Queef it again, Sam.

My Final Semester of Grad School

(also titled I Am Going to Shoot You With  A Gun Now), starring Myself.

Have you heard of this thing called the Internet?  It is the word we use for a bunch of computers that are connected.  These connections allow people to rapidly move ideas and things back and forth.  Here is what the internet looks like:

Electric spaghetti = the Internet

The Internet allows us access to something referred to “e-mail” (the widely-used abbreviation for the term “electronic mail”).  Electronic mail is, for most people, a very confusing concept.  You know, people who are more comfortable with skinning a sheep, preparing a square of vellum, crushing berries and deer bones for ink, and then rolling the whole business up and sealing it with wax so that it doesn’t come loose when the courier takes it over the rocky hills into the neighboring fiefdom.  The problem is that e-mail is annoyingly quick and involves hardly any prep work, or walking, for that matter.  In light of this, most people do not like it.  Take the elderly receptionist across the hall, who doesn’t understand the concept of “forwarding” an e-mail.  She likes to ask me questions by forwarding an e-mail to me, any e-mail, from whenever, from whoever, appending her questions somewhere within the many responses attached to that e-mail.  The questions have nothing to do with anything that any parties involved in the original e-mail chain are discussing.  What’s great is that if I reply, she sends this reply back to me, as well as to everyone else involved in the original e-mail.

This type of situation calls for a fresh e-mail, a new e-mail, one unfettered by irrelevant banter or business.  However, my coworker is under the impression that the Internet is under ration, and that we must carefully preserve every sheet of digital paper we have, lest we run out.  Can you imagine??  What if you clicked Compose and your Computermatronic Machine barked back, “YOU HAVE USED ALL OF YOUR E-MAILS.  PLEASE RECYCLE.”

He will eat you if you don't.

(This same receptionist believes in saving newspapers.  They are removed from the shelf near my desk every week, and found stuffed around her CPU under her desk, in true A&E “Hoarders” style, which probably has something to do with the facts that 1. her desk smells, and 2. her computer has caught fire before.  Of course, the smell could be the clinically depressed fish in their tepid water, which she stirs with her fingers to “wake ‘em up”, the rotting food given to her by her “connection” in the cafe downstairs at the end of the day, stockpiled in her file cabinet, or the 14 large fountain drink cups filled with Pepsi from God-knows-when sitting in her overhead shelf.  But I’m pretty sure that the newspaper hoarding caused the fire.)

Anyway.  This information is neither here nor there.  But it sure is stinky!

I expect this sort of reaction to technology when dealing with someone who’s almost seventy and is too lazy to write on anything but cartoon animal Post-Its, or write with anything that doesn’t have a plastic ice cream cone or fuzzy Santa head on the end of it.  I do not, however, expect this kind of absolute fear and aversion to technology from the people who work in the Graduate Admissions Program Evaluations office at the institute of higher learning to which I pay lots of money (to be spent on things like Internet connections and e-mail programs).

When I say “pay lots of money,” I mean that in a few short months I will be paying out the ass and bleeding out the eyes because tuition loans will come knocking like Jesus on your nasty old heart, and I most likely will not just be handed a job as easily as they hand me a piece of paper saying I’m qualified to do a job.  So, it’s a little frustrating when they make it harder to GET that piece of paper by burying a million forms in the big yucky backyard I like to call “my school’s website,” and expect me to first know how many there are, that I need to go dig them up, then to actually go and dig them all up.

Not only are the forms outdated, containing references to permission numbers and systems no longer used by the university, they are also written for students who actually physically attend the university.  I mean, hey, if you’re going to have a blossoming online program, why take the extra half hour it might require to update a couple of things so that people who rely entirely on the website will know what the fuck they’re doing?  No.  Instead, directions are as follows:

Want to graduate?  Follow these steps carefully, and DO NOT CALL US.

1.  Go to this website.  Turn up speakers and listen carefully to instructions.  DO NOT CALL US.

2.  Open all 12 pdf forms, then close them again.

3.  Open all odd-numbered forms beginning with vowels only and save to your desktop.  Be sure that your desktop background is a picture of a waterfall or a kitten, as the forms will not work otherwise.

4.  Re-name form A yourlastname_yourfirstname_streetyougrewupon.pdf.  Rename form E yourlastname_biddlenuts_wtf.pdf.  Re-name remaining forms I, O, and U with this naming convention, except substitute your last name with the maiden names of maternal and paternal grandmothers, and for the third form just make some crap up.  For the first name, use the name of imaginary nuts (be sure to follow up imaginary nut name with “nuts”).  In the third field, use the names of the three architects of the tomb of Henry VII in alphabetical order respective to the form.

5.  Fill out all forms, print them, pee on them, then scan, save, and re-name following the filename conventions CLEARLY outlined in Step 4.

6.  Send to your grad advisor in an email with the subject line reading I DON’T LIKE YOU, EITHER in all caps.  Find your grad advisor’s e-mail address here.

7.  Failure to complete all of these steps exactly and fill out all forms correctly results in late graduation or no graduation at all.

8.  Please do not begin step 1 until you have filed the Permission to Fill Out Graduation Forms with the Forms Permission Office located behind the dog factory in Dongguan Province, China.  **This form must be hand-delivered.  Please bring 8 forms of I.D., excluding passports, state issued I.D.’s, and pieces of registered mail.  Please allow 18 months for approval of this form, during which you must establish legal residency in China.**

9.  DO NOT CALL US.  NOBODY WILL BE AVAILABLE TO TAKE YOUR CALL.  WE DO NOT LIKE PHONES OR CALLS THAT ARE ON THEM.

It’s probably like this because, in order to make any changes, there are 1,520 other forms to fill out in order to secure permissions, publishing rights, and rights to wipe one’s ass or take a coffee break while editing old forms.  So, might as well just leave them the way they are for full-time, on-campus students, scatter them in the web wind for the online students, and set a rigid schedule of deadlines for the completion of each form.  Didn’t get that Permission to Fuck Yourself form in on time?  Well, guess what, you don’t get to graduate.  So, you know, permission granted, you poor asshole.  Enjoy your Ramen, because you’re coming back to pay us this summer.

