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.

Glitter Turds & Sweet Tarts

yah-okeh

I like my job for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I meet a lot of interesting people.  This university attracts students from all walks of life, from across the globe, which is pretty awesome if you like celebrities and foreign people, which I do!  And even though everybody’s got their panties in a bunch because Tom Hanks’ son is doing his undergrad here, I couldn’t care less because I just had the pleasure of meeting a very famous singer.  I swear I’d helped her find three books and two websites on finance interview preparation, none of which pleased her, before she revealed that she had, in fact, WON ASIAN IDOL TWO YEARS AGO.

She didn’t give me a chance to say, “Of course!  I knew I recognized you from somewhere!  You are the most talented Asian I know!  What are you doing at a business school in Illinois, U.S.A.?!”  She immediately and without any hesitation revealed to me that her passion is SINGING.  That evil Mommy-san and Daddy forced her to go to B-school, even after her triumphant victory over every other singing Asian in greater Asia, even after her tour of Asia with Asian Idol.  “It’s not like-a I even wanta to BE HERE,” she said, and slammed a book back onto the shelf in the wrong place.

Then she got mad that I wouldn’t let her use my computer to check her Gmail.  I guess you can’t have it all.

Minor Inconvenience

I was fifteen minutes to work today, which isn’t a big deal or anything.  My boss is pretty busy walking around the office telling everyone how hard I work, anyway, so she doesn’t usually notice or care when I step in a couple minutes late.  Unfortunately, there are some people who are really really put out of sorts when the train is late.

Today the train was late because of an accident involving a fall (or a jump, which is usually reported as a fall for a couple of days).  The point is that some poor jerk made contact with the filthy, wet, stinky, and highly electrified tracks in the gloom below the platform, which is a shitty way to start your morning.  The trains all had to share whatever tracks they could get, as power was shut off so the poor jerk could be peeled off the tracks and sent to the hospital to be pronounced one way or the other.  Everything was slow, and running behind, and basically not where anyone expected it to be.  When my train finally came, the stuttering conductor saw fit to let us all know that the reason for his lack of punctuality was “a accident involvin’ somebody jumpin’ on the tracks” downtown.  So naturally, the entire car erupted with gasps and everybody started telling everybody else exactly what they thought about mass transit suicide.  That’s when the lady behind me piped up to anyone who would listen:

“Why people always gotta kill theyselves durin’ rush hour? I know thangs is bad, but they ain’t THAT bad you cain’t wait until lunch time. Lawd.”

She proceeded to call all of her friends and let them know just how inconsiderate she thought it was to kill yourself during rush hour.  She revealed during all three of these phone calls (on her pink Razr with BabyPhat charms dangling from it) that she had actually found out about the suicide only a couple minutes after it had happened, on her alarm clock radio, which is when she decided to roll over and sleep a little longer because the trains were going to be “all messed up and shit anyway.”

Ahahahahha!  Total cunt.

It’s easy.

Basically all you’ve got to do is a Google image search for “cutest cupcakes ever.”

Are you serious? You can't be. You are, though.

If you happen to be in Japan, you should do a Google image search for “cutest cupcakes ever,” only in Japanese.  And you’ll get this:

HIYOOOHHHHHH!!! Hihihihihihihihihihihihi!!!

Someday I will build a cupcake library, in which I will preserve one of every type of cupcake ever made, along with metadata to help future cupcake artists with their research.

I can do this kind of thing because we live on a fantastic planet, and it is covered with stuff that’s cute as shit.

God DAMN I wanna eat that tiny toast made of frosting SO BAD.

Feliz Naviblog

My best best friend friend Patrese has started a blog about how much she loves Christmas, and Christmastime, and pretty much all things Christmas-y.  I support her endeavor because I am a good friend (thanks, thank you…stop it!) and because starting in October it’s really cute to watch her get all ramped up for the birth of little baby Jesus and then celebrate it by buying every little baby Jesus she can find and gluing it to her front door.

OK well, so she hasn’t done that yet, but I think this might be the year.

Anyway, I think Patrese likes Christmas so much because her family always made it into a big sparkly happy soiree full of love and Sunday gravy. Which is so cute I want to poop glitter turds and Sweet Tarts!

