Come on.  You and I both know I’d be obligated to play with my balls for about fifteen minutes.  That’s the first thing I’d do and also the second thing and the third and on and on from there.  I’d just play with my balls, all day, forever, because that’s just about all dudes do.  I looked up from my book on the train the other day and there was this loud frat boy standing there in those thin shiny basketball pants, yelling into his phone about what he was gonna do that night, and the whole time he was looking off into space and absentmindedly fondling his balls, just rolling them back and forth in his hand like a nice little ball of dough he was gonna put on top of a pie.  I just could not stop staring at that.  Another time I saw a guy dig at his balls and dick for about thirty seconds straight while waiting for a light to change so he could cross the street.  Then he switched things up and formed his hand into a claw and dug at his asshole for the rest of the wait and half the trip across the street.

I told The Pants I wished he could have a vagina for one day so he’d know what it was like and he said “Yeah!  I’d play with it all day!” and I can’t say I was surprised.

Are you addicted to anything?

For a while it was coffee, then it was Arizona Green Tea, then coffee, then for a couple of weeks it was Goose Island root beer?  Now it’s coffee again.  Because, by “addiction,” I’m assuming you mean “afflicted with a day-long brain-splitting headache if you go without,” right?

What do you see in a guy/girl?

A guy/girl?  Like both at once?  I saw some of those and they were mostly chicks with dicks in this video that popped up after I watched the Danielle Staub sex video.  They were boys with mannish chins and stubble and little sad excuses for dongs and floppy boobs.  But you hardly ever see guys with a vagina.  So I guess what I’ve seen in a guy/girl is, quite simply, a penis and some boobs that each leave something to be desired.

Do you find piercings/tattoos attractive?

God, no.  Everybody has the same ones, to0.  Girls always get birds on their collarbones or stars on their necks and stupid shit on their wrists and feet and guys always get something on their upper arm meat and it’s interesting for about five seconds and then it’s just not worth the cool points they thought it would be, so it’s awkward for everyone who’s been made to look at it.  My apologies if you have a tattoo, though, I really like yours.

Also there’s something about facial piercings that really bugs me: it’s the fact that people who have them on or near their mouths are always gumming and chewing on them and they basically walk around looking like gigantic drooly idiots.  Some girls can pull off nose rings and it’s cute, but some can’t, and boys almost never can.  I do like a nice healed ex-pierced ear on a boy, though.  That’s nice.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever licked?

Uh.  What?  Oh, hello, I didn’t see you there.  I was just trying to get this frosting off these beaters…yes, I know they don’t detach.  See, that’s why I was uh, down there.  But now that I am down here…

Do you actually believe Alaska is covered in snow?

Why??  Is it not true???  And do they really not go everywhere on a little sled pulled by dogs?!  And are there not igloos?  And can I not see the chimney smoke from Santa’s house from the highest point in the state?!  WHAT LIES.

Are you ever purposely irritating?

Well.  There’s always a moment where I’m accidentally irritating.  But then when I discover that what I did was irritating, I am filled with an ungodly desire to do it again and again and again.  Just ask anyone who’s ever spent more than an hour with me why their buttholes are sore.  There is nothing funnier than poking someone in the butthole with any sharp object that happens to be nearby!  Over and over and over, until they cry and say “I hate you!  Go away!”  Oh, we have fun.

If you could make someone disappear, who would it be?

Myself!  Fuckin A.  Then I’d go around saying things like “I HAVE MADE MYSELF DISAPPEAR.”  And people would have to believe me because I’d still eat nachos and walk through snow and shit.  It would be obvious I was invisible and I’d win Magic Person of the Year and I’d buy 30 KitchenAid mixers with the prize moneys.

Look behind you, what do you see?

Five volumes of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and about thirty dusty binders full of classification schedules.  I’ve never opened a single one of them.  I’d probably only open one if a piece of candy fell in there or something.

What’s your fave thing about the opposite sex?

You can do it backwards!

What’s the most important thing to you?

I’m not sure but it’s definitely a thing.  I mean,  as a kid I used to make lists in my head of what I’d take with me if the world exploded or the house imploded or the Big Earthquake hit Southern Illinois and I had to run outside in the middle of the night for some reason.  The lists were organized in order of priority and I don’t think any people were on it.

What would you be doing right now if you were kicked off your computer?

If someone came in right now to kick me off my computer, I’d wipe the browser real quick, then toss up the policy manual I’m working on, then start crying because, look, I really need to get that policy manual done, man!  Also I just real quick like wanna Google image search “demi moore’s bush.”

How do you spend your weekends?

Sleeping late and eating giant breakfasts and going to the farmer’s markets and buying presents for people’s unborn babies and skipping the hipster indie skank den (even though they have better coffee) because the line is a million people long and everyone is knitting (why?  WHY), going instead to Starbuck’s down the street.  Eating pizza and watching movies and making fancy drink concoctions with whatever we can find and TRYING NOT TO LOOK TOO WHITE AS I GO ALONG.

What country would you love to visit?

Norway.  I heard that’s where Erlend Oye lives and I’d hump his leg.  Plus there’s whale watching every day and it’s free.  I’ve also heard that everything is lovely and clean and pretty and it’s the most pleasant place in the world.  Then I heard some other stuff that happened in Norway but we’re going to say that’s a one time occurrence and it damn well better be.

What’s on your mind right now?

Howwwww am I going to get all this onion dip out from under my K, H, and I keys?

When was the last time you went to a good party?

Halloween was pretty fun because I ate about a million of these chocolate and coconut covered yellow cake things and got all kinds of sugared up and THEN I thought it would be a great idea to pour vodka and red bull bombs on top of that, and danced around waving my tiny doll hands and tried in vain to pick up carrots off the floor with them.  And on the way home we pulled up next to the Congress in the shitty Halloween traffic and I made faces at all the Sexy Bees and Sexy Witches and Sexy Dead Girls lined up outside after whatever bullshit show had gone on and they did not like it, no, not one bit.

Can you lick your elbow?

No, but I can poke you in the butthole with this yardstick.

If you jumped out your bedroom window right now, how injured would you be?

Well if I could teleport to be in my room right now, I guess it would be stupid to jump out when I could teleport from the window to the ground, now wouldn’t it?  But technically if I teleported home right now and jumped out of my window I would not be hurt at all because I live on the first floor, which is only one floor above basement level but still sort of on rape level.

What would you do if your bf/gf cheated on you with your best friend?

Well I have no room to talk if I have a bf AND a gf, do I?

Do you like anyone you can’t have?

If I can’t have it, I instantly hate it, and that’s how I know nobody else has anything I want.  Easy!

Do you dance even without music?

The last time I did that, my sister told me I looked like farm equipment.  So, YES!

If a blind guy/girl started hitting on you, what would you do?

I’d start singing “Jeeepers, creeeeepers!  Where’d you get those peeeepers!”  No.  Kidding.  I’d run away, then come back and be like “What are you talking about?  I’ve been here the whole time.”  No, hold on, I’d take them to bars and have them lip read everyone’s conversations for me.  Wait–dammit!  That won’t work.  This blind person sucks, can I get a deaf person or someone with a real nasty cleft palate?

What was the last concert you went to?

I think it was when we saw Menomena.  I remember because a certain person talked through the entire set and then the singer came down and stood behind us to “cool off” and he was wearing the deepest Deep V from American Apparel I’d ever seen in my life, it was a total fucking joke, like a negative of a dickie.  And he just kind of hung out there and then the certain person talked to him for like 45 minutes and we couldn’t leave because they were just jabbering about music and beats and bullshit and all these girls in Salvation Army “finds” that still stunk like moth balls were standing around moony-eyed pretending they were checking their phones when really they were OBVIOUSLY waiting for that Deep V to come off and the certain person to shut up for a second so they could strike up an awkward non-conversation with the singer.  Blerg.