So, yeah.  When my school attempted to tell me via a mass e-mail that I wouldn’t be graduating until next fall, I decided to pick up the phone and call them, even though they haaaate that.  After about an hour on hold, I spoke with a woman who sounded like she was sitting in a La-Z-Boy with her jeans unbuttoned, and answering my question was keeping her from reaching for that 2-liter of grape soda on her side table.  You know, lots of heavy sighs and “let me seeeeeeee here” and crackly, spitty mouth sounds on her end of the phone.  She informed me that I couldn’t take the final course I needed to graduate because I hadn’t submitted my permission form that is apparently required for admission to the course.  I told her I’d send it that very second.  She proceeded to tell me that since the form takes 4 months to be approved by everyone who needed to sign off on it, I would have to either send it 4 months ago or send it now and wait four months.

“So,” I said, “Let me get this straight.”  Then I went into this scary lawyer mode, repeated everything she said, only in a way that made it sound just like the bullshit it was.  “You people can’t be bothered to move that form through your office to fast enough get five signatures in under four months?  EVER HEARD OF E-MAIL?  DO YOU HATE IT AS MUCH AS PHONE CALLS???”

That’s pretty much where my explanation of e-mail, discussed at the beginning of this blog post, came in.  While explaining the concept, I demonstrated it by e-mailing the form to her.  “See how quick that was?  Now just bang that through to all 5 people who need to sign it, and we’re done.”

If you do enough bitching and make people feel dumb enough, you get what you want.  Normally, I hate that approach, having spent so much time in retail, but as a retail employee, I never said, “Aw, you know what?  My handbook, written by Moses, clearly states that before you can buy those pants, you have to stand on your head and queef the Star Spangled Banner.”

So, guess who got into the final class she needs to graaaaaduaaaate on tiiiiime?

It’s me.  I threw in a little something about how I’d sue the all-fired shit out of them if they tried to make me pay for another semester of courses just because of a pissfuck form.

3 more months of school.

9,341 more 2-liters of grape soda.

Remaining forms to fill out: endless.

I Totally Did.

Last night I totally saw a commercial for high fructose corn syrup.  Like just advertising high fructose corn syrup.  Some guy was drinking juice or something and another guy was like Whoa, don’t you know what’s in that?  And the other guy was like Ummmm do YOU know what’s in it?  And the first guy, who was apparently supposed to act like some kind of total retard, was like High fructose corn syrup!  It’s like SOOOOO bad for you!  And the other guy is like Whyyyy is that?  And then the first guy is just like, Durrrrrr you know why, durrrr.  And he couldn’t come up with a good explanation.  So the end of the commercial was some kind of voice-over tagline of “High Fructose Corn Syrup: Some Stuff Is Worse, Dude.”  Or maybe that’s not how the commercial ended.  But that was the gist of it.  And then my brain fell out and I realized that I really don’t care what the TV says.

Then this morning, PepsiCo came by my office and dropped off a case of Mountain Dew that they had failed to hand out to students.  The PepsiCo rep asked if I would like this case of Mountain Dew, and I said “Do dogs pee on brick walls?”  But he just looked at me funny because I think he knows that I know that Mountain Dew is the dog pee that rolls off brick walls and into the gutter.

But this isn’t just any old Mountain Dew.  This is “Mountain Dew Throwback,” a special formula of the green stuff that is actually made with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, just like it was made in the days of old.  The bottle says “LIMITED TIME ONLY” above a picture of a hillbilly guy getting a hole blown in his hat from the cork shooting out of his clay jug.  Kapoof!

Don't mind if I DEW. AHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!

I don’t know if you know this, but it was actually a bad idea for the PepsiCo rep to leave this case of Mountain Dew in my office.  Because now it’s under my desk.  And because (I don’t know if you know this, but) the last time I drank Mountain Dew (regular formula, even!), I ended up standing in the middle of traffic downtown without any pants on, throwing rocks at tourists in full scuba gear.  The time before that I threw a chair through a window on the 12th floor of a Columbia College Chicago building because I agreed with something someone said about a Tobias Wolff story.  And this shit under my desk has actual sugar in it.  And there’s 79 grams of it in each bottle.  So go ahead and prepare my spot in the Seacliff Heights Home for the Criminally Insane.

And yes, dear God, someone has come up with a Mountain Dew flavored cupcake.  But the thing that perplexes me is that they’ve flavored it all with lemon-lime stuff.  Anyone who knows anything about Mountain Dew knows that it’s based on orange juice concentrate.  It’s only COLORED like lemon-lime drinks.  Getcha citrus straight, stupid.

Desktop Management

So I filled my cubicle walls with buttons because they’re not only great push pins, they’re also interesting conversation pieces.  And I couldn’t think of a better way to use all of the millions of buttons I’ve collected through the years.  So far, however, the only conversation they’ve started is “Your buttons suck.”  Yeah, but did you see the Bruce Lee one?  You suck.  And why the hell do people see my partition, notice the little desk top area in front of me which holds my name plate and is an obvious place for them to stand and speak to me, and invite themselves to come and stand behind me, facing my computer screen?  It’s so weird.  But it seems like the motherfucking students at this school always ignore the fact that I have a little wall around me and just come around it.  I feel used.

I showed the Bruce Lee one to an Asian student who said, “Why’d you show that to ME?” and I said, “Isn’t he your uncle?” because I am playing this game where I am actually trying to get in trouble because I’m starting to think it’s not possible.

