Cyclothymia

A Bit Much Before 9am

Groggy, barely processing, I'm standing in a long line at Starbucks behind a woman wearing a gold lamé sweater, stirrup pants, and ankle-high patent leather stilettos. She is waggling. Her butt. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back. And. Fucking. Forth. A few minutes later she starts moving her feet, and I realize she's practicing salsa. In line. At Starbucks. At 8:30am.

Dear Jeebus,

Like everyone else, I have a few requests:

1. Please strike me blind.
2. Please immediately immolate any individual who cannot resist the (oh so tempting) allure of wearing lamé before 9pm. I hear lamé is very flammable. Go Old Testament on their ass, you know you want to. With all the cyclones and earthquakes lately you must be missing the personal touch.
3. Get me my coffee ASAP.

Sincerely,
Your Thoroughly Creeped Out Friend.

I Guess The Sunshine Prozac Effect Has Worn Off

LA sent me home this weekend with its usual freeway-traffic slap on the ass. Silly me, only budgeting an hour and a half to drive 30 miles! You can try to lure me in with your fabulous weather, open spaces, and gorgeous beaches all you want, but at the end of the day if you make me long for Boston traffic, you've pretty much put yourself in the same class as Detroit.

Also, Friday night I went out in Santa Monica and had possibly the worst club experience I've ever had. Being constantly groped from all sides and enduring a stench reminiscent of...of...I don't know, a koala orgy? Sooooo much fun! However, I draw the line at people touching my face. At least three people reached up and put their (presumably) cum-covered paws on my cheek, while whispering sweet nothings like "I love you, you're precious." Oh, well then, we clearly have something special. And by the way, ecstacy is so 1999.

That said, I have discovered an overlooked upside to LA - for us northeastern girls anyway. People in LA consistently guess my age to be at least 5 years younger than I actually am. I can only assume it's the complete lack of sunlight we get here (relatively speaking) preserving our skin (again, relatively speaking). Boston girls - we may be pasty, fat, poorly dressed, and perpetually angry, but our skin is positively NUBILE. I'll be clinging to that for a while.

And with that, I'd like to send a big shout out to Boston for welcoming me home by spraying freezing rain in my face. You crazy asshole of a city, it's good to be back.

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Support Inappropriate Groping At Bars
Turning Back Progress One Hand At A Time

No Thanks, Send It Back

Pogo spent the night outside last night. The cat is obsessed with getting outside, despite the fact that he has NO SURVIVAL SKILLS and is SCARED OF EVERYTHING. Nevertheless, he clearly sees every open door as an opportunity to escape the brutal regime he's being forced to endure inside my warm, dry, food-filled house. I try not to take it personally, but last night I'd had enough, so I chucked him out the window, yelled some epithets at him, and locked up for the night. Or maybe I forgot the big window doesn't have a screen.

Why was the window open in February you ask? Because my shrew's tit of an apartment has two temperatures: boiling or freezing. The colder it is, the LESS LIKELY THE HEAT IS TO COME ON. I'm not shitting you. I have radiators that apparently are controlled by the building thermostat, which is ridiculous in a building with 30 units, and I'm getting screwed by it. Actually, I'm more worried about my aquarium, I'm pretty sure my fish aren't down with 90 degree water, although they haven't verbalized it BY DYING yet.

I know I'm USING A LOT OF CAPS TODAY, and if you're interpreting that as yelling, GO RIGHT AHEAD, because THAT'S WHAT I'M DOING. Aside from hunting for Pogo at 6am, and then crawling out the wet, thorn-covered window to retrieve him, this day can go suck itself because:

1) On the walk to work I walked straight into a low hanging branch covered in yet more thorns (wtf is up with the thorns everywhere today? Am I missing some metaphorical message the universe needs to get across to me?)*, which caught on my hood and ripped the gortex. The hood of my coat has a visor, which is awesome since it really keeps rain and snow out (or at least it did before I WALKED INTO THE DAMN BRANCH), but it limits the overhead visibility, especially when I'm walking hunkered down staring at the sidewalk in a puddle of self-pity and world-loathing. Thankfully I bet the 5 people around me and the nasty little tree were cheered up by my misfortune.

