Cyclothymia

Well, that was quick.

A few days after I moved into my new place I discovered that the person who is living across from me is a delicious tart of a mid-20s-ish guy. I'd be happy about this, except for the fact that I then started checking my hair before going to the mailboxes, not dropping my ratty laundry in the hallway, putting on pants just to go to the storage area, etc etc. It's very taxing, and given that I'd never actually date a guy in his mid-20s, A COMPLETE WASTE OF MY TIME.

Last night I was coloring my hair, which really counts as sufficient multi-tasking in my world, but I also needed to do laundry. My hair was in mid-color, chemically slathered and shaped into a cone, and I was wearing baby blue crocs, red gym shorts, and a t-shirt with a giant hole in the back. What to do, what to do? I waffled for a minute, but the rigors of opening the closet, selecting a sweatshirt, putting one arm through the sleeve, and then a whole different arm through a whole different sleeve seemed a bit much, so I tromped on down to the laundry room as I was.

On the way back up from the laundry room I noticed the hole in the back of my shirt had a mid-sized sibling in the armpit/side. I wasn't wearing a bra (also too much work). I am not properly proportioned to be running around in public without support - my boob could have swung through the hole and gotten stuck. So, if the tasty little muffin had run into me I wonder what the tally would have been? She may be strangely coiffed and dressed like a smurf, but at least I can see her boob a little bit. Her saggy, saggy boob. I am not positive, but I think most heterosexual males would consider that a win. Go me! Regardless, it's good to know that although I may be vain, self-conscious, and given to unnecessary preening, my passion for energy conservation can trump those qualities in under a month.

How to Get Drunk and Rail At Men for Under $20

I spent last night with Nina Hartley (porn star/author), Jessi Klein (comedienne), and Jill Soloway (Six Feet Under writer), or at least listening to them, which I guess is the sort of thing that happens when you are in LA. Nina Hartley and Jessi Klein were on a panel at the Lady Party 911, also known as a two-hour-long discussion about pussy: its effectiveness as a marketing tool for Britney and Lindsay (since I’m in LA I’ll go with first names like everyone else), how heavy petting and blowjobs can be emphasized in sex-ed, and why the hell men need to control every fucking thing in the world (turns out it’s their unbalanced yang*). It was awesome. I go to lectures in Boston not infrequently, but this is one of the first with free vodka and a hip-hop group that I’ve been to in a while. Or ever.

The ironic thing about the night is that I wore these totally super cute purple heels which happen to match my purple chain-link purse PERFECTLY. I hadn’t worn them in a loooooooooong time, and now I remember why. They have to be the single most uncomfortable pair of shoes I’ve ever worn. The arch? Completely detached from any relation to a natural arch. The square sequins? Sewn so as to dig and cut with every step. And the slingback straps won’t stay on. Basically they are really not intended to be worn while upright, much less moving, and thus clearly the perfect choice for a feminism discussion panel. Thankfully the friend I was with offered to switch shoes with me for a little while. Her nice, flat, shiny flip-flops. She was going to have to physically fight me to get them back, which brings up the issue of appropriate choices and behavior for a feminism event yet again. I did wear my Andy Warhol Women in Revolt t-shirt at least.

*As in yin and yang, not penis, although I’m sure unbalanced penises are also part of the problem.

Bearly Literate.

I was doing some scrabble reading (I'm obsessed with scrabulous on facebook), and came across this sentence:

Bruce D. Wilner says, "Not only do they allow QI in the U.K., they also allow ZO (a type of hornless cattle).

I felt sad for a moment at the thought of homeless cattle. And then I thought, hmm, this is in the UK? Do they have feral cattle there? Is there really space there for feral cattle? Is that safe?

And then I re-read the sentence.

Cold vagina seeks penis power to hit the walls and work the middle.

Quite possibly the best youtube video ever. Let's all bow our heads and take a moment to thank Jeebus for the beautiful thing that is Public Access Television.

The Perils of Drugs Part II

Those of you who are familiar with ambien are aware that it can have a blackout sort of effect, where you do and say things that you don't remember. Well, this weekend after coming home from a club, I took an ambien and a lorazepam (I'm having vicious sleep issues at the moment) and proceeded to get ready for bed. I realized that I couldn't find my phone when I went to go set its alarm for the next morning.

After searching the car, the yard, the kitchen, my bedroom, my clothes, the car again, and finally the q-tip canister we have (because that's where I found my lost engagement ring, and now I think it's a magical canister, repository of all things lost), I gave up, and realized I was going to need to let my friend know about the situation, since my phone-less-ness would complicate meeting up in the morning. At this point it was long after I took the ambien, so I was very out of it, but I figured I'd be able to put something together. I don't remember writing the letter, other than that it was a much harder task than I was expecting.