Last week, two of my coworkers who fancy themselves the funniest and coolest in the office went to lunch together, and came back with a desk calendar for me.  I assume they bought me a present because you can’t give a calendar away at this time of year, so it must have been hella cheap.  Anyway, it’s a daily rip-away calendar called Kittens & Friends.  It’s full of those weird scary pictures where someone picked up a cat and dropped it on top of a puppy and snapped a picture of the two animals at the exact moment when they realized they had no idea what was going on, or whether they were going to live through it.  And now every single day they come by my desk and ask what’s on the caaaaaaalendar todayyyy??  I’ve been ripping the pages out a day ahead and depositing them in a folder labeled “KITTIES ETC.” which I just leave on the corner of my desk so they can drop by and get their kitty fix without having to stop me from whatever it is I’m doing.  Like blogging or doing a Google search for “bunny rabbit cupcake” and covering it up with a really complicated spreadsheet and a really complicated look on my face.

Note to self: I have to remember to clear my search history daily because yesterday I got it in my head to Google “uterine prolapse” again.  I don’t know why I keep doing that, it just fascinates me.

Note to self: When dealing with unwanted cube visitors, do a Google image search for “uterine prolapse.”

Mail Room Gang Rape – A Christmas Story

Jesus Hearts Shrimp Salad

What’s totally fucking gay about the holidays is that everyone at work gets this stupid fucking friendliness disease.  It makes them all want to spend a lot of time together.  So much time, in fact, that the ladies in this office have organized a Crochet Circle and a weekly meeting to recap all the events of So You Think You Can Dance.  And that’s not enough, we also have to have constant fucking holiday parties.  It’s inappropriate to NOT go.  It’s inappropriate to sit here in the office while everyone else is AT the party, and it’s also inappropriate to go home early while everyone else is getting drunk in a big awkward crowd.

So I stopped working at midday on Friday and went over to the conference center and ate weird butterscotch pudding stuff with white chocolate sticks stabbing it.  The whole room smelled like fish because most people cannot help but equate luxurious food with crabby lobstery shrimpy things.  So there was crab or lobster or shrimp in goddamn everything, from the “gourmet” macaroni and cheese to the “gourmet” papaya dip.  Apparently, to make something gourmet, all you gotta do is make it smell like a stank old pussy.

Anyway, there was a giant gingerbread house and a penguin made out of wasabi.  There were also quite a few unhappy looking catering employees.  There was also a splattery puddle of broken glass and seafood macaroni on the floor by the door.  There were also several employees from the mail room, and you can imagine what happens when mail room employees have access to an open bar.  “Wassup shawty how you been doin?  I been lookin atchu fo like two munfs, giiiirl.  When you gonna lemme holla atchu?”

Ugh.  So I snuck out early because if I’m going to take time away from work, I think it should be spent with the people I WANT to spend it with.  Or with the television shows I want to spend it with.  Not with a room full of awkward IT department freaks and gang rape mail room dickheads.

You know what else is totally fucking gay about the holidays?  I would sort of like to know why I got a crappy picture frame and my coworker got $300 in American Express gift cards.  I mean, it’s totally not the holiday spirit for me to be asking that question, but fucking A, even Christ himself would be like, “What the hell?  A picture frame?  A picture frame.  Awesome.  Thanks, but it would be nice if I could pay my goddamn heat bill.”

The gayness here is that now I have to buy my boss something, and it will probably be of the same value as the picture frame.  So I’m actually losing on this deal because I just bought myself a picture frame I didn’t want, if you think about it.  Yet, my coworker is skipping through the office, $300 richer than she was last weekend.  And yeah, maybe we shouldn’t have opened our Christmas presents at the same time, because they are so obviously different (mine being in the minority here).  But still, holy shit.  One thing that’s gay about Christmas is that people do all kinds of dumb stuff that’s not only offensive but also probably a little bit unethical.

I am reminded of the time in second grade when I brought a Hello Kitty stationery set for the mandatory gift exchange, and what did I get in return?  A dollar store Barbie knock off with a rat turd in the box, courtesy of the girl who ate her own hair and was obsessed with pulling everyone’s pants down.

Can we just not do the gift and card thing next year, you bunch of shit eating motherfuckers?  I could care less what you do with your free time, we only work together.  And someone will inevitably get a torn-up coupon for a Lean Cuisine with a half-assed holiday message scrawled on the back, while someone else gets a solid gold replica of God’s own gleaming cock.  So save me the fucking Christmas spirit dick shit and give yourself the ass-crappy pair of socks you so carefully selected for me at Walgreens because you pulled my name out of a fucking basket.

What’s kind of funny, though, is that I wasn’t aware that when newspaper delivery people give you a card, which is both in an envelope and contains an envelope, you’re expected to put a tip in the second envelope and leave it for the paper guy, like OH!  Surprise!  Here’s the tip you didn’t know we were going to give you in the envelope you gave us to put it in!  It’s dumb as hell, this tradition, this straight-up asking for a handout because it’s the hollllllidayyyyys crap.  So the guy who delivers the papers to the library (of which there are like 6 every day) left us not one, but SIX ENVELOPES.  No doubt in the hopes that he would be getting six tips.  What the fuck is that?  I thought it was kind of hilarious that his last name was Ortega, which immediately made me think of Ortega chips and salsa.  I thought about writing him a nice note that said, “Dear Mr. Ortega: Thanks for the awesome chips and salsa products.”

Poop.

The mouse problem is really starting to piss me off.

Apparently, the little green poison balls that the exterminator left all over the apartment are actually candy for mice.  Because now there’s little gnawed-down nubs of green poison everywhere, and then there’s little mounds of green poop, and there’s just as many mice as ever.  When I came home on Friday, bearing my crappy picture frame and an even crappier attitude, I was greeted by a tiny mouse who had accidentally attached his stupid little fucking face to a glue trap in my bedroom.  So, yeah, I had to get a trash bag, pick it up, endure its screaming and struggling as I did so, and throw it in the dumpster to die a slow death.  It was awful.  Why won’t they just go the fuck away?

