her singing?  I haven’t really listened to the last Death Cab albummmm?  Also I don’t wear black shoes with black tights?  But like what does this say about the future of marriage?!  That is something I totally care about because I watch TV so I know for a fact that divorce sucks and is horrifying and life-changing and also bad for America.”

Here’s some examples:

In which some poorly paid intern at MTV has pieced together a playlist and analyzed the lyrics as morose warnings of the failed marriage.

In which someone with really awesome Photoshop skills has illustrated what a breakup looks like, inserted a bunch of shots of Glam Zooey, and a couple paragraphs about depression over the divorce of two total strangers.

In which a bunch of losers from the u-bend of the Internet toilet (message boards…yes, people still post to those) basically repeat what everyone in the rest of the world is saying, “She’s so pretty/she’s so annoying/he’s so ugly/it’s so saaaaad.”

I broke down this morning and got all philosophical on some indie chick’s ass and commented on this.  I realize it’s totally futile to even bother talking to anyone who thinks their feelings on celebrity marriage and divorce are actually feelings about The Future Of Marriage and not really a reflection of their fears about their own life/relationship direction.  I know that.  But since I started reading and commenting on Stephanie’s blog and Facebook, I’ve become less of a drive-by “Fuck you, you dumb bitch!” commenter and more of a thoughtful “I respect your opinion, and here’s what I think, you dumb bitch” commenter.  That is, I think, a bit of an improvement.  Here’s what I said:

I read something once about how it’s a tactic of Scientology to recruit as many famous people as possible because, as a culture, we are so focused on them that our brains immediately make the connection that if SO MANY famous people are scientologists, then, naturally, SO MANY normal people must be, too, since famous people only make up a tiny bit of the population. Right? RIGHT? I think the same line of thinking may be employed here with the “…everyone gets divorced. Especially famous people!” line.

It’s been suggested that loving, tender feelings between partners tend to go downhill after about 4-6 years. Incidentally, that happens to be about the amount of time it takes to raise a child to the point of being able to fend for itself. I found that really interesting in consideration of all of the short relationships and marriages I’ve heard about. It may just be our human nature that causes our feelings to change the way they do. We’re just big mammals, after all. And I’m sure it’s the more human side of our human nature that keeps us trying to find ways to compromise and stay together with our mate if that is what we want.

But why does it have to be sad if that’s not what we want? What makes you sad about Zooey and Ben? Why does the time a couple has spent together have to be considered a failure if they divorce amicably? Assuming that they didn’t take the Kardashian route and set up an elaborate scheme to boost their publicity, which I do not think they did, what I see are two people who probably loved each other very much, then decided that they didn’t want to be bound together for the rest of their lives. I don’t see that as a failure at all. I think it would have been a failure if they gritted their teeth, stayed together though neither wanted to, grew to resent one another, and brought up a couple of celebrity kids in that tense atmosphere. A relationship that doesn’t work out isn’t a failure: if you learned something about yourself and about the other person, and both parties can walk away changed for the better and happy about who they are, I’d say that’s a success.

We tend to project ourselves, our own fears about our own lives, onto celebrities, and the characters they portray. My friend told me about seeing the first Sex and the City movie and hearing a girl say, near the end, “Oh no! It can’t be over, I don’t want Carrie to be ALONE!” There was real fear in her voice. Because, for her, that meant something very real and very scary about the future: “If someone as great as Carrie can’t get a man…”

So we need to stop glamorizing celebrity relationships, especially those that are marketed to us as cute and innocent, like Zooey and Ben’s. We need to look at why we really feel what we do about news like this: what does it mean for us?

But overall I think Zooey Deschanel can suck it.

It took me an hour to make this. Not one lesson!


Speaking of drive-by comments, my blog has been getting over 200 hits per day because of this post.  Within this post, I discuss the weirdness of a certain popular set of dolls that are made up to look like, uhh, something that rhymes with “blonsters” and go to a school that is the opposite of low…the one you go to after middle school…I’m trying really hard not to mention it again because apparently droves of tweens Google the name every single day and land on my blog.  I don’t want to be held responsible for their disappointment.  Oh, hell, I guess I could say it like Snoop Dogg: Mizz-onster Hizz-igh.  Yeah.  They’re creepy.  Anyways, go away, Tweens!  Go read these.

And let me be clear: the misdirected tween hits are the ONLY misdirected hits I want to cut down on.  Perverts with racing heartbeats who Google something obscene and land here, only to find nothing but WORDS! DAMMIT!, who then leave me another “you must be fat/ugly” comment, typing with one hand because their sweaty dick’s in the other, well, I want you guys to stay.  Keep it coming.  HEY-OHHHH!!!

dork love

Yesterday on the train, I spotted a couple of major thirtysomething nerds.  Like dorky in the way that it was beyond dorky, the dorks who don’t even know how majorly dorky they are, they think everything is fine and they don’t try at all to be anything but what they are.  The Superdork of dorkdom.  They were standing, facing one another, in the little vestibule just inside the train doors.  I only noticed them when I got up and walked to the vestibule because my stop was next.  And I’m sorry that I had to get off the train so soon, because their conversation was SO AWESOME.

