Et tu, Ennui?

mancho

2010-01-07T21:26:00.002-06:00

(reblogged from my tumblr, because I am totally fucking lazy and stuff's been crazy this week, and my sister's in town so I know I probably won't be able to write much, but I also don't want anyone who reads this to think that I've forgotten about you because I absolutely haven't. In fact, I'm knitting you a triangle top bikini now; I hope you like it.)

My dad is normally a pretty reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful human being, but throughout my childhood, he loved watching pro wrestling. He’d always invite my brother and I into the TV room to watch with him, I think because he felt better about having his children there as props/excuses.

“I swear, I don’t want to watch it! It’s all the kids’ fault!”

Anyway, I got kind of into it, too, back when it was about brightly colored costumes and pageantry and ridiculous characters rather than what it is today, which is a spectacle of juiced up men in neutral colors watched by closeted McCain voters who get really mad when anyone tries to take their guns away. People who probably still own “NO FEAR” shirts. People I grew up with in rural northern Wisconsin. I even had some action figures, and my brother and I would combine WWF Wrestlers, plastic zoo animal figurines, and Legos for the ultimate playtime experience.

There was this wrestler named Macho Man Randy Savage that had a violently neon colored outfit. For some reason, I was really, really afraid of him. I used to have nightmares that Macho Man Randy Savage was waiting in the woods across the street from my house and that he was going to run up to me after I got off the bus and piledrive me into my driveway. In one, Macho Man Randy Savage was my gym teacher, and the entire gym class was just me running away from him. I called him “Mancho Man.”

And now, he hawks Slim Jims.

drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweed.

2010-01-05T20:53:00.002-06:00

So, I started a tumblr for a variety of reasons, one of which is the ability to queue posts and have them display in intervals. Also, my friend made me do it. I'm still going to be posting here on the regular for those of you who don't tumble, but for those of you who do, you can find me at morninggloria dot tumblr dot com.

On New Year's Eve, I had a small run in with law enforcement. True story! After that, I was so upset and shaken up that I couldn't have fun at the Girl Talk show. We ended up leaving at 12:30 and getting into a huge screaming fight. It was so bad that Boyfriend decided that we had to "redo" New Year's Eve, and bought champagne that Sunday night and I made a nice dinner and we watched Arrested Development and went to bed early. Much better than me kicking him out.

Happy New Year.

go fuck yourself, 2009

2009-12-30T18:51:00.002-06:00

I started writing here almost a year ago, at the beginning of what would turn out to be a very challenging era in my life. January and February brought my unwilling participation in the Great Uterus Adventure, followed by months of bitterly cold weather and a summer that never really happened. My grandfather died, who was the relative outside of my immediate family to whom I was closest, as did my parents' cat that had at one time been my cat. My boyfriend lost his job and has yet to find a new one, and we almost had to get married in June so that he could afford his anti coagulant medication and contact lenses. The Minnesota Twins' performance was once again laughably underwhelming, and the Notre Dame Fightin' Irish football team made me want to punch a nun. My kitty got sick, and in a fit of panic and fear of losing yet another something important, I willingly shelled out whatever the vet asked for in performing a series of procedures that turned out to be detrimental and consequently found myself with $20 to my name (aside from retirement savings) with two weeks to go until Christmas. A bunch of public idiots said a bunch of stupid shit, and a bunch of private idiots realized that they, too, could become public idiots if only the shit they said and did was stupid enough.

I did some cool stuff this year-- my first time in Mexico City, I succeeded in not getting fired, my brother's wedding was a bucket of fun. I listened to some good music and I learned how to cook and I became a little less afraid of everything. I met people that I like, I left people that I didn't like, and my friend Mrs. K and I cooked Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people and nothing was a disaster. I wrote a decent amount and managed to keep my apartment in a state above chaos. I haven't totally given up on going to the gym and I have succeeded in living on this earth for 26 years without catching an STD. Hooray for those things.