2) I'm the only one in the office today and I don't have much to do. I should have stayed home.

Note to self: do not drink a lot of sake and get to bed @ 1am on a Monday night, it makes you a bitter girl. Absolutely kick-ass date** though, so I've got that to cuddle with in my misery.

*Can someone with some rudimentary skillz in punctuation please tell me how the hell that sentence should have been handled?

** This "date" thing is new to me. The ex did not take me on dates, except for maybe valentines or my birthday. That should have been yet another clue that I was wasting four years of my life.

And I Broke My Espresso Carafe Too

Work this week has been really shitty. I was hired as a UX person, and I made it very clear that the testing aspect of my role should be kept to a minimum or I would not be happy, and they said it would be, and yet here I am wrapping up my second week of full-time testing. I know we have a build coming out today theoretically, so my hope is that my boss isn't completely addicted to having an extra tester available, so that next week I can back to doing what I was actually hired to do.

Another totally depressing aspect of life right now is hunting for new homes for two of my cats. In some ways all three adjusted to the move quite well, in the sense that no one refused to eat or drink, no one started spraying, and no one hid under the bed for days at a time. In the sense that they aren't trying to slaughter each other 24 hours a day, not so much. There is blood involved, and it's only a matter of time until someone loses an eye. It would be funny if it wasn't a) so concerning, and b) frankly as annoying as being trapped in a cage full of monkeys flinging shit at one another.

Aside from the ongoing ultimate fighting championship, my allergies are going batshit (yes, I'm going to see if I can use shit, or some variation thereof, in every paragraph of this post because cursing makes baby jesus cry, and that makes me feel better). My allergist told me this week that I'm starting to show signs of persistent asthma, and for whatever wacky reason he thinks it might have to do with my having 32 pounds of cat in 400 square feet.

I am broken-hearted that I have to do this. I've had all three of my cats for at least 8 years, and love them all as unique individuals. I'm a little more closely bonded to Preggers, but as far as my responsibility for them goes, they are equal. I was really, REALLY hoping to find a home for them with someone that either I knew or that a friend knew, so that I'd still be able to visit or at least get real updates, and not worry that their new people were going to neglect regular vet care, or give them up to a shelter at some point, or feed them shitty food, or let them wander the streets without a coat on, etc. But, that isn't happening. I had two leads, and both of them fizzled without really getting anywhere, so now I've got the cats listed with various cat rescue groups. After the struggle of finding the right home for them is over I'll never see my babies again.

So, yeah, life sucks, and I'm whining about it. Shit.

How Not to Impress Me in a Bar

• Visible gel in the hair. Did we move to some latin country when I wasn't looking? Is it the 1980s again? The wet look is best left to armani models. Just to be clear, that's not you.
• Plaid shirts over...well, anything. These are your going out clothes? Really? To pick up women? How about a pair of athletic shorts, or an old sweatshirt emblazoned with "It Goes Downhill From Here"?
• Suggest that seeing the hugging couple across the room was annoying me. As your opening line. Transparent and bizarre attempt to find out if I was single, or are you just an aging lonely freak with no social skills? I suppose those options aren't mutually exclusive. I'm not bitter, but apparently you are.
• Ask me to guess the temperature in the room, and don't take my half-hearted replies for an answer. You clearly think precision here is key, or we'll never know which one of us is WRONG. What's wrong is boring the living shit out of me.

This, my friends, is why I hate waiting in bars for people to show up. Did the hottie with the gorgeous eyes come talk to me? Of course not, but the strange slickster felt I was approachable. Newsflash - I'm not. I'm a bitch. Especially when the red sox are losing. Fuckers, one and all.