Ugh.  Unfortunately, this week will be spent pulling out and going through every pile of sweaters, every bit of storage stuffed into closets and under beds, and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, without the reassurance that this will be the only time I’ll have to do it.  Oh, no.  The mice will just love a clean apartment to shit all over again.

Not the best way to spend the first week after a fall semester ends.

So, yeah.  The fall semester has ended.  I was up late Sunday night at the kitchen table, screaming and crying and pulling out my hair because Microsoft Word “encountered an unknown error and closed unexpectedly,” and would I “like to report this error?”  I’ll tell you what I’d like to fucking report.

So what’s funny is that the paper was about personal digital curation, i.e. the steps individuals should take to both avoid losing important digital records and to preserve them for future use.  Kind of funny that Word should shut down, refuse to re-open anything but an early, 2-page draft of what had become a 22 page document replete with bibliography.  So I slung myself around the kitchen, screaming NOOOOO NONONONOOOOOOOOOO!!!  PLEEEEASE! with only an hour until the paper was due.  Then I relaxed and accessed everything I’ve learned about digital document management, and used that knowledge to successfully restore all 22 pages of the paper, and turn it in on time.

THAT deserves an A, nevermind the paper.  Yeesh.

SUPER HAPPY OK YEAH FUN DAY FROSTING PARTY YESSSSSSSS

On a more positive note, do you know what day it is?  Do you!?  It’s December 15th, and apparently, that means it’s National Cupcake Dayyyyy!!!  Woowoo!

I don’t currently have a cupcake in my hand.  I don’t currently have one in my life, and I don’t foresee one stopping by at any time in the near future.  I’d really like one.  It’s a national holiday, dammit!  But I’m broke as hell, so I think I’d better just look at some pictures of cuppycakes.

Have a look at these shits:

How about some coconut?

These totally look like a white lady's titties.

These are some ass-nasty looking turkey dinner cupcakes that came straight out of Paula Deen's butt. I would totally eat them.

That link up top will hook you up with the Huffington Post article on this most amazing and happy day.  I strongly suggest you peruse their cupcake pictures.  They got some cupcakes on there that I’d fuck for sure.

No, really.  I would fuck them.

Tit Tips

So what’s great about a little bit of extra padding around the holidays is that most of it goes to my tits and my ass.  Which is kind of awesome…fun for the whole crew.  Due to all of the pastry that is literally bulging out of every room in this office, my boobs have become more like those things people keep on their desks, you know, where you pull back one of the metal balls and swing it against all the rest, and they knock each other back and forth.  My boobs are kind of on the largeish side at the moment, is what I’m saying.  It’s kind of awesome.  Now I know how my sister, Hugetits McGee, feels.  And I have to admit that I’m going to be a little sad to start doing the whole get-thin-for-the-new-year routine, because they’ll be the first to go.  Bye bye, awesome titties.  We had fun, we really did.

The built-in boob shelf is not substantial.

So anyway, yeah.  I’ve been looking into some boob control solutions for my holiday dress, which is this skinny little black satin tube number which will need to be held up by some hook and strap combination that is somehow attached to my boobs.  I posted a little something something about it on my Facebook, but I can’t seem to get any straight answers out of anyone.  I can’t BELIEVE nobody wants to talk about my breasts as much as I do.  People need to get their goddamn priorities straight, what the fuck.

Yer outta milk.

Agent Big Guns and I realized that we had mice last weekend, when they started pooping in her dirty laundry.  The mice who inhabited our apartment are some inconsiderate sons of bitches.

Not only do they scratch around at night, but they DO NOT do tricks of any sort, nothing like that Mr. Jingles guy in the movie The Green Mile.  They just scamper and shit everywhere.  And once we realized they were around, I started seeing them constantly.  One of them walked out of my bedroom at 2 in the afternoon last week, wearing my pajamas and eating a bowl of cereal, just looking at me like, whaaaat?

They’re real assholes.  The exterminator came, and threw down every kind of mouse contraption that the Tomcat company makes, and what do these little jerks do?  Oh, they skip around the glue traps like they’re dancing around a Maypole.  They prop snap traps open with tiny Santa figurines they’ve whittled from pieces of our furniture and take the bait.  They leave personalized notecards that say “Dear Tenants: Happy Holidays!  Go fuck yourselves.”  But you know what else they do?  They eat the poison the exterminator left all over the place.  They eat it right up.  So laugh it up, douche mice, you’re about to have such a bad stomach ache, you’ll be praying for death.

Just don’t do it in my bedroom walls, stinkies.

Banana Cream Panties

I hate it.

I don’t know why the hell George Lopez is so important, or how he got to be where he is today, or who put him there.  I don’t get it.  I’ve only ever seen him yell things, like “WHO’S READY TO PARTY” and “LATE NIGHT IS FUN AGAIN” and “GEORGE IS HOME.”  Where the shit did he come from?  Why won’t he go back?  How do people get their own sitcoms when you’ve never heard of them?  And when that sitcom fails, how do they get ANOTHER show named after them?

You are not fooling me, George Lopez.

Oh, wipe that shit eating face off your head.

He always looks like someone colored him with crayons.  The bad crayons.  The ones at the bottom of the coffee can they pass around at youth group in the church basement…the broken ones in peach and orange that have been used to color over black and brown so they’re all smudgy.

Speaking of George Lopez, why does Keira Knightley always talk like she’s got a load of tobacco in her mouth?  Is her underbite that serious that she can’t speak properly?  If so, how the fuck did she get to be an actress?  Why do they pay her the big money to stand around and make that underbite face?

Exshhcuushe me?

Has anyone ever realized that in the movie Beethoven, the bad guy basically plans and plots for months just to fool a family into giving him their St. Bernard so he can shoot it in the head.  So that he can test a new kind of bullet.  To see like, what it does to a dog brain.

Sometimes I wonder why it couldn’t be ANY type of large dog.  Or why it couldn’t be ANY St. Bernard.  Why did it HAAAVE to be Beethoven?