Do you speak your mind?

Yes, and I should do it less, because I’ve come to find out that most people like to be lied to and fellated into believing whatever they want about themselves or the situation.

What would you do if someone random on the street came up to you and started hitting on you?

I’d ask them which specific blog post pissed them off.  Ha!

Ever been caught naked?

Not fully naked, but sort of, about 3 apartments ago when I was standing in the kitchen doing dishes in a tank top and stretched-out, cruddy-looking day-off panties and I turned around and the maintenance guy was STANDING AT MY BACK DOOR STARING IN AT ME.

Ever been in a fight?

No, but I ran from one once!  There was this girl in high school who tried to hit me with her hair brush so I went into the principal’s office (I mean, why are you going to try to throw down right outside the principal’s office, girl?!) and calmly asked if he had time to see me.

If so did you win?

Well.  It’s been ten years, and she works at Wal-Mart and is dating someone who’s still in high school, so you tell me.

Name the most stupidest thing you’ve ever done?

“Most stupidest?”  How bout we let you answer this one?

But seriously, I stupidly keep thinking I don’t have any cumin and now I have seven stupid bottles of stupid cumin in my cabinets.  How stupid is that?  Nobody makes THAT much goddamn chili.

Would you talk to someone you don’t know on the internet?

BOY WOULD I

Ever been in trouble for something you didn’t do?

Nope.  I almost always did it.

Ever done anything stupid towards a cop?

I pretended my headlights weren’t on because they wouldn’t work when actually I’d just forgotten to turn them on and I was embarrassed to admit that so I pretended to flip the switch over and over and then I was just like “They were working earlierrrrr!”  He let me go. WITH NO HEADLIGHTS.

Would you send money to a starving family in another country?

No because I’ll probably just buy them a goat they can eat and keep their young warm inside the carcass.  Over there, in other countries, they don’t have the fantastic banking system that we do, and if I gave them money, they’d be like whaaaat do we do with this?  Deposit it in our checking account?  Thanks a lot, our “checking account” is a guy with a machete who drops by every 2 weeks.

If you could speak another language, what would it be?

Farsi, so I could look up that stuck up asshole I ran into last year who listed “Fluent in Farsi” on his CV and start a conversation with him, then say, in Farsi, “Bull SHIT you know Farsi, you dumb mother fucker!”

One word to describe yourself?

“Awkwarful.”

What’s the last present you’ve received?

A little Hello Kitty in a nurse uniform.  She went directly on the Shelf of Cute Things in the kitchen.

What would you rather have as a name?

Klarnzorg the Destroyer. Also my arms would be guns that shot fists.  But when I was ten I wanted to be Nicole or Kelsey.  Just ask my brother, whom I told to tell any cute older guys we ran into at Lake of the Ozarks that my name was Kelsey.

Any siblings?

The aforementioned brother and two sisters, one of which might now actually think my name is Kelsey.

Are you a sporty kind of person or do you like to lay around and do nothing but watch tv or sit at the computer?

What’s amazing is that now we have this invention known as the Wii.  The Pants owns one and you can use it to do nothing, sporty nothing, watch TV, and also do computer-type things.  All at the same time!  I am Every Kind of Person.

Could you outrun a bus?

Sure, if I push a small child in front of one, I’ve found that it usually stops for at least a couple of hours and I can get a pretty good head start in a couple of hours, man!

You and your friends are bored. What do you do?

Hit each other!  No?  You guys don’t want to do that?  Why won’t anybody stand up?  I promise I won’t poke your buttholes anymore.  See?  I’m putting my old piece of TV antenna down.

Who hates Twilight as much as I do?

This girl for sure:

Wait, shit.  It’s the other way around, I don’t think she hates Twilight actually.

What would you do if the world were coming to an end?

Where did I  put my list of things to save?  I don’t know.  Oh well.  I’ll tell you one thing:  I’d go around punching everyone in the mouth who said things like “you guuuuyyys this is just like that movie Melancholia you guyyyyys” and I’d also eat a bacon cheeseburger pizza from Domino’s, dipped in sour cream, and then a whole quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream then go out in the street and be like KING KONG AIN’T GOT NOTHIN ON ME and then the world would end.

Biggest regret ever?

Going to school for writing.  Though it was a good way to waste the time and it gave me something to do between retail shifts and it did give me lots of good fodder for really lame, overblown, self-assured characters in case I ever write anything later about stupid people who love themselves.

Would you have given into peer pressure?

If anyone had bothered to peer pressure me!  I wasn’t cool enough, dammit.  And the only party I went to in high school where someone encouraged me to drink, there were already so many girls there pretending to be drunk that it seemed like one more would just be a pain in the ass, and also a lot of unnecessary competition.

If you could see your future in a movie, would you watch it?

Only if it was starring Kirsten Dunst and I was getting married and then the world ended!

Do you regularly indulge in drugs? If so, what? i.e Dope, Ectasy

Are you a cop?  Because I haven’t heard anyone say “dope” for a long time.  Not even to call someone a dope.  But, since it probably won’t get me in any legal trouble to state my intent, I’ll go ahead and say that I’ve been checking out these Darren Aronofsky meth ads and I think I’m gonna give it a whirl because no matter what I do I can’t seem to get my eyeliner to look like that without drugs.

Three things you would want if you were stranded on an island?

Man!  All the stuff you can’t do here in Camera Land!  The only  lame thing is that I wouldn’t have internet access so I couldn’t do all the web sleuthing and peeping and stuff I’d wanna do if my IP address was some remote location in the middle of the sea.

If you won a holiday but had to choose either a cruise ship or resort, what would you choose?

If I won a holiday, I’d choose Thanksgiving, and I’d have everything non-stuffing molded out of stuffing.  Also, why would I choose to be stranded on a cruise ship with a bunch of assholes and their kids, surrounded by a high ledge with certain death below?  I’d go with a resort because it’s probably not going to sink and kids are possibly not allowed and also they might have free sushi for breakfast.  I will take my chances there.

Favorite color?

Tits.  HAhhahahha kidding!  Not really, it’s tits.

What annoys you?

Ugh, being misquoted for the sake of bullshit drama:

“I broke down this morning and got all philosophical on some indie chick’s ass and commented on this.”

Of course, “got all philosophical” doesn’t sound as mean and hateful as “go postal all over,” so you’d have a hard time getting anyone to believe I was hating on you if you were telling the truth.  And you need everyone to believe it because it’s better than the thought that someone might not hate you, at all, might just disagree with something you wrote.  Siiiigh.

If your best friend and boyfriend needed you, honestly who would you choose?

Judge Judy.  I mean, hellooooo.

One thing that annoys you about your best friend / boyfriend?

THEY ARE ALWAYS TALKING DURING JUDGE JUDY.  NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU.

If you could ask someone any question you want, what would it be?

I’d say “Why are you such an asshole?” then I’d compare their reasons to mine and have a good benchmark for whether I’m normal-asshole or extra tasty crispy-asshole.

If you won lotto would you still work?

Prolly.  Like on dried flower wreaths and building a gift wrapping station in my mansion’s work room, stuff you see old people doing in ads for rheumatoid arthritis medication.

Random crazy thing you daydream about?

I had this weird daydream that Thom Yorke made me a little change purse thing and I felt really bad because I thought it was stupid but I wore it around anyway.

Do you prefer a beer or spirit mix (vodka, bourbon)?

Lately I prefer White Cake infused vodka:

Current obsession:

See above.