An Hour and A Half Later...

Subtitle: COMCAST CAN BLOW ME

I hadn't set up internet at home after the move, because I knew I'd be away for a while, and didn't want to deal with it. Dealing with Comcast is almost always horror show, so I was more willing to creep around my building looking for unprotected wireless connections, scuttling guiltily into the stairwell whenever someone was coming*, than I was to call Comcast. What I want to know is this: with 90% of the Old and Decrepit population of Cambridge living in my building, why are there at least 25 wireless connections, but only 2 unprotected? And none near me? Who told these people about WPA? Next I'll see one hobbling into the elevator with a Wii and a copy of Shuffleboard Extreme.

I had my old cable box and modem, so last weekend I finally wired up my system. Lo and behold I had cable. Premium cable. I was totally scamming The Man. No internet though. Clearly internet is more important than cable, so the next day I had to call and request service after all...my fight against the man was brief but satisfying, that $12 saved is like, 4 lattes. They set up an appt for someone to come out on thursday. I hung up. Then I thought to myself...hmm. I have all the equipment, a working cable drop, why do they need to come out here?

So I called today to find out why exactly someone needed to come, aside from it being an excuse to charge me $40. I talked to one person who had me on hold for 25 out of 40 minutes while he was trying to get his shit together, and then finally calls sales to get "internet added to my account" because he can't add my modem to the account without that. Oooooookay. He comes back and says the guy has to absolutely come out. He has paperwork to fill out. Numbers to write down. Functionality to note. Umm. Right.

So I hang up and call sales to ask why internet isn't already on my account. They tell me internet is on the account, but it's not active. Why, I asked, is it not active? Because the guy hasn't come out yet. Ok, yes, but what I'm wondering is what precisely this magical guy will be doing when he comes tomorrow? Given that, you know, I have all the equipment, and it's, you know, hooked up and WORKING? Well, she says, maam, it'll be easier if they guy just comes tomorrow. Easier for who? Me, the person who has to miss work, or you, the person who doesn't want to deal with this? And didn't I see specifically that there's a self-install option?

Well, ma'am, there is self-install, but if you cancel the appt for tomorrow and something goes wrong, you'll be charged for a repair visit, rather than this installation visit. Umm. A) It's not like the installation visit is free, so I'm not seeing the downside....and B) you're saying that if something goes wrong and a repairman has to come out, I'll be charged for the visit? Yes ma'am, that's why you want to go with the installation visit, because that's the only way we can verify that the equipment is working, otherwise you're just telling us it's working. Right. Because I would tell you it's working if it's not? Right, she says, people do it all the time.

So if my cable stops working a month down the road, you'll charge me to come repair your service that I'm paying for? Right, she says. Because I might have been lying about whether it was ever working, even though I was paying for it? Right, she says, people hook up their systems incorrectly all the time, and it's usually something small. But, says I, then it never worked, and doesn't it seem unlikely that I'd pay for a month of service that I can't use just to avoid a repair visit? I'm talking about if it suddenly stops working a month down the line, and you're saying that if I don't have the guy come tomorrow then you'll charge me for the repair visit a month down the line because it could be my self-installation? Yes, she says. So, basically, in perpetuity you can blame service problems on the customer if people choose to avoid the $40 fee of an installation visit, which in my case would consist of the guy walking in, poking the box and modem with a stick, pulling his pants back over his beer gut, hitting on me, signing a work order, and walking out? Please wait a moment, she says.

A few seconds later I hear some hold music, and then a very competent guy comes on the line. He has my internet working in 10 minutes. Have you ever been happy something's over, but still wanted to beat your head on a wall? I can't decide who is more evil, UHaul or Comcast.

*Since, you know, I look like such a hacker, and I'm STEALING.

I do actually really like the new place, I swear.