I mean, you could argue that it’s because Beethoven got away from him when he was a puppy.  You could argue that, but that would be stupid.  How would anyone know which dog it was when the dog was full grown?

So anyway, obviously it HAD to be Beethoven.  Crazy Mad Scientist Bad Guy did not want to test the brain-exploders on any other dog.  So he spends several months, at least (because Beethoven’s all grown up when he comes collectin’) getting shit together to get Beethoven’s family to hand him over.  He masquerades as a veterinarian and somehow gets set up with his own vet’s office.

Another thing that bothers me is when people who are near pregnant women just CANNOT STOP bringing up the fact that there is a fetus in the room.

My Polish office-mate is knocked up, and hates it, and says to me every day “Theenk ov dis bevore you lie down wiz a man” before puking in her trash can.  She’s so negative and weird, and apart from the projectile vomit, I couldn’t ask for a better person to share my office.

So anyway, she’s been working on this project with this whore from Alumni Relations.  This fiftysomething cunt comes down to our office every single day and talks to her really loud, like she’s deaf because she’s Polish.  And then there’s the pregnancy thing.  She brings it up every chance she gets.  “Oh, if there’s wine at the event, I’ll need to have a glass or two!  But YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY, CAN YOU!?  NO, you CAN’T!”  Or she’ll take a stack of papers out of my office-mate’s hands and say “This is WAY too heavy for a pregnant lady!”

She uses entirely too much hair spray.  Her hair looks like some kind of fuzzy hat, like she takes it off a stand and screws it into a hole in her skull every morning.  She wears pantsuits in neutral colors with smart button down shirts and a little understated cross necklace.

Today she announced four times (the amount of times different people entered and exited our office) that she was going to remove the jacket segment of Sensible Neutral-Colored Pantsuit because she was “burning up.”  Every time she said this, she went on to say “It’ll happen to you someday!  It will!  I won’t go into detail!”  Most women chuckle out of politeness, but when she directed this at me I played stupid.  No, really.  I mean, you want to talk about every fucking stage of the life cycle of human female sexuality so bad, go ahead.  Tell me everything, you goddamn creep.  Want to do a demonstration on douching next?

She also sits at the study carrel in front of my desk and talks to the computer while she uses it.

“Now that’s not what I want!”

“OOOOH I didn’t mean to click there!”

“Wait…where is the…hmmm…OH!  Found it!  Hahahhaaha!”

If I needed a safe-sex reminder before putting my knees in the air, it would be this bitch.  If I got knocked up, she’d be in my face every day, trying to poison me with a cloud of aerosol hair products so she could slice me open with her raptor talon and eat my unborn child.

I like it, sort of.

Speaking of safe sex, Species and Species II are probably the best movies ever made.  Probably, but then again, probably not.  There are probably better movies, for better reasons.  Actually, nevermind.  You should watch them, though, if your boyfriend falls asleep and you’re in an uncomfortable position but you don’t want to wake him up by getting up to get the remote.  Yeah, in that case, watch them both, back to back, then watch a little bit of the beginning of the first one again.

Now that we’re on the subject of the things I do like, the things that are worth my time, we should talk about Yoplait.  Are you aware of how good it is?  Do you understand how they make yogurt taste like some kind of pie dessert, only it’s yogurt?  I don’t get it, but it’s good.  Pineapple Upside Down Cake?  Pina Colada?  Boston Cream Pie?  Are you shitting me?

Dear Yoplait,

Banana cream pie makes me banana cream my panties.

Love,

Bananacreamery

It’s just good, y’all.  You should try it.  Plus it’s LIGHT so you don’t have to worry about all those extra calories.

(Not that I do…yesterday at about this time I was dipping a shard of Crunch bar into a Mr. Pibb on a dare.)

(I dared myself.)

Okay, I also think that this is pretty fabulous:

It is a customizable cupcake go-kart.  You even get a hat to wear while you drive it, which is the top of the cupcake.  And Neiman Marcus is only charging $25,000 for it.  I’m starting a collection so I can afford one.  Not so much an official “collection” as a jar on my desk with a sign on it alluding to the fact that my 97 year old grandmother can’t afford the chemo she so desperately needs.  And a really sad look on my face.  Even though my granny ain’t 97 and she don’t got cancer, and when she dies it won’t be from anything but the piss and vinegar mixture she drinks every morning.

Pussy Crisis

There is a crazy receptionist on my floor.  She works across the hall from me and is older than shit and somehow finds something to cry about every single day.  Nobody puts up with her crap anymore, so anytime there’s a new person in the office who’s not used to her bullshit, who hasn’t yet had the chance to report her to HR,  she preys on their attention like it’s free hot bacon or something.  Because that new person doesn’t know any better and is usually trying to fit in.  She gets one whiff of someone who’s just trying to be polite and goes apeshit for it.

Oh, and by the way, she’s totally the type who fills garbage bags with any kind of free food left lying around for everyone to enjoy, to bring it home to her fatass husband.

She’s also the type who probably pushed her children down the stairs when they were little, or put mashed up heart medication in their food so they’d end up in the emergency room, and she’d get to sit at the nurse’s station and feed on everyone’s sympathy.

Anyway.

She called in on Monday.  As if that wasn’t enough, as if everyone would miss her SO BADLY and be SO WORRIED about her absence that they couldn’t carry on with their day, she had an email sent around to let everyone know that she wasn’ t sick, she was out because her cat needed to be put to sleep.

On Tuesday, someone in her department, someone who had worked there for a mere 3 years, resigned to work for PBR.  (HR at PBR…PBRHR?)

So since I am that unfortunate new person who still has to prove to her that I won’t take her bullshit, she shuffled over to my desk in her tiny little witch boots when she got the news on Tuesday afternoon.  “Did you hear?” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.  “Did you hear about Kaitlyn?”

I did.

“Oh, I’m just beside myself,” she sobbed.  “First my cat, now this?”