I feel sort of like how Luke Skywalker must have felt at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. I may be sporting a weird robotic hand and completely freaked out to discover that my mortal enemy is my biological father, but at least I'm not dead, and I'm excited for 2010, which I hope ends up being a Return of the Jedi type year.

and i owe it all to you

2009-12-30T18:41:00.004-06:00

New Year's Day is the last game that the University of Florida Gators football team will play with Tim Tebow, their Jesus-loving quarterback who is probably a virgin, and Urban Meyer, the superhuman, hedgehog-headed wonder head coach who has a creepy Spartan relationship with him. Boyfriend is an alum of the school and certifiable football superfan (he had a suit custom made, half blue, half orange. He wears it tailgating and people, like, take pictures with him. It's weird, but he puts up with my obsessive trolling of pit bull rescue websites and that weird voice that I use to talk to my cat, so we'll call it even). I think he might be a little depressed about the imminent end to the Urban Meyer/Tim Tebow era and their Batman/Robin-like duality that has led the team to two national championships.

He's shut himself in his "office" and is listening to a playlist consisting of "I've Had The Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing, "Boys of Summer," and "Tha Crossroads" by Bone Thugs N Harmony, among other songs that might be on the soundtrack of a movie about a boy who dies of cancer or a foster mom slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. I don't know whether to laugh at him or hug him. I understand the realness of sports heartache, but at the same time, there are few things more hilarious than sports schadenfreude.

i'll give germs 2 U

2009-12-27T11:05:00.002-06:00

Whenever I hear a slow jam playing, I can't help but wonder how many people got chlamydia to that song.

it's a boxing day miracle

2009-12-26T21:25:00.002-06:00

Every time I spend more than a day or so in my childhood home, my lungs swell up and I can't breathe and I have to take my sister's albuterol every two hours until I leave.

I spent Christmas wearing sweatpants, eating, wrapping presents, watching my brother's enormous black velvety cat stalk and pounce on my petite brown tailless tabby, fighting over the remote control for the family television, and fantasizing about the day that my mother's yappy little Pomeranian would no longer yap. From not being alive anymore, or having to have an emergency laryndectomy, or something.

On Christmas eve, we went over to my grandma's house with some aunts/uncles/adult cousins/cousins' toddler offspring who danced around and called everyone "Uncle (Their Name)." Even "Uncle Grandma." I couldn't stop looking over at the closed door to the second bedroom and thinking about how my grandpa had died in there, just four mouths ago, just right in that room. I wanted him to come out of the room and announce that he had just played the biggest joke ever on the entire town, that he was going to dress up as Crabby Santa again this year and everything was going to go back to normal.

It appears that the Catholic Ned Flanders was running the music program at good old St. D's Catholic Church in town, and there's no way that any sort of God had anything to do with the sounds that they were making. I debated taking communion, you know, since I don't believe in it, but I did so that my parents' feelings wouldn't be hurt.

Last night, I either saw a ghost or dreamed I saw a ghost in my brother's old room at my parents' house. It's a guest room now, and I usually sleep in there when he's not home and I am, because the mattress is better. I woke up this morning (or had a dream that I woke up) and there was a girl standing at the end of my bed. She was pale short with long, straight dark hair. I thought that it was my sister, but it wasn't. I sat up and said her name, but then I looked at the place at the end of the bed and she/it was gone. Or I had been sleeping. Either way, it wasn't scary.

The roads were just fine north of Eau Claire, but north of Wisconsin Dells, an ice storm hit and traffic slowed to a crawl. I stifled my natural compulsion to sing along hammishly with the radio (the rental came equipped with XM, which is much more dangerous than regular radio, as at any given time, I can find something to which I know the words) in the interest of R not crashing the car into the ditch. My father text messaged me temporary updates about how he was grouse hunting in the woods out back and how it was a shame that we had to leave on Saturday rather than Sunday (I have never once in my entire Little-House-In-The-Big-Woods-But-In-The-80's-And-'90's existence expressed any sort of interest in hunting with him.) Windshield wipers never seem to work on that gross snow/dirt/ice/salt mixture that gets kicked up by cars in front of your car on the expressway, and I'm amazed that we didn't run out of windshield wiper fluid.

Whenever I come home from a week or more away, in the last few minutes before I arrive at home, my stomach ties itself in knots and I convince myself that when we pull onto my block, my building will be in flames.

I'm in a really weird mood.

gloria

2009-12-16T20:28:00.002-06:00

Gloria is my maternal grandmother's name, and Gloria is my middle name, after her. Gloria's mother was named Evelyn, and Evelyn spent a substantial amount of time in prison.