I’m worried about:

See above.

Next thing I want to buy:

See above.

What’s your fav type of music?

Oh, I don’t know.  Let’s not talk about music, okay?  That’s the gateway to pretention.  Also, hearing what someone else thinks about music won’t sway my opinion either way.  Does it work like that for you?

Have you ever met anyone famous?

Oh sure.  I will now proceed to drop names nonchalantly while you envy my second-degree fame status from over there in your Lame-Z-Boy.

Any ideas for your wedding?

Ewwwwww shut UP

Song that has the best memories to it?

I guess that graduation song by Vitamin C.  I remember sitting there laughing and everyone was crying and we watched the goddamn Powerpoint of all our baby pictures 1000 times and they kept PLAYING THAT SONG and those are good memories because life is so much better than that now, for me, anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

Walt Dick-me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am

in the garden

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

my mother’s purple necklace

that she gave

to me

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

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

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

Where was I going with all this?  Oh yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*schlock + garbage

**Case in point: I am a cyborg.

And the hits just keep on comin.

WHYYYY. I HAVE SO MUCH MORE TO GIVE.

Nothing against fat girls or sexy vintage underwear.  That’s cool.  I personally have a gigantic 60′s ass.  And even in the 60′s they would have thought it was  a big ass, probably.  They would have said “She’s a lobster…all the meat’s in the tail!  Hot-cha cha cha chaaaaa!”

I do have a problem with burlesque girls looking at chicks who dance at the Admiral Club or Diamond City and go “Ewww what a whore.”  It’s all the same thing.  Maybe you’re covered up about 27% more than she is at the end of the night, and you and your burlesque troupe friends have to split the door price instead of getting your own tips, but come on.  It’s all just dancing around in panties, isn’t it?  And for some reason, the girls who do burlesque just always happen to get on my very last goddamn nerve.  It’s an annoyance that’s separate from my hatred of burlesque, they’re a dipshit first, an old-timey stripper second.  I just can’t say I’m surprised when some bitch that has annoyed me to no end for all the time I’ve known her tosses out there “Oh, here’s a flier for my burlesque troupe, we’re doing a show this Friday night.”  You don’t say.

Halloween is the day when girls wear skanked-out lycra straps over their nipples and call it a costume.  Burlesque is the nonstop Halloween for the jiggly-fleshed girl, because “It’s not skanky because it’s art, okay?”

I think it’s really exciting and interesting. It seems (with) this revival, women are embracing this style and want to have fun with it and they want to embrace their inner bombshell and get really..you know  have fun with dressing up and feeling their own ..like..confidence and sexual power.  They are seeing a different version of sexy other than a blonde bikini babe, tan, and natural running down a beach in slow motion.  You know, this is a different kind of sexy and I think there is a lot of women who can relate to this style. . .”–Dita Von Teese, aka Heather Renee Sweet, to Katie Couric, who you know does not give a shit.

ick.

Oh, tell it to the fucking Pussycat Dolls.

Anyway.  I had this boss once when I worked in retail who was a tooootal cocksucker.  No, really, she sucked a lot of cock.  And it was weird that she did that because she also hung out around groups of boys and did the whole “Hey, hey dudes: I’m a lesbian.  What do you think of that?  Does that turn you on, that I’m a lesbian?  Because I’m SUCH a lesbian.  WINK WINK!”  Meanwhile, her girlfriend, a Filipino art student who was like 6 years younger, stayed at home all day babysitting her son for her.  I always felt sorry for that girl, but not too sorry, because hey, you chose to do that to yourself.  I had a friend who called my fake lesbian boss the Faux Lesbeaux, which, over time, translated itself into the name everyone used for her eventually: the Flezboss.

This woman was stupid.  I’d wager she still is.

The Puma store where I worked had a back alley, where The Homeless liked to congregate at night.  This alley had a dumpster that was strategically placed to hide the back door from street view.  There, in the shadow of the dumpster, The Homeless would unleash their bowels.  It just so happened to be right in front of our back door.  So, the Flezboss created a Support Ticket! to have someone come clean the alley.  On it, she wrote, in her cutesy “Aren’t I just a little airhead? Hee hee hee!” way, “Back door has fisis behind it.”  Fisis.  Because in her mind, it’s cute when you spell things majorly wrong.  She then took that piece of paper around to everyone and said “Look!  Look how silly and stupid I am!!!  Is this how you spell feces?  Hey, does anyone know how to spell feces?  Teehee!”

She pretty much hated women, but her lezzy cover-up served to dispel that rumor, because “I love women!  They’re totally hot and they turn me on and I go down on them.  Does that, uhhh…do anything for you??”  She constantly made bitchy comments under her breath about women customers or coworkers.  If a male visitor, customer, or coworker talked to anyone but her, she squeezed herself into the conversation, flipping her hair and batting her eyelashes and mentioning her sexual orientation as casually as possible.  Her only attempts to socialize or connect with her female coworkers was to feign idiocy over her menstrual cycle every month.  She’d announce that she had to go to the bathroom because of “Girl issues!”  She’d ask us for tampons, all the while shoving the tampons she’d bought that morning deeper into her purse so we wouldn’t see them.  It was so we could bond, you know?  Like women bond over their periods in shitty movies and brainless burps of television.

She tried her damnedest to get myself and like four other women fired for arbitrary shit like “Your tone this morning was negative” or “I could tell from your facial expression while you were reading the week’s numbers that you were being negative.”  One day I came in, she brought me into the office, sat me down, and handed me a piece of paper to sign.   The piece of paper said that she had been the only witness to me saying something derogatory, to myself, in another room, about a manager.  And that since she witnessed this (through a wall), I was on my Final Warning.  I think, on that day, I just kind of wept at the futility of it all, how fucking stupid it was that fake lesbians with fat asses had the power to yank my crappy ass retail job out from under me.  She was just an asshole.  Why in God’s name would you fire ANYONE from a shitty job in a basement of a Puma store?  Isn’t there something else you could be doing?  This comment she told HR she overheard never happened.  I’d shout it from the rooftops right now if I’d said it.  And I didn’t.

I’m pretty sure she just didn’t like that I was smart, and I could see through her bullshit.  People haaaate to be around someone like that, someone who knows when you’re being a stupid asshole on purpose.  That’s probably why she had another piece of paper sent down from Retail HR On High to tell my favorite manager and friend that she was “being too clique-y” with the staff.  This was like a day and a half after she tried to win cool points with the staff by going around with her bad-assery badge on her sleeve, saying that just the night before she and another member of the staff had driven around in her car with open PBR tall boys.

Here’s some old blog posts about her, which I wrote under my own name and threw out there on the interwebs for all to see, too young and stupid to realize that she’d find them and my work life would be even more hellish than I ever thought possible:

So when the Flezboss stopped me, at 5:01, from clocking out and running directly into traffic so that she could lean into my face and stage-whisper “DO YOU HAVE A TAMPON?!?” like it was the first time she’d ever asked me that question, it was actually very hard not to just lean into her face and scream my fucking head off.

I wish I had exploding tampons with nails wrapped around them. I’d give her one of those. Because she asks me every fucking month–and I think I’ve blogged this before–if she can have one of my tampons. Like she’s completely taken by surprise by the fact that she needs them at the same predictable time every fucking month, the fat fool. I guess they do use double the amount over at the Lezzie Borden she calls an apartment, and maybe it’s harder to stay stocked up, but Jeeeezus Christ on a cracker. Buy the big box, you fucking asshole. You and that oily little catfish you call a girlfriend couldn’t use that many in a month.

Anyway, I’m going to start drawing up plans for exploding tampons. Then I’ll give one to her and if she’s smart she won’t ask for one again.