For your amusement:

Subject:
Phone es peronals locos. ..er whateve that means I'm ona hunt ofr my phone @ 3+ am  

Body:

Not sure this is gong to shake upb, ut really need ti find fone, so may not be int shape for famers market. I'm   wantering the streets for my phone, that acan't be good. Hpffirble speelling atrocities aside. Feel bereft without portable ocmmunication device.

Send me msg or all ehnw you get this, may help[ narrow down.,

"Feel bereft without portable communication device" just sounds so sad. I want to give me a hug.

I sent another, even less comprehensible, email to the peeps I'd been with earlier, in the hopes that they may have some knowledge of what happened to the phone. My favorite line from that email was "Gave taken ambien/lorazepam, all comvbinga blure, but if you call me and hear riging, plsease sequester said phone" As if the phone wasn't lost, but rather had run away and needed to be grounded, or was at issue in a legal battle. Obviously when I'm on ambien my normally deeply repressed anthropomorphic feelings for my phone come exploding to the surface.

I still haven't found my phone. :( Sniff. Feel bereft.

NATP Army

This, my friends, is an important post. I'd like you to sit down with your family, put little Timmy on your knee, and get ready to talk about Drugs, and how they're bad, mmkay? I know you've probably already had an awkward, not to mention hypocritical, conversation about the evils of drugs with Timmy, along with the requisite warnings about your brain, and how it looks in a frying pan, and whether it goes better with toast or an english muffin, or how to tell if a girl really likes you or is just using you for your drug connections (she is), but this is different.

This is a story of how there are two types of people in the world. Many years ago I was having a rather innocent conversation about annoying gym habits, and I mentioned that I had seen a girl flossing her butt with her towel and it grossed me out. A friend responded with "What, you DON'T dry your butt?" And so the great debate was on. It turns out that there are the ass towel people, and the non-ass towel people. If you are an ATP, you step out of the shower, grab your rich, absorbent towel, and proceed to dry your body, including the crack of your ass. The crack which contains the asshole. The asshole out of which your bacteria laden feces come.

As you might be able to tell already, I'm not an ATP. I am an NATP. I prefer to dry the cheeks and let the crack air dry. No, I do not wave my butt around while spreading my cheeks like some have suggested, and I certainly don't use the hairdryer, as others have suggested (although it sounds kind of fun). I simply don't believe in rubbing a piece of cloth over my asshole and then wiping my face with it. Apparently some people think that's weird.

This conversation has come up many, many times since the original debate. It will never die, because if there is one thing people like to do, it's separate themselves into religious camps. Another example of this behavior would be the peaceful, nature-loving, skilled sailing people vs. the impatient, phallicly-compensating, nature-destroying powerboat yahoos. Again, I fall on the side of right, with the sailboat people. Which isn't really fair, since I like to water-ski and jet-ski and such, but whatever, it's fun to get all moralistic about irrelevant things.

I know, Timmy's getting restless, so I'll get back to the drugs, I just needed to set the background in case you, dear reader, were somehow unaware of the seething ass towel debate. So, a couple of weeks ago a friend and I were going to a concert. I cannot go to concerts without smoking pot. Concerts without pot are torture for me. Yes, I am a lower-life form with no soul or class, or appreciation of the finer bits of life, this is not news. Luckily, I'm a one-hit wonder when it comes to pot, and on top of that I very rarely smoke it anymore, so I'm even more of a lightweight. I can get a contact high passing by the Berklee auditorium entrance. So, said friend and I smoked a little before we went. Said friend is not a one-hit wonder. Said friend taught cheech and chong how to hit that shit. Said friend got me absolutely bonkered.

Said friend is also an ATP, but she has many other wonderful qualities, so we hang out anyway. After getting me totally bonkered, Ms. ATP and I are in the car, on our way to the concert, and Ms. ATP says "So Frank and I were going to get you an ass towel." The very first thing that popped into my head at that point was the image of a towel with a giant embroidered ass on it. Probably a satin one. Something like this:

For obvious reasons, I was excited about the prospect, so I said in a kind of high-pitched screaming sort of way, "Like a towel with a giant embroidered ass on it?!"

"No"

I was a little disappointed, but I quickly racked my drug-addled brain for what other incarnation of an ass towel she could possibly mean, and this time I came up with a towel with a giant embroidered pile of shit on it. Like so:

Now I was even more excited, because if scatological humor is your thing, people it doesn't get much better than this. I could already picture where to hang the towel. So this time I definitely screamed, "OH! You mean like with an embroidered pile of dookie on it?!" (It didn't seem appropriate to curse, too crass).