The story about the drama of my grandmother's childhood and my great grandmother's legal problems is murky. I know that my great grandfather (I don't know his name; I don't think my mother even knew his name) left Evelyn with four young children. I know that Evelyn may have been mentally ill, because she was found wandering down a country road ten miles away from her house one evening, wearing only her nightgown and with no knowledge of her kids, who were home alone. Gloria was just a baby.

Evelyn was sent to a women's prison in southern Wisconsin, and my grandmother was passed from relative to relative for years, never living in one place for long. She lived in California (with her aunt who was tight with Ronald motherfucking Reagan. I'm serious.), in Oregon, in Illinois. Her father had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared and couldn't be located.

My mother grew up believing that her grandfather had abandoned Evelyn and that Evelyn was a little kooky but harmless, a little distant. She didn't know that her grandmother had been incarcerated, or that her mother had never had a home until my father, a social worker early in his career, discovered a file about Gloria and her siblings in the basement of the courthouse, disclosing where they lived, how their father had disappeared, how Evelyn was sent to prison for neglect, how the kids were distributed to family and friends. He told my mother, who had no idea, and after Evelyn died, she told me.

I never liked my great grandmother. She was mean to my grandma, who isn't going to win a Nobel Prize in physics or anything, but is one of the sweetest people I've ever met. I hated Evelyn's nippy poodle named Mitzy (is that not the perfect name for a poodle who is also an asshole?), and I didn't like how her house smelled like dirty laundry, and I didn't like how she doted on my brother but ignored me, and I didn't like that weird ass minty lime hard candy she always shoved into the palm of my hand when I walked through her door. She stabbed a nurse with a fork when she was in the nursing home, and lived to be 95.

My grandparents came to visit us one afternoon about ten years ago, riding in a shiny white Buick with maroon upholstery that we'd never seen before. Two days prior, a man in a suit had appeared on their front porch with a bunch of legal papers and a $10,000 check. Gloria's biological father had died, and he left her some money and property. He'd apparently moved to Iowa, remarried, and had a different family that we haven't met and will likely never meet. The next day, my grandparents bought the car with cash.

The whole thing is very telenovela. I wish I had a print of my great grandmother's mug shot.

compliment off

2009-12-15T19:55:00.003-06:00

I'm watching a show called "The Great American Sing-Off" right now. It's a performance competition reality show for acapella groups. A judge on the show just made semi critical (but correct) comment about one of the group. The crowd booed.

This always happens, the crowd that boos in the face of anything but a reality judge schmearing creamy and nondistinct compliments on any reality show contestant. Anything constructive, anything that would actually help the contestant improve is met with hostility from the American reality television show live studio audience.

It's really annoying, because the cranky British guy on the judging panel on any given reality competition show is usually right, and, as a performer, "You get pitchy on the high notes, and that's tough to listen to" is much more helpful than "GIRLFRIEN! YOU BROUGHT IT! YOU BROUGHT IT!"

While I sat her grumbling about the stupidity of the reality television audience, a brilliant idea hit me: why not just create an entire show that consists of regular people walking onto a stage in front of a live audience and a panel of judges. The person introduces themselves, and the judges just sit there, and one by one compliment the person on stage. For anything. And then the audience goes "WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!" I'll call it "The Compliment Hour" and it will be America's Favorite Hour Of Nonthought.

party in my pants

2009-12-15T18:03:00.004-06:00

My company mandated that my division of the company not have Christmas parties this year, because some of the things that my company does are really ham-handed.

I have four different bosses, so I'll refer to my main boss as Professor Boss, as he reminds me of a winsome history professor in a boy-centric drama about bonding and growing up, like Dead Poets Society, but taller. Professor Boss, ever in tune with the fact that many of his employees are raging lushes with repressed something or other, decided to sidestep this company wide mandate by calling his friend who owns a bar in Wrigleyville and arranging a gathering there to honor another boss' anniversary with the firm. So, it just happens to be right before Christmas, and maybe some people will be wearing Santa hats, and some people will possibly be wishing each other Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah or Joyous Kwanzaa or Blessed Boxing Day or whatever. But it is absolutely not a Christmas party.

Our officewide Absolutely Not A Christmas Party is scheduled for Thursday, and it will be held in what may very well be the worldwide headquarters for the Worldwide Guild of Douchebags, steps away from Wrigley Field.

I can't fucking wait.