I’m indifferent to Christmas because my stepdad celebrated by screaming at me to get the fuck out of the Goddamn tree before I fucking ruined everything.  Then my grandma took too many pills and had a meltdown because some bitch at church wore heels she didn’t agree with in the Christmas cantata, and my cousins cried while they watched us open our presents because my aunt loved God too much to buy things at the end of December.  Then they told us we’d probably be going to Hell because of the Play-Doh Snack Shop.

Shit.  If I’m going to Hell for a toy, it’d better fucking be the baby blue plastic four-door ‘59 Caddy my slut of a Barbie used to roll around the living room in.  That would be worth it.

Today.

I finally figured out a way to spill Arizona green tea in my hair and make it look like I meant to do it.  Holy hell, I smell like the stairway to Heaven.  Or Arizona.

This is a stapling emergency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swine Stew

So now every day I go and play Librarian.  It is great.  Now that I don’t work in the basement for a shoe company, I no longer have to wear the season’s hot sneakers and t-shirts with names like “Number One Logo Tee” and “Favorite Logo Tee.”  (Honestly, nobody wants to meet anyone who has a “favorite logo tee,” you know why?  Because those people are useless to society.  Useless.)

Now I have to go buy Working Lady clothes, and though I try not to shop at the places where the real Working Ladies shop, I keep finding the same shit.  And I would kind of like to know why every women’s shirt has to have a goddamn ruffle running down the front.  It’s like, Here are my tits.  They are like a giant cake.  A giant, frilly cake.

If I had it my way, I’d be able to find the perfect sweater vest, and I’d wear a tie every day.

There is dried coffee all over my computer today because yesterday the train driver decided to brake hard and sudden for a rat or something to run across the track.  So, naturally, whatever was in my cup was suddenly shot into the air.  When it landed, it splattered all over my face, hair, computer, and new sweater.  I’d like to find the son of a bitch that did it and kill his dog.  I’d wipe my knife on my pants and say “A dog for a rat, man.”

(I wouldn’t wipe dog blood on my Working Lady pants.  Those are good ass pants.)

Dear Jon

One of the mini headlines on the paper today is “Can Obama revive an ailing health plan?”  I don’t know if you want to call it conditioning or what, but I immediately thought “YES HE CAN!”

I don’t get all the ass crap over this health plan.  Is there a problem with taking care of everyone?  Maybe I just don’t understand politics, but that one time when they kept playing that clip on the news of the lady going “SOCIALIST!  SOCIALIST!  SOCIALIIIIIIST!” all up in O-Bomb’s face, I was like…what’s wrong with that?  I mean, okay, communism and Nazism are taking it a little far.  But Socialism is a-ok, USA!  Get on it!

Really, though.  People are all kinds of worked up and crying and angry about all this healthcare dog shit.  And O-Bomb is up 24 hours a day, trying to knock America’s dick out of the dirt.  I feel bad for him.  And I’m happy he keeps getting up in the morning.

If anyone shoots him, I’m going to be really mad.

It’s funny to think that I have family mixed in with that pack of healthcare protest assholes down in the Batshit Crazy States.  I mean, my aunt would throw a gay baby out the window of a moving car, then sodomize a Planned Parenthood worker with a rifle just to prove a point.  What point?  I don’t know, something about the right to have a rifle.

There’s so much political bullshit to work out, and Jon Stewart is on vacation.  He should not be allowed to take vacations.

Moutharrhea

Office Banter: I kind of love it.  I’m very, very good at it, too.  It’s like magic!

Like when I walk by Cheryl’s desk in the morning, I know that when we’re done with the good morning how are you’s, I’m supposed to say something like “Just getting my coffee…ugh!  Big day!  Big day, Cheryl!”

I do need a bit of practice with Office Eating, though.  At the rare times when I have to eat at my desk, I need to learn how to take smaller office-appropriate bites.  My problem with food is that it is SO GOOD that I see it and I grab it and I go NGARRRRRR!!! whilst shoving it into my face hole.  No, really, I make that noise.  Then, when someone asks me a question or begins to engage me in some Office Banter, I’ve got to hack up a Nutra Grain bar whole, and shoot a bag of pita chips out of my nose just so I can answer.