I'm not sure I've mentioned it, but I'm moving. Actually, I moved this past weekend. Sorry for not letting you know, but I haven't had time to run, stretch, eat, or fart in several days, so notifications have been low on my priority list. High on my priority list was getting all of my shit into my new cubbyhole-sized apartment, and hunting down the previous tenant like the fucking animal she is.

Letting the landlord know she'd be out a day late 3 days before my move? CRAPPY. Leaving the apartment so dirty there were dessicated rodents in the living area? CRAPPY. However, the coup de grace was when I went to take my first shower* and discovered that the drain was completely blocked. By that I mean that after a 10 minute shower the water level was over my ankles and it took 2+ hours to drain. It was so blocked that I thought I must have tripped the drain plug, except that the rubber plug was clearly sitting on the side of the tub. That was so awesome to discover at 10pm after moving and unpacking for 12 hours.

The next day I tried an entire bottle of liquid plumber to no effect (other than causing the drain to regurgitate a lovely crap-coloured soup), before calling my landlord, who showed up with a snake that wouldn't fit in the hole (hehe), an industrial sized bottle of another version of liquid plumber, and a bunch of tools. We together determined that the drain was, in fact, completely blocked (thank you landlord for your faith in my intelligence), and furthermore that there was no way the previous tenant could have overlooked this fact. Fucking whore.

He asked me to try the other liquid plumber that night, which was specifically for hair. The bottle contained 20 applications, so naturally I dumped the whole thing in the tub at once, shut the door, and said a little prayer to the jeebus of hair clumps. An hour or two later, it had worked.

The part of me that believes in humanity does not want to believe that this girl could have been voluntarily showering in her own scum for months, so I choose to believe that she coated one of the rodent carcasses from the main room in shellac and shoved it down the drain, leaving it to fill the pipe like a tiny mouse version of the Lincoln memorial. Because I always picture Lincoln encased in concrete in the memorial. Because he was that big. He was all like, "Noooooooooooo, don't pour concrete on me, I don't want to sit here anymore!" And America was all, "Too bad Lincoln!" So that's what I picture her doing to the mouse, only it was dead, she used shellac instead of concrete, and it was here in Cambridge in a pipe rather than on display in DC.

*In the new place, not my life. Although, you'd never know I generally practice good hygiene by the ENORMOUS zit on my cheek. The painful and deep kind that I have never gotten, much less on the cusp of turning 30.

Screw you guys, I'm going home.

I don't have anything to say. I've been spending my time watching the stats page and laughing at all the hits beginning with "search for naked Jessica Alba". Incidentally, I still can't get over the optimism of the average internet porn surfer. I mean, REALLY, do they actually think if they click on enough links they'll finally find that long-lost picture of Jessica Alba boinking Giselle? As always, the answer is apparently yes. Godspeed Mr. Sticky Fingers.

Anyway, surprisingly, that eventually gets old, and yet I just don't have the heart to share with you all anything remotely relating to my very deepest thoughts and feelings, excerpts from my diary, etc.. In fact, I may never write anything meaningful again since my delicate little psyche has been crushed by The Mean And Horrible Justin. I had to submit a scientific writing sample for a job I'm applying for, and they specifically asked for a research paper from my undergrad years. Yes, a scientific paper so old it was written pre-science, but whatever floats their boat. I had full confidence that my earnest theories regarding the flatness, not to mention turtle-backedness, of the earth would be so incredibly compelling as to send shivers of doubt up their 21st-century round-earthed spines.

So I dug around and actually managed to find one (I think I should get the job for that fucking feat of magic alone), and then asked The MAHJ to take a look before I sent it off, since he's all sciencey and stuff. He dutifully printed it out and, after tearing it into one billion tiny little shreds, covering each individual shred in red frowny faces, and peeing on the pile of remnants, he handed it back. Have I mentioned that it has been a while since anyone actually edited a piece of my writing? It seems I have completely lost the knack of taking constructive criticism with anything resembling a shred of grace, so let's just say there were some tears and a bit of thrashing about on the floor for dramatic effect.