We all need it.

a-musing

2009-12-14T22:29:00.000-06:00

It's weird that "thesis" sounds so much like "feces."

i can't quit you, christmas

2009-12-12T09:15:00.002-06:00

... but if I could, it would probably look a little something like this:

(via Big Fat Whale)

my employer hates fun

2009-12-11T17:53:00.002-06:00

Today, a mass email was sent out by my massive financial conglomerate employer.

UPDATED: LIST OF BLOCKED VENDORS was the subject line, and attached to the message was a file that contained a list of places that can not be paid for with the newly-issued corporate cards.

Here are some of those items:
Cruise Lines
Boat Rentals & Boat Leases
Marinas Marine Service – Supply
Orthopedic Goods – Artificial Limb Stores
Mobile Home Dealers
Boat Dealers
Recreational & Utility Trailers Camper Dealers
Motorcycle Shops & Dealers
Motor Home Dealers
Snowmobile Dealers
Miscellaneous Auto – Aircraft – Farm Equipment Not Elsewhere Classified
Women’s Ready to Wear Stores
Women’s Accessory & Specialty Stores
Furriers & Fur Shops
Wig & Toupee Shops
Pawn Shops
Religious Goods Stores
Hearing Aids – Sales Service Supply Stores
Time Shares
SPORTING AND RECREATIONAL CAMPS
Funeral Service & Crematories
Dating & Escort Services
Massage Parlors
Exterminating & Disinfecting Services
Detective & Protective Agencies Security Services
Court Costs Including Alimony & Child Support

The fact that a list of these things exist, and that "wig and toupee shops" and "snowmobile dealers" need to be expressly banned for corporate reimbursement has me asking so many questions. Is this preemptive? Did a bunch of corporate expense hounds get blazed one day and make a wacked out list of things that the company should not pay for? Or, did someone actually try to expense "dating and escort services" back in the 80's, when Reaganomics reigned supreme, hair towered to the heavens, cocaine flowed like thawing polar ice caps and things were cray-zay? Were our investment bankers and traders so sleazy that they found it appropriate to brazenly flaunt the fact that they were charging HOOKERS, cruises, and artificial limbs to the company?

cheese

2009-12-08T19:55:00.001-06:00

fandom

2009-12-08T17:38:00.004-06:00

People believe really silly things, all over the world. Stupidity and mass hysteria are colorblind, and I believe that one day we will live in a world where we all can just laugh at each other and realize the potential for silliness across all races, creeds, religions, and levels of cheese consumption.

That being said, in South Korea, it's a commonly accepted belief that leaving a fan on all night can lead to death by suffocation, hypothermia, hyperthermia, or poisoning. For this reason, all fans sold in South Korea come equipped with a timer that shuts the blades off after a certain period of time, to prevent people from dying from motherfucking fan air.

I am not joking.

Prior to the summer of 2006, the Korean Consumer Protection Board issued a statement about summer safety. In it, they asserted that asphyxiation by fan was among the top 5 causes of summer accidents that can relate in death. According to the KCPB:

"If bodies are exposed to electric fans or air conditioners for too long, it causes bodies to lose water and hypothermia. If directly in contact with a fan, this could lead to death from increase of carbon dioxide saturation concentration and decrease of oxygen concentration. The risks are higher for the elderly and patients with respiratory problems.

From 2003~2005, a total of 20 cases were reported through the CISS involving asphyxiations caused by leaving electric fans and air conditioners on while sleeping. To prevent asphyxiation, timers should be set, wind direction should be rotated and doors should be left open.

This is amazing. I can't believe that before today, I was unaware that an entire country of otherwise reasonable people seriously believes in fan death. Tell your friends.

More on fan death:
KCPB Bulletin
A newspaper article from 2008
From "The Straight Dope"

And....
The Wikipedia article that kicked off my glorious day of researching fan death when I should have been working.

mudslinging

2009-12-06T19:44:00.002-06:00

While watching the SEC football championship game between Florida and Alabama yesterday (to paraphrase bluebears and Cecil B. Demille's The Ten Commandments, "Where's your messiah now, Tebow?!?") I remembered an idea that I had years ago.

During football games, a portion of the commercial breaks is devoted to ads full of multiracial groups of friends doing lab experiments and shots of newly mowed lawns and brick buildings accompanied by words that convey strength and academic quality but are sort of meaningless by themselves-- "Strength. Quality. Professional. Innovate. Create. Express. Achieve. Give. Share. Educate. Expand." etc. These commercials are boring. Mind-numbingly so.