Uh huh.

“Well,” she sniffed, drying it up.  “When I’m feeling a bit more…you know, stable…do you think you could show me how to use my Blackberry?”

This, this right here, is what I refer to as a “suicide pig.”  It’s anyone who gets some kind of thrill out of sadness or loss or a big change.  Anyone who uses it as a chance to advertise themselves and their feelings to the entire world.

I came up with this phrase when I still worked at the fucktard writing studio.  A woman had, unfortunately, shared a story she wrote about her brother’s suicide, or a story that in some way mentioned her brother’s suicide.  Before the next class meeting, I overheard this other tubby cunt going over and over with the instructor the fact that she had been “inspired” by the story shared last week, and had changed her ideas, and then sat down and wrote an entire story about, what the fuck do you know, suicide!  “And I just, you know, I don’t want to be insensitive, I don’t want to, you know, like, make Diana uncomfortable, so I mean, could you just read my story and let me know if it’s acceptable?”  She was so excited, she could hardly get her poorly-chosen words to flap out of her big wet fish mouth fast enough.  The instructor assured her that whatever she’d written would be fine.  “Okay, because I think, you know, that maybe the three of us, you, me, and Diana, should maybe sit down together and discuss how I don’t mean to hurt her feelings by writing about a suicide…”

Then on the class break, the original Suicide Pig cornered Diana by the teapot and struck up another conversation about it.  “OH I was just so nerrrrvous that you’d be offended!  I really hope you didn’t take my story the wrong way!”  Diana assured her that it was nothing to be worried about, her brother’s suicide had happened a long time ago and she didn’t have any problem talking about suicide.  “Oh thank goodness!  Well, do you, um, mind if I ask what happened exactly?”  Diana shared that her brother had hung himself.  “Oh gosh!  That must have been so awwwful!”  And the look on her face, the candy-sweetness in her voice, her giant wet mouth…one of the most gruesomely sick things I’ve ever seen.  If you’d told her there was fresh blood dripping from the ceiling she would have looked up and opened her mouth as wide as she could.

I am so tired of people’s plastic emotions, worn around the arm like Gucci purses.  I’m so tired of people processing death and sadness like it’s a fucking McGriddle.

Friday Dance Party XI

Sorayda likes this song, and I like Sorayda.  And this song.

Hold me closer, tiny diner.

Today’s bloggerating was interrupted not once, but twice by one of the library’s most famous patrons, last year’s Asian Idol.

I mention her again not only because she happens to be annoying the shit out of me at present by asking me dumb questions with a whiny slant because she’s doing her project at the last minute which means that it’s my responsibility to take her hand and walk her through every step of her research.  No, it’s not just that.  I mention her again because I think her life is kind of amazingly tragic.  One minute she’s an Asian superstar, the next she’s in a shitty suburb in the U.S. and she’s changed her name to Cecilia.

That’s like being forced to move from Emerald City to Craplakistan and change your name to Dong.

I guess I’d act like a dumb bitch, too, if that happened to me.  Shooooot.

Oh well.  On with the bloggerating:

I am now a proud collector of miniatures, which I prefer to call “tiny things” because “miniatures” suggests that I subscribe to The American Miniaturist which I DO NOT and anyway when I did it was an accident which they fixed and then accidentally kept sending me the magazine, as magazine companies usually do because they’re stupid and anyway I’d like to see what kind of magazines come to YOUR house so shutup.

So, yeah.

I bought these the other day:

They’re called PuchiPetites.  They are very tiny, handmade, Barbie-sized foods for you to fuck around with when you’re bored with normal sized foods.  Every tiny jar opens, every lid comes off, every tiny little piece is movable and comes complete with a teensy label with poorly translated Japanese all over it.  The Sn0-Cone says “Cold: it is a time.”

I am not going to tell you where I got these, because then you will be unable to resist going and buying a bunch of them, and you’ll have them, and I won’t, and why the hell would I give you something for me to be jealous about?  That would be dumb.

I will tell you, however, that the nice lady who sells these saw them at a Barbie exposition, as they are imported by Barbie fanatics all the way from Japan to play special roles in Barbie dioramas.  (She notes on her site that a diorama without any PuchiPetite in it has absolutely zero chance of winning a contest at a Midwestern Barbie expo these days…FYI.  They are just too perfect.)

I’ve got my eye on the Birthday Set, and of course, the Cupcake Set.

OMG.

I’m really not sure why I paid money for these.  But judging on the variety of exactly what is available for purchase from the PuchiPetite people, I predict that I will be in serious stone-cold debt by 2010.  Just look at this shit:

I don't know what the fuck is going on here but I like it.

Why does this get me so excited?  And by “this” I don’t mean all the colors and crazy writing up top.  I mean MINI STUFF.  I mean STUFF THAT IS TINY.  Why do I love it so much?  Why do I get more enjoyment out of a candy apple I have to pick up with my fingernails than I get out of the real thing?

My sister and I had a dollhouse when we were kids.  My grandma was all into dollhouses–like seriously, she spent hours in her garage in the winter carefully attaching tiny stones to the chimney with hot glue, layering tiles onto the roof, slicing tiny bits of thin carpet to fit the little dolly rooms of her two 3 story doll mansions.  Then she’d dig through craft stores for tiny spoons and forks and matching plate sets, paintings for the walls, little chairs, sheets for the dolly beds.  The dolls themselves were nothing to write home about.  They were pretty much just a bendy wire frame with little plastic hands and feet at four of the five ends, and an empty plastic head at the top.  Their central wire was wrapped with nylon strips so when you took off their old-timey clothes they looked like mummies.  I used to hijack all of their Victorian dress and pile them all in the teensy bathroom together, nekkid as jaybirds.  “Why did someone do this to us!” they would scream.  “Our dignity is destroyed!  We are all NAKED!”  Eventually one of them would have to use the tiny toilet, because there was no sign of rescue, and the rest of them would politely face the wall.