One dork was wearing a sweatshirt with a wolf on it.  A WOLF.  AND NOT IN AN IRONIC WAY.  Also, it was a sweatshirt.  As in, not a hoodie.  No zipper.  Just a good old-fashioned Hanes pullover sweatshirt that had been washed so many times, the majestic wolf and the pale moon behind him were flaking away.  The dork’s stonewashed, off-brand jeans bagged around his waist and might as well have been tucked into his white hi-tops.  The other dork, also wearing stonewashed jeans, was covered up top in a fully buttoned green army jacket.  Both dorks carried sensible, cheap backpacks, the RIGHT way (a strap over each shoulder, none of this cavalier, tossed-over-one-shoulder-Andrew-McCarthy-in-Pretty-In-Pink crap), with brand names like “Rock Tarp” and “Downs Sport.”  Dork #2 had cut himself right above his upper lip somehow, and was sporting a thin flesh-colored Band-Aid there, so close to his lip it looked like a part of his actual lip.  The blood from the cut had seeped through the gauze part of the Band-Aid and looked like a giant scab in the middle of it.  The Wolf Dork had a skinny black mustache tracing his upper lip, patchy, scraggly hair that seemed to have forgotten to grow in a couple of places.

And here is what was said:

Wolf Dork:  “I believe in you.”

Band-Aid Dork:  “…”  Looks at floor.

Wolf Dork:  “I just don’t think that you believe in you.  You have to believe in yourself.”

Band-Aid Dork:  “…”  Scratches at edge of lip Band-Aid.

Wolf Dork: Reaches out and awkwardly pats Band-Aid Dork’s shoulder with his fingertips.

It was pretty much the most awesome thing I saw all day.  I couldn’t even bring myself to laugh at them, they were so heartfelt in their dorkery.  I will forever wonder what challenge was facing Band-Aid Dork for which he needed a pep talk from Wolf Dork.  Perhaps he was going to give shaving another try?  Oh, that was mean.  But seriously, I wonder.

Nasty Self

The Pants and myself are moving in together in May.  Which is cool because he’s a good boy and he gives me a boner and doesn’t kick too much in his sleep.  Also our relationship is of the age where we’ve each pretty much acknowledged that we both poop and we share the coffee-making duties and we don’t bug each other too much.  So it’s all romantic and shit.  Also we’re both pretty into puppies and the idea of raising one together, like as a puppy team, and if that doesn’t make you want to vomit everywhere and then eat it, I don’t know what will.

Part of me isn’t scared because hey, I’m on drugs!  And it makes me not scared of anything!  I ride my bike real fast without a helmet on!  I spend too much money on leggings!  I’ve been driving a CAR, regardless of all of the horrifying car accident scenes that flash through my mind when I do it!  WHO CARES.  But, of course, part of me (Nasty Self) thinks I should be scared, so maybe I’ll sit down and devote 20 minutes to every day to be scared about moving in together.  That part of me goes “Ohhhh remember LAST TIME you did this?  And it didn’t work out?  And he brought home a 12-pack of Bud Light every night and turned his cap around backwards and drank it all on the couch then drunk-emailed all the girls he thought were hot then barfed for an hour then fell asleep on the bathroom floor??  Remember that?!  Remember how you couldn’t EVER get your hairbrush out of the bottom drawer in the morning because his head was always in the way!?!?”  Well.  Yes, Nasty Self, I remember that, but I really don’t think that’s going to happen this time.  The Pants is a social drinker and doesn’t wear caps and sleeps in a bed.

“WELL.  WELL.  What about…okay, what about other stuff you failed at, you failing failure!?  Know how you don’t write anything anymore?  WHAT ABOUT THAT YOU PIECE OF SHIT??”

You can't hide.

You can't run.

Sometimes Nasty Self is just a tailgating cocksucker.

But.  The Pants would like to live with me, me and Nasty Self both!  Score!  And I would like to live with him but no so much with Nasty Self.  But what are you gonna do?  I mean, the prescription interference makes Nasty Self shut up and cool the fuck out at least enough to let me stop crying all the time and asking “Why don’t you hug me while I’m sleeping?!  You don’t love meeeeeeeeee!”  Also it’s kind of nice not to have to budget an hour of my time each day to lie on the bottom of the shower sobbing about nothing and using up all the hot water.

I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna keep buying vintage Pyrex from Etsy like it’s going out of–well, like it went out of style in the 70s.
Because that shit is the best when it comes to pie crusts and cupcake batters, both of which I come up with like every single day because I’m actually kind of domestic.  I’m going to make an honest effort to come up with names for our puppy-child that aren’t appliances (“Microwave”), foods (“Cheddar”), or just weird made-up hybrids that you’d forget how to say before you had a chance to teach the dog to respond to it (“Snofflebugs McGilliwubbles”).

“Yeah, well you’re going to FAIL.  I mean, how can you even expect to be able to have a SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIP when Zooey Deschanel is getting divorced?!  ANSWER ME THAT, KNOWITALL.”

Wait, what???  Zooey D. is getting D’d?

Shit.  I quit, then.  I quit at life.

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July 22, 2009 · 8:58 pm

Face Punching Contest

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

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

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

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

It was creepy.

bitch tongues

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

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

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

What does this fucking cunt say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fucking….what?  I hate her.

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

Uh huh, uh huh.

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

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

I cannot stand Mary Gaitskill.

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

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

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