What I'd like to see is college/university/conference commercials to take a cue from political ads right around election season. I'd like to see them go negative and instead of being empty vanilla promotions for the school that pays for them. More shit talking, please.

"DID YOU KNOW... that students at the University of Florida don't even have to go to class? How is this an education? Vanderbilt. Where the kids are actually smart."

or

"Fact: Notre Dame students are jerks. This message paid for you by the University of Southern California."

or

"Boise State's football field causes birth defects in 25% of women. Is this what you want for your children?"

Get on it, haters.

deli

2009-12-04T23:32:00.004-06:00

"I'm thinking about moving to New York," he said. He was, as always, wearing clothing that cost more than my monthly rent, and the perfect amount of hair gel to convey "young, brash investment banker" look. He was handsome like how Gordon Gecko is handsome. I was wearing heels, and secretly rejoiced in the fact that this meant that I was at his eye level.

"Really?" I feigned interest and tried to stretch my height further. "Why?"

It was lunch time. Un/fortunately, our buildings are very close to each other, and running into each other at lunch in his building's giant cafeteria is a little too commonplace. I've always gotten a sick feeling of victory when I've seen him on one of those days that I bother to dry and straighten my hair and put contacts in, and I duck out of the way on one of those (more normal) days when I had slept for as long as possible, showered hastily, slicked my hair back into a bun, and put my glasses on as a substitute for eye makeup.

He said that he just needed a change of pace, that he wanted to be where everything happens, finance wise.

"That's weird," I said. "Why did you even move to Chicago in the first place if you wanted to be in New York?"

He looked at me with capital-S-Significance, "You know why I moved here. I moved here for you. I wasn't going to leave without you, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. You said that you'd maybe think about moving to New York someday. I thought that maybe I'd just get a head start."

Fuck you, I thought. It was really weird that he was telling me this in the line for deli-carved sandwiches. I didn't know what to say, and I should have walked away, but we were in a long line together, and I really wanted a corned beef sandwich.

cinnamon roles

2009-12-02T18:27:00.003-06:00

Cinnamon is my favorite flavor of anything, ever. When I was a kid, I'd buy packs of Big Red and chew piece after piece until I couldn't taste anything. I filled my room with cinnamon candles and would bake cinnamon rolls and always pick through the candy in the lobby of the doctor's office to pick out the little cinnamon disks in the red wrapper.

Boyfriend doesn't like cinnamon at all. The taste revolts him, the smell invokes retching.

One thing that's been the most difficult for me to give up since he moved in is baking cinnamon rolls, chewing cinnamon gum. Having anything cinnamon at all. He never insisted upon it, but I abstain from it anyway because I can tell how much he hates it. Once, I had an oatmeal raisin cookie at noon, and when I came home, he could smell the dreaded cinnamon on my breath.

Sometimes I just want to bake some fucking cinnamon rolls.

found: the mythical jared?

2009-12-01T21:39:00.002-06:00

"He went to Jared."-

"-Jared has a tiny dog and enjoys being photographed on the toilet."

I don't know, guys. This could be the Jared that all of those dudes are going to when they discover that they're gay around the holidays.

(via Lamebook)

problematic christmas songs

2009-12-01T18:08:00.004-06:00

I am too cool for almost everything (by this, I mean that I can't suspend disbelief of my own awkwardness in the following situations/contexts, no matter how hard I try, so I do not participate in these things). I'm too cool for dancing at bars, too cool for emoting in public, too cool for Catholicism. I'm also too cool for: hipsters, regular radio, many television programs, made up holidays, going to the beach, and, come to think of it, all religion.

I am definitely not too cool for Christmas (even though I'm not religious, I dig the mythology, music, and traditions of the holiday. Also, my family's celebration is kickass). All self consciousness about how everyone is always probably thinking about what an dork I am evaporates. From the day after Thanksgiving until the day after Christmas, my ipod is populated exclusively with workout jams and Christmas carols. I dance around my apartment singing along with Celine Dion's rendition of "Silent Night." I decorate and send officewide emails alerting my coworkers of when Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is on CBS. Even though I'm firmly entrenched in my anti-Scroogey ways, I find myself catching non sequiters in the lyrics of certain Christmas songs. There is a painfully finite number of Christmas songs, and some of them are painfully weird.