And so, I have lost the will to write. Wouldn't that just serve The MAHJ right, to be all meaningful-writingless, and have to watch me mope around the house for five or six years? I think so, and whether you think so or not, that's the tack I'm taking. So, instead I will leave you with this bit of fabulous fun written by someone who is not me. More precisely, it's the rider for Iggy Pop, and it's chock full of stream-of-conciousness hilarity, unlike my shitty little research paper.

Jessica Simpson Masturbates Her Way To A Larger Penis

Periodically J and I will spend some quality time talking about life and issues, you know, the important stuff. Yesterday the topic happened to be whether skunks were super cute or not - we both emphatically agreed they, like, TOTALLY are, and people need to get over the whole stink thing. Other hot topics have been "The air purifier: complete waste of space, or loud too?" We are Teh Deep.

However, a recurring question has been this: what differentiates your average blog from a blog with a ton of traffic. How, for example, did Dooce become Dooce? Actually Dooce isn't a good example, since Heather obviously sold her poor little fallen-mormon soul to the devil in return for chiseled cheekbones and a chance to whore herself out on the internet. Who knew a heathen's soul was worth so much? Well, apparently it is, and on top of her soul-selling, she's a fabulous writer too, but whatever.

As for my own blog, my stats show that the traffic on this site falls into two categories. The first category is comprised entirely of a small Mexican child who likes the colors. Hola Miguel! The second category is made up of people who found their way over here through a search engine. You would think the occasional person would search on cyclothymia and find their way over, though of course the blog would be a disappointment if they did...but then again, maybe they'd love it...no hate it...no love it. HA! Mocking mental illness is always such fun, but to get back on topic, no, nobody searches on cyclothymia - all roads leading to this little blog seem to begin at "www.searchengine.com/find.asp?subject=whale-tail".

Why? Well, one of my posts a while back not only referenced the whale-tail phenomenon, but also included a picture of a particularly horrible one. Stats don't lie, and people, that picture has generated a thousand times more traffic than my little purple-loving amigo Miguel. Sometimes I like to envision the whale-tail enthusiasts' responses upon finding themselves looking at my photo of a singularly unattractive whale-tail.

*fap fap fap fap*
*click*
*droop*

Maybe I should change my tag-line to "5 Seconds To A Limp Penis"? Ah, who am I kidding, internet porn surfers are way too dedicated and determined to be discouraged by one misleading link. I'm just one sticky mouse-click out of millions. Sniff.

So, in an effort to do a better job of pissing off more drunken, naked, and swollen college boys, I give you:

I've titled it:  Jessica Simpson, Jessica Alba, Kiera Knightley, Scarlett Johansson flaunting whale tails while naked and sucking cock. Search engines, start your indexes!

Also, my accomplishment for today so far has been finally hammering into my brain that 'occasional' is spelled with one 's'. I swear to jeebus that I'm generally capable of using the basics of the english language without spellcheck, but that word has tripped me up since I was but a wee tyke.

And um, here's some linky goodness:

http://www.41pounds.org/

http://www.nrdc.org/cities/living/ggift.asp

Edit: 8 hits from search engines in less than 12 hours. Mwahahahahahaha! My evil empire is growing...

I can't take the pressure.

Every can of Amy's Organic Soup says

Directions: Heat and serve. Please do not overcook.

Look, Amy, I disappoint hundreds of people every single day, I don't need to add your unfulfilled expectations to the list of my failures. And has it not ever occurred to you that some people enjoy the taste of scorched soup? For me personally, the entire scorched soup experience is very nostalgic. It instantly brings me back to my childhood, and scorched soup's cousins: brown bananas, dry chicken, and carob nuggets. Ah, those were the days. If I feel the need for a trip down memory lane, I will go right ahead and overcook the hell out of your soup, and there's absolutely no way you can guilt me into stopping.