So based on the fact that my grandma’s appreciation for dolly-sized things was pretty serious, you would think that the dollhouse, and its components, she bought for myself and my sister would be equally serious.  You would think.  NOT SO.  We got the crappiest little duplex you could imagine.  The stairs were plastic, for chrissakes.  The picket fence was painted onto the outside of the cardboard wall.  And I don’t recall exactly but I bet the place came with dollhouse-sized rats and a dollhouse-sized group of Latin Kings down the street.  And the dollhouse dumpsters were right by the kitchen window, filled with dolly sized syringes.  It was a bad place, and they gave us so little crappy ass furniture to go with it that we were reduced to using the plastic lid spacer thing they used to put in the middle of Pizza Hut pizzas as a kitchen table.  Our doll family had to share a bed.  All four of them, one bed.  Yeah, they were a pretty skanky family.

Am I obsessed with tiny things because I am a girl?  Or because I’m making up for the tiny tragedy I faced as a child with a sub-par dollyhouse?

(And what are you supposed to DO with tiny stuff, anyway?  Know what I did with my first three official sets of PuchiPetites Mini Sweets?  I tore into the boxes with my teeth and carefully set up all of my mini food sets on my desk, where I should be doing work.  Then I just, you know…looked at ‘em.  I can’t think of a whole lot else to do with them.)

So when I was ten, American Girl decided to cash in on the fetish for tiny-ness shared by most girls in the 8-12 range.  They busted out the Illuma Room, which was basically a white box with magnetic walls, a drawer underneath, and an electrical cord so you could plug the whole thing in.  Not only did it light up, but the things you put in it would make sounds and do all manner of other amazing stuff.  The idea was that you bought the light box and the drawer for like $100, then you bought one of the themed sets and went apeshit with the details:

So yeah.  As a pre-teen I salivated over the diner, the horse stable, the New York loft apartment, and the Purple Room.  I couldn’t have them at the time because an entire set would run your momma about $200.  And I can’t have them now because an entire set (all played with and missing pieces and scratched up and only half-working) will now cost you around $500.

Except for this bitch, who had amazing luck and got the whole diner set for $1.50 at a Goodwill.  Fuck that whore.  I hope she gets twat rabies and leaves me the tiny diner in her will.

I hope someone out there shares my mania over tiny things that look like real things.  I hope that someone isn’t a total weirdo.  Then I will have hope for my future.

But either way I am still buying this and this so mehh.

Hell on wheels.

Last night I dreamed that I was at the Skate Palace in Muddy, Illinois.  It’s this warehouse with a smooth floor and a snack counter and a skate rental service and a dark hall full of benches covered with cum-soaked carpet where you change into your fungus-filled rented skates.  It’s a real place where I spent many hours on the sidelines as a kid, nursing skating injuries on my face, hands, and knees.  Anyway, in my dream, I had gotten there just in time for Skate Limbo, but the original limbo song was replaced with a My Chemical Romance cover.  Then I lined up all of my friends, but denied them the pleasure of going through the limbo line and instead lectured that they should appreciate me more.  I have never wanted out of a dream more in my entire life.

Sparklepants

I was a cupcake for Halloween and it involved pink glitter tulle.  I don’t know if you know as much as I do about tulle, but it’s hard for a tulle to hold a glitter.  So I am still finding pink glitter everywhere. Yes, even there.

Coffee Anus

Now I’m really going to blow your fucking mind.

QUESTION:

If a Starbucks has nothing but coffee, and it falls over in a forest, is it really a Starbucks?

I don’t know.  But what I do know is that I have to be at work at 7 every morning this week.  It’s brutal enough due to the fact that it’s a week before the time changes, so getting up at 5am is  like getting up at 2am: just as dark and only a little less stupid.  And I know that it bothers me that the only espresso fill-up station on, near, or around my commute is an awful Starbucks in a grocery store next to the train (which is so weird to begin with: it’s like the train platform has a grocery tumor, and the fruits & vegetables section in the grocery store has a coffee shop tumor…some kind of creepy transportation/fresh food/greedy coffee chain fusion.  People sit in the loungey area with their laptops out, messing with their iPhones and trying really hard not to look like they’re in a filthy chain grocery store coffee chain shit bin.).  So anyway, the only point in going into one of these places is to get a fancy espresso drink.  If I wanted a damn $3 cup of coffee I can brew at home for a hundredth of the price, I’d be an idiot and someone should hit me in the face.  I want a Venti Somethingorother, dammit.  I’m tired and I need a shock to my brain stem.  So it’s really stupid when you walk up to the counter and give them your order and it takes a whole twenty minutes to say it (I believe I’ve mentioned that I’m an asshole), then they say “Our steamer’s broken.  So only coffee and tea.”

I’d like to know how Starbucks is a Starbucks without steaming capabilities.  I don’t see what now separates the grocery store Starbucks from a giant coffee-shitting anus.  I’ll get my shit coffee at home, thank you.

Cupcake Masterpiece Theater

So yeah.  I did a little search for “starbucks cupcakes” because I was going to point out that Starbucks really messed up when they stopped making the Vanilla Bean and Triple Chocolate cupcakes.  After they knocked that one out of the park, they decided to roll it back a little bit and start making these awful red velvet cupcakes, and I guess part of making them is leaving them out on the counter overnight, and also adding giant spoonfuls of baking powder and not mixing it in properly.  Those things are like biting into a rock that bleeds.  A far cry from the cuppycakes of old:

Uh huh. Right there. Yeah.

Upon my search, I found the first cupcake, other images of which you can find at the blog whose credit I have left on the stolen Starbucks cupcake picture.  If you can’t tell, I am not going to mention any names because I am about to make fun of her/him/it:

“As for the Starbuck cups, i did a google search to see what the Starbuck’s logo looked like since i never really studied it before. So after finding some great pictures, i begain the painstaking effort of slowly painting on the logos onto the cups.. which trust me is one of the toughest things I’ve ever done due to how tiny i had to make the Starbucks cup in order to fit it onto the cupcake. Trust me, painting on the logo onto a cup that is smaller than my thumb is not the easiest thing to do. I could feel my hand shaking with each stroke of my brush and i had to hold my breath every time i lay brush to cup. Whew!!”