1. It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
This song just starts out cruisin' along with normal Christmas stuff. Marshmallows, jingle belling, stockings, parties... but takes a weird turn. Suddenly the lyrics start talking about "scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago." What? Is this a Christmas tradition that I've been missing out on? Ghost story telling? Uh, recalling the "glories" of old Christmases? Are we Vikings?

2. My Grown Up Christmas List
This is one of the shittiest Christmas songs ever. If I wanted to hear a lite rock muzak singer outline his/her plan for world peace (No more lives torn apart. Then wars would never start. And time can heal all hearts!), I would sit in on a Republican congressional primary in Ohio or the Miss USA pageant preliminaries.

3. Baby, It's Cold Outside
AKA Ode To A Midwinter's Date Rape

4. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer
When I was a kid, my older cousins taught me the "sassy" version of this song, which consists of irreverent interjections between the phrases-
Rudolph, the red nosed reindeer/ Had a very shiny nose (LIKE A LIGHTBULB!)
And if you ever saw it/ You would even say it glows (LIKE A LIGHTBULB!)
All of the other reindeer/ used to laugh and call him names (LIKE PINOCCHIO!)
They never let poor Rudolph/ join in any reindeer games (LIKE MONOPOLY!)
Then one foggy Christmas eve, Santa came to say
Rudolph, with your nose so bright, won't you guide my sleigh tonight?
Then all the reindeer loved him/ As they shouted out with glee (Whoopee!)
Rudolph, the red nosed reindeer/you'll go down in history!!!! (LIKE RASPUTIN!)
- and now, I can't hear that song without thinking of the between line interjections.

5. Santa Claus is Coming To Town
There's a verse that describes things that Santa is bringing for the kids- little tin horns, little toy drums, rooty toot-toots and rommy tom-toms-- wait, what? What's a rommy tom-tom? It sounds like a hot eggnog cocktail, but I don't think I want to drink it.

6. My Favorite Things
BECAUSE THIS IS NOT A MOTHERFUCKING CHRISTMAS SONG.

who the hell is jared?

2009-11-29T11:11:00.004-06:00

I don't understand the catch phrase "He went to Jared" in conjunction with a jewelry store and women delighted with men who bought them things there. Isn't Jared a dude's name? Wouldn't "He went to Jared" be an almost ready-made euphemism for "he realized he was gay and is now living with his boyfriend"?

I mean, right? Good for your newly out of the closet ex boyfriend and his new boyfriend Jared, but it still doesn't change the fact that having someone leave you sucks, even if it was because they realized that they were wrong about their own sexuality.

jealous

2009-11-27T21:48:00.002-06:00

I often find myself jealous of my cat's slothful lifestyle.

what the dickens

2009-11-27T20:30:00.008-06:00

We just returned from a Black Friday viewing of Disney's A Christmas Carol in 3-D. I certainly enjoyed the extra dimension, and the movie itself was very true to the original Dickens story. I worried that perhaps Jim Carey, voice of Scrooge, would have shat all over this movie like he did with How The Grinch Stole Christmas, that he'd flail and mug and facially contort his digital self across the screen, dropping potential catch phrases left and right and screaming unpredictably. He didn't, so, thank you, Jim Carey, for not ruining this.

That being said, Don't take your kids there unless you have type of pre-criminal spawn that doesn't scare easily at loud noises, as this movie would be especially appealing in 3-D if you'd like to have the shit scared out of you while listening to charming orchestral arrangements of some of your favorite English Christmas songs. It's scary. There are multiple scare-moments. It's not heartwarming family fare, but that creepy feeling that you're actually in the movie justified the close-to-$20 ticket price and braving the obnoxious out of town crowd at Navy Pier's IMAX theater.

I realized mid-film that maybe Ebeneezer Scrooge was before his time. Nowadays, he'd be a cranky Libertarian. I also wondered for a bit if I bore my own similarities to Scrooge, what with my anti-consumption pragmatism and general level of crankiness. No, I concluded. I'm a little more Grinchy than I am Scroogy, but I really am neither. While I, like Scrooge, believe in a "let's all interfere with each other as little as possible" approach to life, I love Christmas. I decorate. I cook. I buy people gifts. I sing carols and take a longer route home so that I can look at the decorations. I drink warm mulled beer in Daley Plaza and spend hours browsing through the Christmas ornament booths. I'm no Scrooge. I'm also not a Grinch, because although I wear a lot of green and excel at long anti-mainstream tirades, I don't take it upon myself to ruin stuff for everyone. If you want to listen to me, that's cool, but if not, I'm not going to break into your house and steal the Roast Beast.