What’s weird about this job is that my former boss was an epic champion at the Office Banter…except hers was more like office oral diarrhea.  And you could tell she not only didn’t give a fuck what your response was, she was kind of hoping you would die of spontaneous combustion while you were answering her, so she could roast a vegetarian hotdog on your corpse.  She would ask you the same mundane questions about the same mundane things every single mundane day, and then tell you later that you had a “clipped tone” when you answered her about what you were eating for lunch/reading/wearing.  Absolutely insane.  I mean, I couldn’t even get a piece of mail at work without that dickshit woman screeeeeaming to anyone who would listen, “OHHHH MY GOD!!!  WHAT DID YOU GET?  DID YOU GET SOME MAIL?  WHAT IS IT?  WHAT’D YA GET???”

Where I work now, nobody has time to sit and analyze exactly what people said and how they said it and write to HR and worry about the fact that said person might see through their fake-ass corporate bullshit and maybe that’s why she had a TONE…eeeeeeekkk I don’t knowwww.  Nobody cares.  And I can honestly say that nobody has asked me ONCE what I am eating for lunch.  And the other day, the real test happened:  I got an envelope from FedEx for personal reasons, and NOBODY SAID A WORD.

You know why?  Because nobody gives a flying fuck.

Because, lunch?  Mail?  Yeah, they happen every day.  Like, around the same time.  No big deal, dog.

Sub Woofer

Anyone remember that Snoop Dogg show?  Doggy Fizzle Televizzle?

It was this show where Snoop Dogg walked around with his penis hanging out of his pants, dragging on the ground.  He would go to the studio and listen to some fly ass beats and then go count some money and give quarters to teenage girls to blow him.  And MTV or somebody similar filmed it all and put it on TV.  It was kind of cool, I guess.  He did that “izzle dizzle nizzle” shit a lot, which got old pretty fast, but I think he realized that.  Which is probably why the focus of his next show was his bitch-ass wife, who had so many Asian women on her housekeeping staff, she just didn’t know what to do with herself and so always complained about having to clean her house.

Oh, and you were supposed to think of Snoop as this big old pussywhipped Father-Knows-Best type of dad…you were supposed to forget that time he taped a bunch of college girls eating each other out for that Girls Gone Wild idiot.

Whatever happened to that guy?

sick piggy party

OK SO it’s officially only the fourth day that students are back at This Place Where I Work Now That Might Be A Major University…and there’s ALREADY a campus alert because somebody has a confirmed case of H1N1.  And every orientation session I’ve sat in on has been filled with nothing but the sound of coughing fits and sneezing and nose-blowing.  It’s ridiculous.  Some of these people are wearing goddamn surgical masks, and others are reaching across desks to grab an unwrapped piece of candy off someone’s notebook.

And, of course, about half of these douchebaggy B-school dudes just walk around coughing blatantly into the air in front of them without even an attempt to cover.

I’m not saying that smart people don’t get sick, I know that’s not true, because I get sick and I’m smart as shit.  I’m just saying I think it’s weird that these people could build complex business models to measure and forecast all kinds of things I can’t even pronounce or understand, yet they seem unable to grasp the notion that you shouldn’t lick your finger after it’s been in someone’s asshole.

Especially if that someone has SWIIINE FLUUUU.  HelLO?

Scab Artist

We were leaving our apartment, Agent Big Guns and I, and what walked to the door but this thing I think we’re supposed to consider Our Neighbor.  He had scabby looking blonde dreadlocks, dirty Nike high tops, ripped cargo shorts, a reprinted (to LOOK worn out) Joy Division t-shirt, a sweatband, and hot pink sunglasses.  AHhahahhahahah it’s too great!  He’s probably a sidewalk chalk artist!  Or a photographer who likes to take a bunch of pictures of his girlfriend’s arm or his bike chain or his dog’s turds.  Ahahahhahahahhahahhahahaoowwwch!

These Shits Is Yummy, Yo.

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

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

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

der Footenwaren

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously.  Don’t be such a fucking deutschbag.

Bring in the big guns.