And of course I have a giant box of them in my locker, but I always give her the same doofy look she’s giving me, shrug, and say, “Nope!”

Then one day she got a new job:

You know what also lifts a girl’s spirits?

When the fucking white-trash skank whore thorn in her side gets loosed and falls out. That’s right: the Flezzboss, the famous, hated, shitty excuse for a leader is being banished to an outlet in Florida, where she will rot for all eternity beneath piles of rejected Made in Vietnam shoes. By August 1st, she’ll be gone, jettisoned from Chicago just as fast as the plane’s fuel can carry her fat ass.

I keep having to take a moment for a deep breath and a wave of calm realization that the bitch is almost wiped out of my life for good. Ugh.

Now I can buy cute scarves and jeans and not have to worry about someone going out and buying the same one, then wearing it the next day, and then pointing out that she bought the same scarf or pair of jeans as me.

Of course, she just went out and got her hair cut like mine, after telling me she was going to. But she can have whatever haircut she fucking wants, as long as she stays in fucking Florida and gets eaten by the monster we call A High Volume Outlet.

And I won’t have to worry about getting written up every time I breathe wrong, and I won’t have to worry about whether or not my fatty boss is comfortable with my facial expression during the morning meeting, and I won’t have to listen to her screeky voice ever again while she talks shit about everyone on the phone. It’s like I had a giant tumor of fakeness in my life, and it’s being removed.

And here’s a little clip of her being a total suicide pig:

I totally agree that I'm a good person. I just wanted to talk real quick about how amazing I am now that someone is dead.

Sometimes when I think about her, I get really angry.  I get mad that I was under the direction of a person like that, who basically had carte blanche to do whatever the hell she wanted to me.  When people like that are in power, even if it’s just a management job in a shoe store, you basically have to sit there and smile stupidly and stay out of their way and never EVER let them think for a second you might be the slightest bit offended by their racist/sexist jokes, which they tell with their eyes blinking stupidly, pretending not to know that what they just said is totally inappropriate.  You’re supposed to laugh along and be just as much of an asshole as they are because people like that are fucking bullies, and if you stand up to a bully who manages a shoe store, get ready to be fired from A FUCKING SHOE STORE.

I swear there’s a point to all of this.

The point is this: recently my anger and annoyance, deeply rooted in the past and lying sideways somewhere under my liver like a little rock, flared up a little bit.  See, I go all over the interwebs looking for pictures of cupcakes and cupcake recipes and fun stuff that makes me feel good, which usually means that I do lots of Google searches for things including the word “cupcake.”  It’s unfortunate that Safe Search would never have protected me from what I found not too long ago.  It appears that, aside from getting arrested, my former boss has been spending her time having her photo taken in such a way that darkens the word “cupcake” and all its positive connotations forever:

No...please stop...

Ohmygod.

These images come to us courtesy of “Cupcake Pinups,” a photography studio that is so serious about its love of sugar, rockabilly, tattoos, and strappy underwear, that it’s actually invested in a real Facebook page to promote its business.

Upon seeing these, I wanted to douse my brain in lighter fluid and set it on fire.  And don’t even think I take any satisfaction in the death imagery above: I don’t wish this woman dead and that wouldn’t make me happy.  What would make me happy is if everyone quit talking to her, forever and ever.  All I see here is a tubby bitch lolling around in a fake cemetery with her mouth open like she’s saying “HEYYYYYY How do you spell feces?!?!  HAHAHA LOL!”

And why…whyyyy did they have to use a cupcake for this asscrappery?  That’s what made it possible for this cunt from the fake graveyard of Hell to haunt me, years later and now that I no doubt make a better salary than she ever did in the shoe store management circuit.  She has reached across  time and the deep web to torment me with this horrifying example of Rockabilly-burlesque fusion with a cherry on top.

And yes, that is a fake cupcake tattoo splotched on her arm.  For the sake of the art, you know.

Happy Fucking Halloween, indeed.

Here’s some examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But overall I think Zooey Deschanel can suck it.

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

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

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

dork love

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

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

And here is what was said:

Wolf Dork:  “I believe in you.”

Band-Aid Dork:  “…”  Looks at floor.

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

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

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

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

Nasty Self

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

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

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

You can't hide.

You can't run.

Sometimes Nasty Self is just a tailgating cocksucker.

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

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

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

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

Shit.  I quit, then.  I quit at life.

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

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

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

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

SIGH.

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

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

Something Awful

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

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

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

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

Eww what a total dog, huh?

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

The proper uniform for any Team Douche hopeful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Donger Need Food

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

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

Brain Ball

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

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

Two related/un-related things about this:

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

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

Hello, Athens!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Whore Island

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that the following is a clear record of the fact that hellfire can be defined as “church camp” or “church road trip.”

Sister: OH yes!
I want my Breathless Mahoney t-shirt
from the Dick Tracy movie that I never saw. this one!!!
wait no
mine was purple
I should make mommy dig it up.
me: No way, she sold all our shit in that yard sale
Remember?
We ate at John’s Cafe at like 1am
then she woke us up at 5am to help her drag shit out into the yard
I almost barfed a sausage biscuit brick
Anyway
Sold
Someone is sitting at McDonald’s right now wearing the hell out of it.
Sister: hahahah
I know
I saw a girl in dairy queen wearing my Heather and BlahBlah shirt
from the one Christian concert I went to with Church of Christ.
me: hahaha
I was so jealous
“a real concert! Man I wanna grow up right now!”
HAHAHA
Sister: Hahahhaha
I know, I know
that trip was so uncomfortable!
Man
[J.H.] was there
and that girl Nicole, the preacher’s daughter
brought a “popular” friend from school
with big, blonde scrunchy hair, and she insisted she had to sleep by the bathroom because she had her period
I remember going in there in the morning and there was a big huge blotch of blood on the floor.
And no one would talk to me, and they made me play mini-golf
and be in a skit about homie the clown, and I didn’t even know who/what that was.
All I knew was [A.W] got to hit me in the head with a sock stuffed with more socks, on a stage, in front of hundreds of people.
and I pretty much stopped believing in god that weekend.
me: oh my god
this is terrible/wonderful
I’m sorry.
I had an awful time on that trip I had to take to that hotel in Springfield with [N.U] and [S.T.] and [N.U.]‘s dad
I brought a fucking coloring book full of unicorns and a bag of markers
and they brought fucking Clinique bags stuffed with makeup
and they whispered about me and put on makeup all night
while i colored unicorns
and in the morning we had to go sing about Jesus and how awesome everything is.
Sister: I remember!!!
I think I was there too!
[N.U.] made us all stop on the way home so she could buy a new curling iron at Walmart.
me: YES
We had to pick up trash on the side of the road or something?
then go to a sing a long
then go home.
fucking awful.
My children are NOT going to shit like that
that will just make them uncomfortable about themselves for 48 hours.
Stuff like that is why I have a nervous bowel.
I guarantee I was constipated for a week after that
because I didn’t have any makeup
Sister: hahaha
I went to camp with those bitches!
I remember, the next day one of them TOLD ME
“Last night we were talking in Heather’s bunk, and I said we should invite you over, and Heather said “But what if she actually COMES?!”
Hey, that’s OK, girls.
I’m over here with my itty bitty book light junior
reading Tituba.
Then they wanted to have a leg-shaving party.
But I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs.
me: ugh
At my church camp they tricked me in to “dry shaving”
“Yeah totally it’s where you just shave your legs like without water, we all do it”
So I did it with a plastic Bic someone gave me
and my legs were so sore and broken out all week
every little hair follicle sliced open
so awful, and hot and painful
then next year I met [B.] and everything was awesome
and we found out we were going to start 6th grade together
We are still friends!
Sister: wow
Well, something good came out of it.
me: I guess so
Sister: I just kissed a guy who told me on the last day of camp that he “couldn’t remember” his address.
hahahah
STORY OF MY LIFE.
me: HAHAHA
Sister: hahahahaha

You can make the body of Christ into small cakes, you know.

me: I totally just found my church camp crush on Facebook
[R.R.]
He looks like a dick
a dick in Abercrombie
The scariest thing about that camp
I mean
besides the fact that they encouraged us to send each other “around the chapel” holding hands
during meals
was that giant box full of water in the front of the chapel where they’d baptise
Looked like a big damn coffin
Sister: no, the scariest thing was the chef.
Pizza!
“Hey, Pizza-Man!”
Then one summer we came back..
and he was gone.
BECAUSE HE MURDERED SOMEONE!
me: oh my god
OH [R.R.] is a flamer now!
sounds about right
He posted an online review of something called “Powered Lube”
Sister: Well, he’s not going to fall for the dry shaving trick.
Not [R.R.]