On a tangentially related note, I can't appreciate the inclusion of the colors pink and purple in Christmas decorating. Navy Pier is an explosion of pink, purple, and metallics, giant shiny bulbs suspended in grapelike clusters from the ceilings. I saw it and was instantly dismayed. It was like that scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas when the eponymous main character becomes depressed and discouraged that all of the Christmas trees for sale are spotted and striped and made out of metal.

yikes, facebook

2009-11-24T19:53:00.002-06:00

Facebook has a new feature that suggests people with whom you may want to reconnect in addition to the old feature of suggesting that you become friends with that super annoying girl that you had one class with your freshman year who is friends with like twenty of your friends from college.

These features are not good, because if I know someone and they are not my social networking friend, there is generally a reason. For example, maybe I straight up can't stand them.

The new feature, which has proven to be just awful, suggests reconnecting with people with whom I've lost touch. They're never good suggestions. The other week, Facebook was obsessed with me connecting with study abroad boyfriend, a gentleman to whom I haven't spoken in probably two years, since his then-girlfriend (now fiancee) told him that he was forbidden from talking to me.

Hey, suggests Facebook, why don't you talk to him?

Hey, ex boyfriend. Remember when you told me that you loved me, and I responded by throwing up? Great memories. Good talk.

Today, though, was when Facebook really crossed the line when it suggested that I "help make Facebook better" for a childhood friend of my brother's named M-N-. Problem is, M-N- died about two months ago, after a long, drawn out battle with a really tragic form of brain cancer.

Hey, remember your friend who died? asks Facebook, That sucked, huh!

Fuck you, Facebook.

This is shaping up to be a real "fuck you" of a week.

fashion plate

2009-11-22T19:06:00.002-06:00

"You are dressed... in the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen you wearing," he said.

I don't know what the big deal is about walking around in a Nike workout top with a built in sports bra and no pants. If I ran things, we'd all dress this way, every day.

Fuck pants.

girls are not funny

2009-11-21T16:24:00.002-06:00

Of course, I don't believe this at all, but a lot of people do. Why? Part of it is because we've been told that the things that are hilarious about being a woman are gross, or out of bounds. This is the humor equivalent of telling T Pain that he can no longer use autotune, and it has to stop. It's not fair.

Menstruating, for example, can be absolutely hysterical, especially self-deprecating references to violent premenstrual mood swings. Once, when I was in high school and on a hormone roller coaster, I sat down to dinner and began sobbing when I discovered that we were eating liver and onions. Sobbing. The rest of my family watched me, silently confused and a little afraid, as my tears turned to hysterical laughter within the course of ten seconds. "Are you on drugs?" my mother asked. I began crying again. I ended up being sent to my room without dinner. Also, play with the idea of menstruation. Isn't part of humor making people slightly uncomfortable so that they laugh to break the tension? Experiment with adjectives used in conjunction with the act of shedding one's uterine lining to deliberately make people uncomfortable. Starting point: "projectile menstruation." Jokes about the Twilight vampires and how the reason that the hundreds of years old vampires still attend high school is that they love the smell of menstruating adolescents.

Another hilarious part of being a woman is the presence of breasts. They're fucking hysterical, just chillin there on your pecs like a fatty built in entourage. And don't even get me started on the hilarity of embarrassing nipples-hard-in-inappropriate-circumstances moments. I battled this all summer, as I work in an office type setting in a fancy downtown building, where the air conditioning is set to an optimal temperature for men in suits rather than women in sundresses covered by button down sweaters. One thing that men don't understand is that an erect nipple doesn't mean the same thing as an erect penis. In fact, usually erect nipples mean absolutely nothing or something terribly boring-- "it's cold in here," my erect nipples may be saying, or "I'm uncomfortable right now," or, they may just be saying, "Hello, people that the person to whom I'm attached is speaking. I just wanted to make you aware that she has nipples." Unfortunately, many men seem to think that nipples visible through clothing are an indicator of obvious sexual arousal. No. It's not. Also, how about trying to exercise with breasts attached to the front of your body, huh? It's like having two warm jello molds buried in your torso. Breasts: sometimes sexy, usually hilarious.