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

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

It was gruesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

career oriented

pretty laid-back guy

easy going

look on the bright side of things lol

passionate

sincere

don’t take things too seriously lol

down to earth

driven

focused

sarcastic and funny

love the city

new to the city

looking for someone to show me around the city

know how to treat a lady lol

lol

lol

lol

The BNDs

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

Stay away from them scrapeys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn to the left

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

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

This season’s hot looks

Check out these sweet picks for summer sandals

This year’s fashion faux pas

Hit the town in these day to night looks

I can’t stand it.  It doesn’t end.

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

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

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

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

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

I'd eat the shit out of these shits.

Asshole Party

Dear Ms. Seelig,

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

Miiiiight wanna look into that.

Love,

Cupcake Jones

God, butt sex, weight lifting, cooking.

My apartment is such a shit hole right now…half of it is in boxes and the other half is a bunch of crap I MAY or MAY NOT want that is on top of boxes.  I was packing stuff I might need in the next week, thinking ohh I’ll remember which box that is in, but now everything is in boxes and there are not windows in the boxes and I don’t know where my underpants are!

That said, I am sitting here at 6pm with the biggest cup of coffee in the universe, waiting for it and the three extra-strength Excedrin to kick in and demolish the headache that is blinding me, and has been blinding me since I woke up this morning.  I had been doing this thing where I really really tried very hard to stop drinking so much coffee, swapping it again for strong green tea.  But it doesn’t work.  I get a stabbing headache that is followed by a horrible, morose mood.  I go out in public and hate everyone.  I went to Target today to pick up the aforementioned Excedrin, and I thought it would be a good idea to stop in at the Target Starbucks and get a gigantic espresso thing.  Well, guess what?  Those motherfuckers broke their espresso machine and couldn’t make any coffee drinks.  I almost threw myself to the floor and rolled around kicking and screaming.  So I ran over to the painkiller aisle and wouldn’t you know it, there were so many people blocking it with their carts that I actually, seriously, honestly considered yelling at the top of my lungs IF YOU FUCKING PEOPLE DON’T MOVE YOUR ASSES OUT OF MY WAY I AM GOING TO KILL ONE OF YOU.  LIKE SERIOUSLY.  Instead, I just stood there and waited, my face all red, breathing really hard and pulling at the neck of my hoodie.  It felt really tight.

Quitting coffee does not work.  It does not.  And the moral of this story is that Agent Ventura really wants a blog to read when she wakes up in the morning and even though I feel like someone is filling my skull with broken glass, I would hate to disappoint her.  Even so, this mood is nasty and evil and the Excedrin is not going fast enough so I HATE YOU.  Not really, but come on.  I got a text message blow off last weekend, spent the week in Southern Illinois, tried to quit drinking coffee, tried to pack for a move, and you wanna know why I haven’t written a blog?  BECAUSE I AM IN A STATE OF DESPAIR.

Not really.  I mean, packing is gay, but it’s almost done.  I have coffee now.  My sister reminded me that I didn’t like the guy that much and was only pissed off that he didn’t like me either.  Oh, and I got the best picture ever in Harrisburg, Illinois:

Fried bologna!!!

My mom makes her coffee with a French press.  I don’t know if you know about this but it’s very exotic.  You boil the water in a fancy teapot, then you grind the coffee beans in a fancy grinder.  You dump them into this glass pitcher, pour in the water, and stir.  Exactly (EXACTLY, YOU STUPID) four minutes later, you put the lid on the pitcher and push the middle down, which makes a strainer thingy squish through the coffee bean/water mixture.  In all, it takes about four hours.

There is no measuring system to speak of.  There is also no milk or sugar in my mom’s house, as she suffers from healthfoodrexia.  I could only find plain organic soymilk, which I mixed into my fancy unmeasured ratio of coffee and water.  Holy fucking shitballs it was terrible.  And it made me so crazy I thought I was going to die for about twenty minutes after I drank it.  Unfortunately, Mommy was at work and could not help her adult daughter make coffee.  I thought about calling her to have her direct me around the kitchen, but I figured she might get mad at me if she was busy explaining to a student that yes, you CAN take a library book home with you, that is what a library is for.  It’s totally weird when you realize that you don’t know where the spoons are in the house where you grew up.

I’m going to go ahead and admit that while I was at home, I ate McDonald’s, Hardees, Taco Bell, Sonic, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Denny’s.  I’m also going to go ahead and admit that three of them were in the same day.  Whatever, shutup!  I don’t care what you think!