Painstaking effort! It’s not easy!   Trust me!  TRUST ME!!!

Jesus Christ.  “…lay brush to cup”???  Was that a cupcake blog or a Hallmark family drama?  Oh, anyway, thank God Tammy got that Starbucks logo painted on all right.  I bet she was so tired after, she had to sit down on the sofa and have herself a whole glass of 79 cent grape soda from the dollar store.

Then you’re outta luck, PAL.

At work, I am sometimes forced to get coffee at this place in the basement cafeteria called “Java City!”  They’ve got this big round sign with a bunch of tall brown buildings on an orange background, I think that’s supposed to represent Java City With Exclamation Point.  I don’t know about you, but just the logo for Java City! makes me feel kind of like I might throw up from caffeine overdose.  Every time I walk by, I swear every fiber in my being gets really excited and then screams “OH NO” simultaneously, and hell, I’m surprised I haven’t suffered a seizure and collapsed on the floor in front of the Java City! kiosk simply because of their marketing.

There’s a Starbucks across campus (people around here say “across campus” to mean “in another building”…any building.  It could be the building next door.  It could be the adjoining building…which, in this case, it IS).  So I went there for a quad shot.  What do you know?  Their milk steamer was working just fine, they were all using it to blow steam up each other’s asses in their downtime.  They had a lot of downtime because the espresso machine was broken.  So yeah, I had to walk my ass (which is fast taking the shape of my desk chair) ALL THE WAY BACK ACROSS CAMPUS and hit up Java City!

Back at the Java City!, they keep their workers imprisoned in a 2×2 pen, which is equipped with everything in the world you’d need to make anyone sick.  The Java City! employees are not happy to see you because it means they have to take all their fingernails off so they can pull a shot.  They announce your drink order, get it wrong, then when you correct them they scream THAT’S WHAT I SAID over the sound of the steamer.  Then there’s that giant fake city looming over your head like it’s about to collapse on you.

So, another question: if everything you need to make floofy flavored coffee drinks can fit in a tiny booth, why the hell do we have Starbucks, hmmmmm?

Anyway.  I think Java City! would be the city you’d go to if you planned to die from a stress-related heart ailment.  Java City! would do it to you, for sure.

And if you sit in the Starbucks in the grocery store in the train station, sipping your latte, and you say into your iPhone “Yeah, I’m at the ‘Bucks…” then I hope you go find yourself clutching your chest in a Java City! sewer someday, pal.

 

More things to add to the List of Dumb.

Netdix

One thing that bothers me about Netflix is that they won’t let you let go of your past.  The only thing I’m allowed to do to my ex-boyfriend’s (of 3.5 years ago) queue, which was connected to my account while we lived together, is look at it.  I can’t remove anything from it.  I can’t delete him as a user.  I just have to sit there and stare at his inactive list of movies, grayed-out and awaiting a shipment that will never come.  I have to endure the constant error message that I will have to “speak with the account owner” if I want to make any changes to this user’s queue.  Netflix refuses to acknowledge the possibility that I could be the account owner, looking at the queue of one of my account users, and trying to get the fuck rid of it for good.

How do you explain to a current boyfriend that your ex-boyfriend’s movies are still in your Netflix account?  With his NAME at the top?  It’s obscene, this last bit of someone else’s life that refuses to be removed from yours.  I feel like I have some kind of cyst on my pancreas that modern medicine can’t reach, not even with lasers made by Jesus.

“Oh, ignore him, bunnyface.  And ignore his movie choices.  I never would have watched that stupid remake of King Kong with him.  Or that horrible movie with Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston.  Shh…there there.  Ignore him and he’ll go away.”

Another thing that bothers me is that I don’t understand why the toilet in the women’s bathroom on this floor has to be auto-flush.  And why it has to be cranked up to the highest flush power, and the most sensitive motion detection. When you sit down to pee, you can’t move one inch, or the demon in the toilet will explode and spray water all over you.  When you stand up, you’ve got to run out the door as fast as your pants-around-your-ankles legs will carry you, because the spray reaches all around the stall, spattering walls, seat, and your clothes.  And as the stall door swings on its hinge, it sets off the flush at least two more times, causing everyone walking by to wonder just what the hell you’re trying to flush.

I don’t understand why the Ladies’ Only Couture and Luxury Goods Marketing Club thinks it’s appropriate to advertise their club meetings on the back of the stall door, now that we’re on the subject.  Luxury goods, indeed.  Now you can look at a low resolution image of a Fendi purse while you take a Jamie Lee Curtis, ladies.

I also don’t understand why so many business school students do not know how to write a check that will cash.  Or why so many of them pretend to be reading the library’s copy of The New York Times, then shove it under their leather folios and walk out the door all quick and crazy like they’re giving out free tits made of hamburger meat outside.  Really?  Stealing newspapers?  These are the douchebags who will be sticking their dicks in American finance pretty soon.  Every time one of them does it, I want to lean out the door and scream “GO AHEAD!  WE’VE GOT FULL TEXT ACCESS, MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRR!”

Why is the Dane Cook hairstyle still so popular with guys who are trying to look professional?  It’s like a foot tall, asshole.  I noticed that you bothered to run a comb straight up through all of the hair on the top of your head, but you didn’t bother to bring a fucking pen NOR a single piece of paper to your JOB INTERVIEW.  Which is why you’re standing at my desk, whining like a three year old who’s wanted nothing his whole life but a piece of paper from my printer.

Friday Dance Party X

Special thanks to Kitty in a Cathouse.

I’m bout to go bang some copies out and file some sexytime.