The worst part is having to stand withered next to the good version of yourself that everybody remembers and liked.

On the bright side, I’m fairly certain you can crush up Klonopin and put it on a cupcake.  YAHTZEE!

“YOU GOT A ATTITUDE”

“YOU AIN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU TALKIN ABOUT”

“HEYYYYY!”

I wonder if any of them are thinking about the tons of people who sleep in on Saturdays.  Granted, I’m sleeping almost until 11am, that’s pretty late to be expecting other people to be considerate.  BUT STILL.

Two weeks ago, I was waiting for the bus and I felt a hard tap on my head.  The next sensation was the dribbling of the bird shit sliding down the side of my head and collecting on top of my ear.  Well, that’s fucking awesome, I thought.  Good thing I have napkins in my purse.

One week ago, I was sitting on the bus, reading a book.  The greasy high school boy across from me let out a wet sneeze, and I looked down to find snot chunky with boogers splattered across my jacket sleeves and cuffs.  “Are you KIDDING ME?” I yelled at him, as his immediate reaction was to pretend that nothing had happened.  He ignored me, as if I wasn’t sitting there covered in his snot, screaming at him.  Well, that’s fucking awesome, I thought.  Good thing I have a single napkin left in my purse.

Usually, when it gets to the point that people are actually spraying me with their bodily fluids and then pretending that I don’t exist, it means I’ve been in this stupid city, riding the stupid buses, and following my stupid routine for way too long.  I thought it was the universe’s way of telling me that I’m fucked, really, it’s the universe’s way of telling me to fuck off.

Shutup, faggot

Stephanie sent me this yesterday and it’s killing me.

Shit Sack Comes to Visit

If you ever find yourself shut in a hotel room with nothing to do, please don’t watch the movie “Hump Day.”  I will tell you why, okay?  Shut up for a minute and let me find my notes.

So IMDB sums it up this way:

When Andrew unexpectedly shows up on Ben’s doorstep late one night, the two old college friends immediately fall into their old dynamic of heterosexual one-upmanship. To save Ben from domestication, Andrew invites Ben to a party at a sex-positive commune. Everyone there plans on making erotic art films for the local amateur porn festival and Andrew wants in. They run out of booze and ideas, save for one: Andrew should have sex with Ben, on camera. It’s not gay; it’s beyond gay. It’s not porn; it’s an art project. The next day, they find themselves unable to back down from the dare. And there’s nothing standing in their way – except Ben’s wife Anna, heterosexuality, and certain mechanical questions.

This movie should have been called “Two Dudely Dudes Have 36 Conversations.”  It was seriously like being forced to be in a room with two people you don’t really like who are discussing performance art.  “But dude what if we like, did this?  Dude what if we like, did that?  DUDE.”  They have conversations at tables, in cars, on the porch, on the couch.  Sometimes the girl has conversations with them.  Sometimes she just has a conversation with one of them.  Sometimes one of them leaves the room and the conversation continues because there’s still a dude in the room and he’s having a conversation with his THOUGHTS, man!

The story behind the never ending stream of talking in this movie is pretty stupid.  Naturally, this young pair of cute vintage-inspired newlyweds is trying to get knocked up.  Then what the fuck do you know?  The guy’s annoying best friend blows into town and takes over their couch and is generally poopy toward the whole marriage and children idea.  Because he’s a free spirit, man.  If you’re not traveling throughout your thirties, you’re lame!

(The one good thing I will say about this movie is that they totally got the annoying best friend right.  Every boy you will ever date, have ever dated, or ever thought about dating, has one of these.  Loud, obnoxious, chubby, and generally stupid, they circle until about 8 months into the relationship (if that), then they fucking swoop in full speed and decide to claim their friend back.  It’s your fault he’s been spending so little time with his best friend!  You know he can’t resist pussy, and you keep insisting on giving it to him!  Meh meh meh!  Oh, plus, these guys always experiment with fedoras.  Because they are, in actuality, slightly gay, and a liiiiiiiittle bit in love with your boyfriend–but only in that way that straight men can recognize their love for each other, the closest they ever get to it is thinking that maybe they’re jealous of their friend.)

(The fact that this movie got the annoying best friend so spot on is not a good thing.  That’s because you have to spend an hour and a half with this fat sack of shit and nobody wants to do a thing like that.  Didn’t think about that, did you, filmmakers?)

The “sex-positive commune” described above was actually like a slutty sorority house full of swinging lesbians who didn’t mind having sex with anyone in front of anyone, you know, those super hot-bodied, abused-as-a-child-but-that’s-not-why-I’m-a-lesbian-I’m-just-really-free lesbians.  So there’s this ONE scene where they writhe around on a bed half naked (well, wrapped in hippie print scarves and sarongs) and say the most random, stupid shit about relaaaaaationships, and that’s pretty much all it takes to give people who are actually sex positive a bad name.  Everybody smokes a lot of pot out of super-clean, over-complicated bongs and before long, our hero and his BFF have decided to take all of the Sex-Positive Performance Artists on in a little bet where he and his friend fuck each other on film.  And these dudes are gonna fuckin do it because they’re DUDES!  And plus the fat BFF has “never finished an art project,” and this is the one that he wants to finally follow through with.

So they have about a million conversations about doing it or not doing it, the wife finds out, she cries and wails, then admits that she cheated on her husband after they got married, so maybe he should get a pass to fuck his friend.  “Get it out of your system, like I did” she says.  Yay for sex positivity!

About the only positive in this movie would be possibly getting to settle your morbid curiosity by seeing two overweight dudely dudes bone each other, which they don’t.  They order room service and just hang out like a couple of bachelors.

Fuck this movie.  Or don’t.  I don’t know.  Maybe we should just talk about it a lot and never watch it.

Around the Orifice

There’s this girl in my office who I’ve always known for a fact held the title of Resident Shit-Talker, but boy did she ever go above and beyond last week.

This girl refers to her shit-talking circuit as “making the rounds.”  That’s where you see her coming through the office, down the worn track of carpet between all of our desks, leaning over everyone’s cube walls for however long it takes her to expel the newest stream of shit from her mouth to your ear.  Oh, and I can’t forget to mention that she’s a cunt, the bad kind.  She’ll come to you, whispering, eyes wide and cloudy with concern like she just saw a bloody car accident, and ask you “What…is WRONG…with Kelly’s hair?  Oh. My. God.”  Mere seconds later, you’ll see her at Kelly’s cube, saying “Your hair looks SO cute today!  What are you doing differently?”