Actually, I feel kind of disgusting.  I had three giant bottles of water today and I still feel like there are cheeseburger-shaped amoebas in my veins.

what is this?

Does anyone know what the hell kind of frosting this is?  I want to know.  It goes on cupcakes and it’s flat.  It’s so you can make cute designs on the cupcake.  I guess, anyway.

This is so shitfucking cute.

Also, who the fuck spends their time making cupcake batter, pouring it into cupcake pans, finding tiny stuffed animals, and arranging them with the batter so that it looks like it’s the stuffed animal that’s happily making the cupcakes?  I want to know because I would like to meet them, and maybe talk to them, and fine, okay, yeah, I want to fuck them.  You happy?

WHO is responsible for this??

Okay, a boy in Australia took this next picture for me.  Not to mention the fact that there is an entire week dedicated to cupcakes somewhere in the world, I was unbelievably touched that aforementioned boy saw this sign and thought of me.  In one half of my brain, I am packing all of my stuff because I am moving to Australia to be his lover forever and ever because he is the most awesome guy I have ever NOT met and fallen in love with anyway.

Let's kiss. NOW.

match dot bomb

Okay, so fine, yeah, I am now back in the online dating scene.  And not for any other reason but that I WANT TO GO ON A GODDAMN DATE.  Especially if it’s with someone I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, whose friends do not know me and think I’m a big ole bitch.  But you know, this means that I am now receiving emails from guys whose interests are “God, butt sex, weight lifting, cooking.”  In that order.

Today is my first day back on the online date pony, and already I’ve gotten an email about how I must be “a pretty sexy librarian” and been approached by a guy who just wanted to let me know that he is “an adventurous lover, wink wink.”  Do you fucking have something in your eye?  And what do you mean, “adventurous lover?”  You wanna do it in the Everglades or something?  Because nothing’s shocking anymore, boyo.  Not after the last six months of my dating life.

Anyway, I totally expect to meet a whole lot of the same pigfaced pussytwats I met the first time around, this time last year, but this time I’ve decided to be nicer to the boys who laugh at my jokes and buy me Sharpies and bring me candy on our first date.

And I will say that at least this website has a gigantic crop of those rugged, corn-fed, Midwestern boys I like to look at.  Woowee!

planes, trains, fuck you

So last night I began my journey back to the city from the Southern part of the state.  This meant that I had to catch an Amtrak train in Carbondale, Illinois.  Due to a car mix-up, I ended up finally securing a ride to the train station a mere eleven minutes before the train was supposed to leave the station.  So naturally, faced with the idea of being forced to spend another night in Southern Illinois and another $50 on another ticket, I freaked out and basically stopped breathing.  Luckily, they held the train for me when they saw me tearing across the parking lot, waving my reservation information in the air like a battle standard, almost crying (ALMOST) because I was sure they were just going to high tail it out of the station without me.  But they held the train, and everyone on it gave me shitty looks when I finally collapsed into a seat so I could put my head between my knees and breathe.

All eyes ceased to be on me when we hit Centralia, Illinois, and the train was immediately filled with the prisoners who had just been released from the Centralia Correctional Facility.  So everyone was paying a little more attention to their personal belongings than they had been before.  Look, if that’s offensive, I don’t care.  Because when a bunch of loud-ass motherfuckers in correctional facility uniforms, with tooth brushes and underwear in plastic bags, yelling about all the week they’re going to smoke when they get home get on your train, we’ll talk about it some more.  They wouldn’t leave anyone alone, as they weren’t allowed to purchase alcohol on the train, so they were hitting up anyone and everyone to buy it for them.  They were also very interested in using people’s cell phones, and I turned down four of them who had to make “real important phone calls.”  The guy who sat in front of me had those retardedly long and pointy and gross fingernails and set about befriending the two kids sitting across from us, who were traveling alone.  The kids went to the dining car, and the next thing you know, the little boy couldn’t find his cell phone.  “Oh, lemme help y’all look,” the ex-prisoner said, and proceeded to go through all of their things with them.  “At least my Nintendo DS is still here!” the little boy said.

“You know what you should always do,” says Ex-Prisoner, “is lock your phone so people can’t use it.”

“Oh, I do!” said the boy.  “I lock it all the time!”