At this point Ms. ATP looked a little horrified, and yelled back, "NO! Like a towel, with Ass on it!" *Picture her grandly sweeping her hand across the air, a la Your Name In Lights.*

With that sweeping gesture, I understood her vision. She meant this:

And it made so much sense. It was so much more than a towel with a giant embroidered pile of crap on it. In my moment of epiphany, I screamed at the top of my lungs....

"OH! OH! OH! OH! Aaaaaaaaaaaaass towel!! Like with a label, and specifically for my ass! Yeah!"

It was at that point that we realized the windows were down and we were stopped in the middle of Coolidge Corner. If you're not familiar with Coolidge Corner, it's basically ground zero for elderly jewish ladies in Boston.

So that, Timmy, is one of the dangers of drugs that you probably haven't already heard about. If you aren't careful, you may find yourself some day having epiphanies about giant embroidered asses (bad enough by itself) and sending little old ladies running for the relative safety and culture of the Gaza Strip. Now go to bed, I still haven't gotten my ass towel, and it's making me cranky.

I didn't think it would take so long to tell the story of the ass towel, but it did, and that's fine because I'm procrastinating. I'm procrastinating because I really don't want to do my orgo problem set. The last lecture was all about electrocyclic ring closures and sigmatropic rearrangement, which may sound fascinating to you, but no, in actuality it was so boring I wanted to pick my own eyes out with an escargot fork just to liven things up. Ha, look at me, I'm all eyeless and distracting the other students! You may take my eyes, but you'll never take my freedom!

Whatever gets you through the day.

I've been informed by someone that my aquarium interest is very dorky. All I have to say to that particular person is pot...paging kettle, COME IN KETTLE! Actually, that's not all I have to say, but it is the first thing that sprang to mind. *cough*

Anyway, the great thing about the internet is that if, say, one of your friends were to question your inherent coolness, and you were feeling a little down about yourself as a result, perhaps drawing little cartoon figures, probably fat ones, on your notebook with "Ms. Dork Of The Year" written in cursive over the chest, or, you know, whatever one might do in such a situation, you can just go onto google and put in "dorkiest thing ever" and scan through the cold hard evidence that you are, in fact, relatively, the shit.

Exhibit A:

I was going to post an exhibit b, but honestly, is it really required? In the interest of full disclosure, however, I should probably admit that I found the crawly bit near 2:50 oddly sexy. Also, 5:10 rendered me speechless.*

The moral of this story? If you don't worry about what's cool or not, you may just find yourself with an absolutely fabulous body and a flair for spin kicks, or a gorgeous little slice of reef in your living room, whatever floats your boat - you just have to let your inner dork fly free.

*To clarify - those times are in the "going forward" frame of reference, whereas the counter on the embedded video is counting down. I did it that way just to mess with your miiiiiiiiiiinds, man. No, actually it's because I watched the video on YouTube first, and the counter goes forward there. Does that discrepancy make sense? No. Is it my fault? No. I can't believe I got emails about this. Seriously. And I'm the dork? And why do some people send me emails, but never comment? Hmmm?!? And as long as I'm asking questions, how the hell do the girl scouts get away with charging $4 for only 15 cookies? HMMM?!? I expect $4 to get me through one 2AM drunken binge. It's madness I tell you.

Fools Rush In

In 1999, my first year out of college, my roommate and I elected to get a Christmas tree. My cat Pogo was still living in Virginia Beach, so we didn't have to worry about him toppling the tree, electrocuting himself, or using it as a dandy new scented litter box. We were also pretty swept up in the "first adult Christmas" frenzy, so we went all out, with the tree, with the decorations, and with the godawful symphonic music. Although we did manage to resist appliqued reindeer sweaters, pretty much every other form of tacky made it into the house. We was all growed up.

After discovering that your average tree was $50 minimum, carrying it back to the house several blocks, and getting completely covered in sap while wrestling it into the house, our enthusiasm was hardly dampened. After we realized that the water bowl we had for the tree needed to be refilled, oh, every hour or so, we did take pause for a moment, but five minutes later we started merrily dancing around the living room to the Muppets Christmas album, and all was forgotten. Until about March.

We looked up in March and realized that the tree was not only still in the living room, but in all likelihood no one was coming to take it away for us. Although we considered just naming it and welcoming it to our family, a good static electricity spark could have set it on fire at that point, so we decided we should probably get rid of it. We started taking the ornaments off, and every single needle on the branch immediately dropped. By the time we finished taking down the ornaments the tree was pretty much nude, and the rest of the needles came off as we moved it out of the house. I swear to jeebus we vacuumed for hours. It turns out that pine needles are perfectly adapted for permanently inserting themselves between carpet fibers. We moved out of that apartment 3 years later and were still finding pine needles everywhere.