Did you ever wonder what would happen to the girls at your high school who acted like this?  Did you think maybe they’d get the Tina Fey “Mean Girls” treatment and grow out of it?  Maybe some do, but in my opinion, those horrible cunts are just in training in high school.  They’re learning how to come off as Super Nice! and just whisper their terrible insults.  I’ll tell you what happens to them: they grow up and work in offices and grow great big dimpled asses, the kind that grow up and over their lower backs, and have to wear plus size Ann Taylor pants.  Oh, and they continue to be horrible cunts, and they think everyone likes them and nobody sees through them.  It’s absolutely exhausting to watch.

Not that I’ve never talked shit, but fucking hell.  It must have been a slow news day last Thursday because the big report we just all had to have was that a certain person in our office went to the bathroom and didn’t wash her hands!  Gasp!  This is horrible!  I KNOW!  What should we do?  I DON’T KNOW!  Isn’t there anyone we can report this to?  WHAT IF SHE’S IN THE BREAK ROOM RIGHT NOW TOUCHING ALL OF THE SPOONS?  She’s disgusting.  We hate her.  Let’s all look at her like “we know what you did.”  Yeah, we should.  Let’s make a concerted effort to make her feel unwelcome.

Look How Your Fat Brain Works!

One thing about working with other people that I’ve just come to accept as The Way Things Are and Will Always Be is that, when there is nothing else to talk about (and sometimes when there is), people will always steer the conversation toward food.  Especially if there is food around, which there always seems to be in the work environment.  Actually, I’m starting to wonder if perhaps people don’t overpopulate the work environment with foodstuffs just so things will be less awkward, so that there will be more to talk about.  Oh wasn’t that a great pecan tart?  Did you have some of that bacon cake and grease juice Sheila brought in?  Gahhh that was gooooooooood wasn’t it?

It’s no surprise that 20/20 found, when they did a sneaky hidden camera test thingy, that people are more comfortable overeating or making poor food choices when others are doing the same.  I don’t think this applies to me, as I grew up “overeating” at every meal, as my mother glared at me from across the table, slurping her Slim-Fast and slicing a Grape Nut in half.  So I’ve always had to be comfortable making my food choices (i.e., the choice to eat) without any support.  However, 20/20 did this little sneakysnake move where they grabbed people out of lines at Disney World, put them in a windowless room, and told them they’d be testing a new chocolate chip cookie or chocolate ice cream.  “Now there is a very high fat content!” they’d say, and you were left to wonder if they meant like, in the food, or attached to the test subjects and slopping over the sides of the tiny chairs.  The sneaky part was that there were always 2 people “testing” the food, and the second person, in true Maury Povich hidden camera fashion, was a decoy!  A sexy food decoy!  Paid to sit in the room and overeat on purpose to see if the other person would do the same!  And sometimes the decoy ate half of a cookie, just a tiny few bites of the ice cream, just enough to taste it.  On those occasions, without fail, the test person would do exactly the same, just a bite here and there.  But when the sexy decoy ate half a carton of ice cream, the person in the white lab coat with the clipboard saying “Go on, eat all you want!,” the test person would do exactly the same, wolfing down scoop after scoop of ice cream, stopping only when the sexy decoy stopped.  More than one person ate until they felt sick, just because the sexy decoy hadn’t stopped yet.

At the end, they gave all of the test subjects $10 and told them they’d been duped.  They showed them the footage and said “Look at you!  Look at you go, rippin’ into that chocolate ice cream!  You had thirty-seven cookies, just because someone else did!  HAHA.  Look how your fat brain works!”  Then the 20/20 Fatty Study Team addressed Mr. and Mrs. John Uh Merica directly and said, “Now isn’t that interesting?”

I have my own food issues, and one of them is that I do not enjoy eating in front of people.  I won’t eat on the train, but restaurants don’t freak me out so much because you’re expected to eat there.  I am extremely uncomfortable, however, eating in the office, under fluorescent lighting, gathered standing with paper plates around a giant airbrushed cake with badly done blue icing baby shoes splopped all over it.  You’re supposed to stand there, eat the cake, and talk.  And if you turn down the cake, you ignite a firestorm of discussion, during which people say all manner of inappropriate things because they feel like fatasses for having decided to eat the cake.  How dare you judge me?!  Also annoying is when I am unable to take a lunch break and have to eat something at my desk.  Inevitably, someone leans over my cube wall and says, “What are you eating?  What IS that?  Hm.  Yogurt?  Is it good?  Smells weird.  Just saying.  Do you like it?  You like yogurt?  Why?  Oh.  You like it.  But are you trying to lose weight?  What are you saying about me HAHAHA.  No, I’m kidding.  You don’t need to lose weight.  I should eat yogurt.  What is that?  Cereal?  Is that in an old butter container?  Why didn’t you use like some brand name Tupperware?  Why did you re-use that I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter thing?  Hm.”

But the funny thing is that all of the obsession with what other people are eating stems from everyone’s own food issues.  Which is also not funny because that is why it will never, ever stop.  I once had a manager at the Footwear Palace where I worked who talked all the time about how she wanted to lose weight, how she’d had to change pants that morning because the others had given her a muffin top, how she’d only had 1100 calories the day before…all unprompted, of course.  Nobody asked her for this information.  But she was butt fuck obsessed with food.  A superfan of frozen Lean Cuisine fare, she would comment, without fail, on anything other people were eating.  She even nicknamed someone because once he brought in chicken fingers for lunch.  She couldn’t help herself.  She also asked him every single time she saw him, even if it was like 10a.m., “What’s for lunch today?!  Chicken fingers!?  I know you love your chicken fingers!  I can’t eat em because I’ll get fat!  More power to ya though!  HAHAHA!” And so on, and so on, every day.  “Whatcha eating?!  MMMMMM.  What’s in the microwave?  Smells GOOOOOOOOOOD.”  Then she’d tell everyone what you had for lunch.  What it looked like.  What it smelled like.  She just could not stop herself.  She didn’t realize how transparently weird she was being about food.

And that’s how one’s boss lives vicariously through their meals.

Is this possibly because mealtimes are sometimes the only break in the monotony of the day, when one gets to reward oneself with food?

My problem is this: there’s an overabundance of processed sugars and complex carbohydrates in my office every day.  Piles of cake and cupcakes and muffins and coffee cake and boxes of chocolatey treats from Dingles & Boomrats (or whatever the fuck that place is called where people order cases of chocolate covered pears with toffee chunks).  EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY.  I hardly ever eat anything just because I’m trying to be polite.  If it doesn’t taste good, I’m not going to sit there and choke it down just because you’re going to be offended if I don’t.  This ain’t Craplakistan.  I don’t suck stranger dick just because some guy on the bus is going to be put out for the rest of the afternoon if I decline.  I don’t want bruises on my knees, and I sure as hell don’t want a butt shaped like my desk chair, like everyone else in this damn place seems to have.  But if you don’t eat something at a mandatory office party, you get this “Oh.  You’re not eating.  Uh huh” bullshit.

My other problem is this: I love sugar.  And cake.  And cupcakes.  But only when they taste good.  And too much fake saccharin makes my stomach hurt like a bitch.  So yesterday at my coworker’s baby shower party, I chose an orange instead of the cupcake platter (including aforementioned airbrushing and really bad giant turdlike icing booties).  Holy hell, did I start a fuss.  Every single person I tried unsuccessfully to mingle with said “No caaaaaaaaaaaake?  You’re not haaaaaaaaaaaaaaving any?!?!?!  WHY?  Let me get you some!!!”