“Oh, really?” says Ex-Prisoner.  “You got like, a code on it?”

“Yep!” says the boy, pleased as punch that he’s taken the necessary precautions.

“Oh, that’s good.  What is it?” asks Ex-Prisoner.

The boy smiles hugely, proudly, and says, “It’s the last four digits of my phone number.”

“Oh, that’s good, that’s real good,” says Ex-Prisoner.  “You should probably give me your phone number so I could call you if I find your phone.”

So they look through their stuff again and again.  They tear the train apart looking for the phone.  Finally, they decide to check the bathrooms.  Ex-Prisoner offers to watch their stuff for them while they look.  At that point, I was just like hey, kids, seriously…come on.  But they walked away, and when they came back, I heard the boy say, “Wait…wait! Where’s my Nintendo?!”

And the whole process started over again.

We finally landed in the White City, over half an hour late.  I finally caught a Blue Line, which sat in the station for ten minutes before chugging forward one stop, where it sat for another ten, after which an announcement was made that this particular train would not be going any further, and that a shuttle bus would be provided…a shuttle bus which was, of course, outside in the rain, and connected only to the Blue Line a few stops away.  After which I would have to walk home.  In the rain.

So I transferred to the Red Line and immediately found myself in the midst of six sorority girls on an outing, who were arguing over, and I shit you not, the fucking lyrics to Single Ladies.  You can imagine how I felt about that.  And, of course, the one who was their fucking tour guide was telling them all the great bars, and proceeded to list all the douchebaggiest places imaginable.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with having stupid conversations.  I’m sure that some of the things I talk about when I’m a little drunk and a bit too loud and stupid are annoying to those around me.  But I was wet and tired and rattled and sick of fucking train delays and I wanted to go home really really bad.  So I pretty much wanted to kill all of those girls.

Also, I was not prepared for it to be sixty degrees and pouring rain in the city.  So I was wearing a tank top and shorts.  And I ended up standing on a corner at midnight, weighed down by all of my shit, freezing my ass off, and THAT is why I kind of maybe possibly snapped at the guy in the swirly velour-covered gigantic Dr. Seussian top hat and sunglasses who leaned into my face and said, “Well at this time ‘o night ya can’t tell if people are starting their night or ending it!  Hyuk hyuk hyuk!”

I was nice about it.  I mean, I don’t understand why the freaks come crawling out of the fucking sewers in their Halloween costumes at 10:30 every night in the city.  I’ll never understand it.  And it’s a bit of culture shock every time I come back from a visit at home, in rural nowhere, where the only sound is the neighbor’s dog and a million jazillion crickets, to be greeted by some weird lonely motherfucker in an outfit purchased at a Six Flags gift shop.

I think I said “SHUT. UP.” and left it at that.  Because that’s when I decided to splurge and got into a cab, because the other freak at the bus stop was whining about how it was Obama’s fault that the bus was late.

bye bye, stinky!

Well, you may or may not know this, but last Friday was my last day in retail EVER.  I am so excited to start my librarian job on Monday that I am peeing a little bit.  I am peeing in my non-uniform pants.

I won’t miss any of the shit that came with that job.  What I will miss are the co-workers, the partners in crime, and, sometimes, inebriation.  One of my favorites, Agent It Won’t Suck Itself, put together a video that was pretty much the most awesome thing ever.  It’s unexplainable.  It’s amazing.  If you want to see it, you should add me on Facebook.  Because, of course, it’s got my name in it, which I’d rather not disclose on this here bloggy blog, because that’s what got me into trouble with the last bloggy blog.

Anyway, the video was very touching, and it made me happy and sad. Plus it had Hitler in it (of course).

So, Miss Agent Ventura, I hope this blog has filled your blog hole for the time being.  I hope you know that I start school AND my new job on Monday, that I move a week from Monday, and that I will probably go for a couple of days in there without internet access, so this blog may have to hold you over for a bit.

But I’m sure I’ll come up eventually with some sort of schedule for my complaints and bitchery, which I will be sure to puke all over this blog whenever I get a chance.

Also, please punch me in the face if I ever mention cutting back on coffee ever again.  This stuff is great!  YEAH!

Ball Grinder

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

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

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

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

My inbox hurts!