Needless to say, that was the first and last real tree I've had. The next year, I took a cardboard box, cut out two tree shapes, cut slots so that they fit perpendicularly to each other, and covered the "branches" with metallic wrapping paper. It was spectacularly cool, everyone said so. Or at least when we mentioned that it required no water, cost about $5, and folded up for storage, everyone seemed pretty impressed.

Six years later, this year, we got a non-homemade artificial tree, which didn't require water, cost about $60, and folded up for storage. The extra $55 seemed to go towards added height and a bunch of needles, and although I wouldn't say it looked real, it did allow us to hang ornaments. We're clearly movin' on up - after another six or seven years of practice with this version of a tree, maybe we'll be ready to consider another genuine real one. After all, we took the artificial one down this weekend, pretty much right on time. GO US!

Really Though

Sigh. I started the MySpace page almost entirely because of two people who are on it, because I probably will not keep in touch with them any other way. But, after setting up the page, I did a search and found some other friends on it, and in the process browsed a bunch of people. The profiles are bringing out the very worst of cattiness in me.

Hello, can we please try to spell our headlines correctly? "Wrestlers Aren't Quiters" is like sandpaper on my eyebals. And the layouts...dear god, THE LAYOUTS! They remind me of why I fled LJ for Typepad. Enough with the blinking text, the Big Pimpin' G Bad Ass White Boy music on repeat with no mute, the background images that make the text unreadable, and the broken links.

Seriously, I am 50/50 for immediately deleting my profile and pretending that I never joined such a horrifying phenomenon. On the other hand, I found a few people that I went to high school with who had great profiles, which was weirdly nostalgic.

I say "weirdly" because 99% of the time I am in complete denial that I ever attended high school. College was light-years better, but, even so, I generally like to think that I sprang fully formed from the womb at the age of 22, landing in the center of a rave. All the innocence, love, and wonder of childhood, with an extra dash of sexual perversion thrown in for fun. It's really how everyone should do it. Anyway, these people were some of the very few that I remember fondly, and it makes me happy to see that they are still pretty cool, at least within the confines of a MySpace page.

InFUCKINGcomprehensible

To the person who stole the platter J and I were making for a wedding gift,

Yeah, I get it. You have some friends named Megan and Keith who were married on September 23, 2006. You were planning on giving them a macaroni picture, but then you saw the platter Justin and I had made. You thought to yourself, "Hey, I have no imagination, no talent, no money, and absolutely no morals! How perfect! This will show them exactly how much I care about their blessed union." So now you've got the platter, and you're just ever so excited about how happy it will make your friends, and how impressed they'll be with you.

There is something you should know though. That platter is cursed. I made a little effigy of you, Mr. Unnamed, Unseen Thief, and buried it in my cats' litter-box. After it was thoroughly soaked and covered in shit, I set it on fire, stomped on it, and offered the ashes to satan in the hopes that you will live a long, lonely, miserably painful and poverty stricken life. I hope your obituary goes something like this:

After a long battle with colon cancer, during which he got no relief from pain medication of any sort, Asshole Thief died a couple of weeks ago. His precise time of death is unknown, as he had no family and no friends and therefore was not found until his neighbors smelled his rotting carcass. His body was lying in a pool of bloody feces, and was partially eaten by rats and infested with cockroaches. He had no career, only a string of failures in which his lack of character repeatedly resulted in public firings. His apartment was filthy and filled with garbage. In fact, everything about his life was horrifically disgusting and depressing, except for one gorgeous platter he had mysteriously propped against the wall.

I hope we meet in a dark alley some day. Until then,
Your Worst Nightmare

Justin threw the platter, and I painted it with one of their wedding pictures, their initials, and the date of their wedding. It was stolen from the studio after the first firing, but before it could be glazed. I guess I'm glad I took a camera phone picture of the painting at least (pre-initials and date). The platter was gorgeous too, although these pics don't show it very well.

 

The Gift That Is No Longer

Original Pic

I was looking forward to giving this to our friends so much. It's the only piece Justin and I have ever done jointly. We didn't even get to see it post-bisque. And the worst thing is that now we have to give them some non-personal random wedding gift. I would do the platter over again if it had been broken or something had gone wrong with the first firing, but there's no way in hell I'm going to spend that much time on a piece again only to have it stolen again, at least at that studio. I'm just sick about this.

On top of all that, J is also literally sick. :( Blah. Sorry for two icky posts in a row, I've actually been happy as a pig in mud since Wednesday.