So when the cupcakes ran out, somebody whipped out this strawberry cake thing.  It had white icing and strawberries all over the top, and it (deceivingly) looked yummy.  Half of my orange gone, I got a slice of cake and, wishing to avoid that saccharin stomach ache, cut it in half, and put it on my plate.  I’m glad I only took half a slice because the cake fucking sucked.  It was like eating wedges of yellow kitchen sponges smeared with carpet cleaning foam.  And what does my boss say, snidely, as I come stand near her?

“Oh.  You’re having an orange AND some cake.  Oh.”

Voila.  There you have it.  The need to look at someone’s plate and point out exactly what’s on it.

Of course, it’s okay to say that to people who aren’t morbidly obese.  However, if someone said that to the lady who doesn’t leave her office between the hours of 9 and 5, who sits in a special chair with a specially purchased foot rest because of her weight, well, that would be inappropriate.  Of course, we can’t mention what she ate, or how fast.  But you can bring up my food habits all you want.

Last month, there was an event in another building, the building that was basically slapped into the middle of campus for all of the school’s entertaining purposes.  Outsiders from whom we wish to woo funding are shuttled to the ornate building first, given tours of the miraculous space-age HD flat-screen technology equipped “classrooms” (which are never used), and treated to a cafeteria-style lunch downstairs in the banquet hall.  The open room and giant trays you’re given for your multiple plates are a higher-brow way of hanging an “ALL YOU CAN EAT” sign over the door.  Employees, who are not invited to enjoy the banquet except for on rare occasions, talk about the Beale Center* all the time, like it’s some kind of magical candy mountain where all of your dreams come true.  And when they talk about it, they’re only mentioning the lunch you get to have if you’re employed there for the day.  So the week before the event with which my office was supposed to help all day, my entire floor was all abuzz with talk of the amazing Beale Center lunch we were supposed to get.  People were practically creaming their panties, salivating, foaming at the fucking mouth, talking about how loooong of a day the event was going to be, “but at least we get Beale Center lunch!!!“  People from other departments were stopping by and asking if we needed any help that day, because oh, you know, I’m  not that busy that day, I could come by just before lunch and help out…?

By the time the frenzy reached a fever pitch, it was half an hour before the cafeteria door was going to be opened.  Mr. Cornell was wandering the halls aimlessly, as he’d left a special session he was supposed to attend early so that he could be among the first in line for the food.  He kept passing my post at the front desk, where I was supposed to be warmly greeting a bunch of corporate assholes and handing them name tags so they could call each other something other than Asshole.  “It’s almost time for lunch,” he said, “you better go get in line now!  Get in line now, if you want, I’m sure it’s fine.  You should go.”  (Encouraging others to do something first, so that he can follow and then point fingers at the leader if anything goes wrong, is something I’ve come to expect from Mr. Cornell.  It appears that it was part of his education to slime his way through life, letting someone else go first.  If every dude in his graduating class had started fucking each other’s buttholes, well then, he’d really be living the life he dreams of.  But I digress.)

So Mr. Cornell keeps swinging past my station, checking the entrance to the banquet hall (still empty), and encouraging me to “beat that crowd.”  I, who had been near the cheese platter all morning, was full and didn’t want any lunch.  In an effort to cease his incessant buzzing, I said “I’m not that hungry, I’m not eating lunch.”

At first, I thought he’d had a heart attack.  Clutching his chest, he turned pale and sweaty.  “YOU’RE NOT EATING BEALE CENTER LUNCH?  BUT IT’S THE BEALE CENTER.  IT’S FREE!  IT’S LUNCH!  IT’S REAAAAAAAAAAALLY GOOD.  WHAT?  ARE YOU SICK?  AT LEAST GET SOMETHING TO GO AND EAT IT LATER.”  Not only was he flabbergasted that someone would actually choose not to eat sweaty pork steaks that had been lying under a heat lamp for half an hour, a scoop from the vat of mashed potatoes made from the finest mashed potato powder money could buy in bulk at Costco, that someone would turn down free congealed shrimp on a stick, as well as a whole bar of fancy cheeses and fancy crackers on fancy wooden platters, all the soda one could drink and unlimited desserts, NOT ONLY did he have to be personally offended by this, he also had to tell everyone in our office that I didn’t eat that day.

Two weeks later, people are still coming to my desk and asking why I didn’t eat Beale Center lunch that day.  “Well why not?  Why?”  They don’t seem to believe that I just wasn’t hungry.  I just wasn’t!!!

I know that part of the draw of the place is that the food is free, and that it’s presented in giant silver tureens heated with little mini Bunsen burners.  I mean, let an adult loose in a room filled with vats of processed foods, where everyone else is doin’ it too, is like a playground.  And to decline is to start a fucking Lord of the Flies situation.

Ironically, in this analogy, I’d be the one they called Piggy.

And another thing that bugs me about work.

I don’t think it’s quite fair that I should be hunted down and obligated to give money, MY MONEY, my hard-earned cash, to some admin assistant for a present for someone I don’t know or like personally, that I only WORK with, because they got knocked up or engaged or got a new job.

*Made up name, duh.

Michelle Fucking Pfeiffer

Where is your Mother?

I think she’s in Nashville, Tennessee at a Sheraton.  I called her on Monday and she was in a really good mood, she said she was in Nashville, Tennessee at a Sheraton.  I asked her why, and she said because her friend wanted to go and she didn’t have anything better to do “so I thought, what the hell?  I’ll go.”  This is the kind of thing you do in your later years, when you have money.  This is the kind of thing you’re supposed to do when you’re young, but right now you owe Citibank almost $60,000 in student loans and they own your salary for 2 years.

Where is your Father?

He’s living in Mt. Pleasant, California.  The last I heard, he wanted to offer me some money to hang out with him and pretend like I like him so he’ll feel better about himself without really having to do anything.  Turns out, the money is my “inheritance” and probably doesn’t exist and when I said no thanks, he made sure to tell me he’d be giving it to his NEW WIFE’S DAUGHTER, then!  Nyahh!  How does that grab you!!  I bet you’re jealous!

This is  the kind of thing you do in your later years.

Where were you born?

In a house in a small town on red shag carpet.  Aforementioned Mother got on her hands and knees and thankfully, aforementioned Father stuck around at least long enough to catch me on my slippery fall from the womb.  Thanks Daddy!

How many days until your birthday?

13.  I know because I’m counting and also I’m obnoxious so I mention it every single day.  You should buy me this because I don’t have it yet and I can’t figure out why:

GIANT CUPCAKE OMG

What is the closest orange object to you?

All kinds of really bad art on the walls of this coffee shop, I can just see the skinny jeaned artist himself hanging the pieces, which look like trees drawn by a third grader with press-on nails at the end of each branch.  “See, when I painted this one, I was listening to a lot of Kanye West?  And, you know, really just…thinking about the colors in the music.  About the antiquated methods used to produce the sound and how that really influences the way it colors your mind, you know?”  Or some other kind of shit that people say about stuff they create when they’re put on the spot.

How many books are in your room?

Over a hundred.  It’s annoying.  Sometimes I wake up and want to take them all outside and leave them on the curb.  I mean, what am I going to do with all of these books?  I’m just not the type of person anymore who buys 100 copies of Hemingway or Salinger novels because I want someone to come over and ask me about it so I can talk about why I loooove his work and how it shaped me as a writer.  Or some other kind of shit that people say about stuff other people created when they’re put on the spot.

Now that I’m such a heavy user of libraries, I see no point in owning books anymore.  I guess they can be aesthetically pleasing, but to me they’re just an annoyance, a waste of shelf space.  I mean, the library is just about the only system in the world that you can use for free to give you access to something you want for free.  Why buy?  Maybe because I feel guilty about reading library books in the bath tub and wrinkling the pages with wet fingers.  I guess that’s why.

Who is your favorite teacher of all time?

Michelle Fucking Pfeiffer.  Not only because we have the same birthday (in 13 days) but also (and mostly) because she knows how to sit on a chair backwards to make people pay attention to you.  When I do that in staff meetings because I’m being constantly talked over by loud, stupid men who basically repeat what I say only LOUDER and get all the credit for it, people look at me like I’m a total weirdo and then continue to talk over me.  I must be doing something wrong, Ms. Pfeiffer!  Teach me!  Maybe I have the wrong kind of chair.

Name one of your goals for this year?

To publish a story.  And I did!  Unfortunately I published it in this crappy excuse for a lit journal that is actually a blog that is actually this kid’s crappy college fiction art project.  So now he’s tagging me in pictures on Facebook and commanding me to write something about the picture he’s chosen, and I’m in the middle of this hideous cluster fuck of creative writing undergrads who like to glue quotes and weird pictures to the walls of their shitty dorm rooms and talk about their inspiration and write about rape and shit eating and bulimia, often in that order.  New goal: bring down the blog in a hail of fire.

What is the biggest trouble you have ever been in?

I used to date the guy in my small, small town who just felt weird about driving around without pot in his glove box.  Which was sucky for him because the small town cops knew him personally and knew where to look and pulled us over every fucking time we went anywhere and there was always pot in the car.  I doubt that I was in any real trouble, but it was pretty annoying to be sitting downtown on a crappy booger-encrusted chair in the waiting room at the police station while he called his mom to bail him out and swore to the cops that the stash wasn’t mine.  Of course, at the time, I thought for sure that all the bad stuff they tell you about in grade school was going to happen to me: I’d leave the cop shop, get raped, my mom would disown me, I’d start doing hard drugs and wearing nasty clothes, drop out of high school, etc. etc. etc.

Did you cry because Michael Jackson died?

No.  When he died, I was sitting on the floor of my apartment in front of a fan, because it was hot as shit outside.   I watched all of the news coverage.  I though, Huh, isn’t that something.  Then I ate a cold tomato like it was an apple, then I went to bed.

What does your 9th message on your phone say?

Your package is on its way!

Are you scared about the end of the world?

When I was eleven, I was terrified to the point of staying up all night and crying because the world would end some day.  As an adult, I’m just scared I’ll be dead of cancer or a flesh eating virus before the world ends.  It seems somehow unfair to have to die some TV movie death before everyone dies an awesome Cormac McCarthy death.

Is there a TV in the room you are in?

No, but there is really horrible tribal funk music, so there might as well be a TV going full volume during some kind of National Geographic mass donkey suicide or something.

Do you usually hold your pee for a long time?

The longest time, especially at work, because I’m pee shy and I think I’ve made it clear that a certain person with a fat ass hovers outside of the women’s bathroom and reports on your toilet habits to everyone in the entire office.  That’s enough to make my pee retreat all the way up into my brain.

Worst feeling in the world?

Well having pee in your brain isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, Bucko.

What’s your current favorite commercial?

Comcast recently shut off my ability to watch basic cable.  Now the only commercial I can see is the one with the white screen and red letters that says “If you are seeing this message, call Comcast today to discuss your options for cable and On-Demand!”  It’s on every channel, 24 hours a day.

I’ll tell you what I’d like to see back in rotation: the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator infomercial.  I also have a fond place in my heart for the Magic Bullet.  Good thing the Internet is magic, I can watch both!

Let’s talk about Ron Popeil. He will never die: he doesn’t need to!  And who better to invent things and sell them to you until the end of time?!  What you’ve got here is a spraypainted zombie with a knack for making your life easier with plastic.  And you can’t make an infomercial without a blustering, clueless woman dithering around on the stage, showcasing her endless surprise for anything the product does.  No, you tell ME about the product, audience!  I’m here to learn!

And on to the Magic Bullet, which apparently exists in Magic Planet, because we’re supposed to believe that an American woman one can only describe as “chipper,” and her slighty homosexual British housemate (with whom she shares a home and an ambiguous relationship) are throwing an early morning party for a group of guests who apparently stayed overnight.  Our cast of characters includes: A hung over businessman, a middle aged couple fresh from the cabana, a sassy young couple who are apparently taking a break from spending every Saturday morning at Bed Bath & Beyond, and a crotchety old woman with a permanent cigarette in her mouth.  These people enjoy spending lots of time together because they share something very important in common: each of them has a really hard time grasping simple concepts.  I’ll give you five dollars if you can count all of the times someone stops the Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner From A Mini Blender show to say “Whoa whoa whoa…so…let me get this straight…you just mixed things, things that can be made by mixing, in a mixing thing??”

Name something you think is pointless?

Those pages and pages of “meal plans!” in SELF magazine.  Who in their right mind is following those?  Really?  It’s this insanely small amount of food you’re supposed to eat every single day, then this ridiculously complicated exercise section you’re supposed to do every day, which usually involves some type of head stand or backwards wall climbing, then you turn the page and the headline says “Are You Always Hungry?” and the article is about how you should try eating a whole wheat pita after your lunch but if you’re still hungry you probably have a disease.  That right there covers about twelve glossy pages that could be put to better use printing an article about cat suicide or something, you know, a real problem.

Favorite fast food restaurant?

Man, I don’t eat fast food often, but Taco Bell just keeps bringin it.  Nobody does fake Mexican better.  Except maybe J.Lo in Selena.

Did you have a weird dream last night?

I keep having this stress dream that the retarded, co-dependent, stupid, emotional, Christian-and-proud-of-it, total bitch senior citizen receptionist at my job is following me around with my mail.  This is something she does, you know, instead of filtering all of the mail into the mail boxes, which is the designated place for people to pick up their mail.  If I have received something that is of interest to her, she holds it at her desk for a few days before bringing it to me and sort of hovering around to see what it is.  Sometimes I’ll realize that I’ve seen her walking around in the halls holding this particular piece of mail for almost an entire day, going into this office and that office, HOLDING MY MAIL IN HER HAND.  I once ordered a library supply catalog, which she perused for days, took with her everywhere she went, for no reason.  I stopped her and asked her for it and she replied “I’m gonna bring it to you!” and basically shuffled away as fast as a 68-year-old can.  I’ve repeatedly asked her to “put this in my mailbox, please” and “This type of thing needs to go in my mailbox, OK?” and “COULD YOU PLEASE PUT MY MAIL IN MY MAILBOX WHEN IT ARRIVES??”

So, my dream.  I was running from her, and she was trying to give me one piece of mail after another, shuffling after me everywhere I went.  I kept screaming “PUT IT IN MY MAIIIIIIL BOOOX!!!”

Do you wish at 11:11?

No.  But I knew a girl who did.  She actually introduced me to the practice when I was twelve, and had come to her house for a slumber party.  This meant that one of my parents had to drive me “way the hell out” to the middle of nowhere, where her family lived in a doublewide trailer that teetered on the edge of a hill, surrounded by goats and mud puddles and giant dogs with ticks in their eyes.  A “slumber party” meant that this girl, myself, and her sisters would sit in our pajamas on the floor of the living room of their trailer, watching “Ernest Scared Stupid” over and over again, while the baby sister snacked on an entire stack of American cheese slices for about half an hour before abandoning the slimy thing on the floor, and while her creepy, silent, trucker-hatted father sat in a recliner staring at us for what seemed like unusually long amounts of time, and while her mother shuffled around in the kitchen (half a foot away) trying to make her Wal-Mart bread machine work with peanut butter in it “even though the d’rections say not to use peanut butter.”

“OH!” my friend cried, “It’s 11:11!  Everybody make a wish!”  I remember thinking “You have a lot to wish for” and feeling awful about it.