I understand that men may find humor about the monstrous female body stomach churning. Believe me, I understand. But I'm tired of living in a world where I have to listen to dudes wax philosophical about the hilarity of the penis (true fact: penises are hilarious) and borderline offensive Tucker Max-style odes to buttsex gone awry yet I can't contribute something uniquely gross to the conversation. In conclusion: periods, boobs, vaginas.

majestic thin crust

2009-11-20T17:34:00.002-06:00

My musical taste fluctuates wildly. About three weeks ago, I was on a Rachmaninov kick. Then, I got really into Florence & The Machine. Then, old skool Janet Jackson. Then Ella Fitzgerald. Now I'm on a Gustav Holst's The Planets kick, and today, I listened to "Jupiter" as I majestically marched home ("majestic marching" is the only acceptable way of walking while listening to very dramatic classical themes). I turned the corner onto my street, visions of giant planets and space flights and elementary school slide shows about the solar system dancing in my head and violins and excessive percussion dancing in my ears, and I smelled frozen pizza, the kind of pizza that populated softball team pizza parties back in the days before DiGiorno rising crust, and in the context of the symphonic piece playing on my iPod, even the pizza smelled dramatic and ageless and majestic.

I returned home and took off my coat, and Boyfriend decided that a good idea would be for him to put my coat on. It's a brightly colored textured coat with retro styling, and sort of looks like something that Jackie O would wear. He looked like someone who was trying to dress like Andre 3000, but failing.

This is my Friday.

barfing with my eyes

2009-11-19T17:39:00.005-06:00

My mother sent me a link to my brother's wedding picture proofs. The bride and groom look great, which is awesome because it means that people will not be looking at me in the pictures.

I sent the link to a friend with the intent of showing him how progressively ridiculous my posing grew as the session wore on, and he was kind enough to put together a nice compilation that summarizes my lack of enthusiasm (face somewhat obscured so that none of you freaks reading this recognize me on the street... all four of you):

Being a bridesmaid (or, in my case, groomsmaid) sometimes feels like you are part of a human picture frame.

Darth MorningGloria

2009-11-18T19:14:00.002-06:00

My company has a specific expense code for the following items:

Use of corporate plane fleet
Maintenance/upkeep of corporate aircraft
Fuel for corporate aircraft
Armored sentry services
Armored air delivery
Fuel for armored car (ATM delivery)

My company does not have expense codes for the following items:
Care and maintenance of office plants
Pest control
Birthday cake

I think that I work for the Death Star.

hairless

2009-11-17T20:03:00.002-06:00

My cat, Eleanor Roosevelt, has been licking herself like crazy of late. So much so that she licked a spot bald on her back.

She's dumb.

Anyway, I took her to the vet today, and the vet thinks that she just has a mild infection or allergy on her skin and gave her some steroids (to help her go up a weight class and really blast her pecs up to that next level, I'm assuming) and antibiotics. The pills came with a nice printed label, with her name on them, except with my last name tacked on the end.

"ELEANOR XXXX"

When I found Eleanor at the animal shelter a few years ago, the tag on her cage said that she was named "Diamond," which leads me to believe that her previous owner was either a topless dancer or a seven year old. Whoever it was, by the time the shelter got her, she had a tail that needed to be amputated and a front fang that needed to be extracted. As I was filling out the paperwork, the shelter volunteer asked if I wanted to keep the name "Diamond," and of course I didn't because it felt a little dirty, like dating someone for awhile and finding out after several months that his ex girlfriend had the same first name as you, or looked exactly like you, and also the ex girlfriend was a total C U Next Tuesday. So I changed her name to "Eleanor Roosevelt," because I think that naming pets after long-dead celebrities is hilarious. I didn't name her "Eleanor (My last name)." That just wouldn't make sense.

What a primeval society we live in that vets assume that cats automatically take their owners' last names.

i'm l vi ' t

2009-11-15T18:10:00.002-06:00

The McDonald's at Washington and Dearborn has a sign outside that is designed to fit the aesthetic of the theater district. Except tonight the cab that I was riding in drove past it and I noticed that the light up "MCDO" in the marquee style sign is out, so the sign reads "NALDS."

I don't know what they would sell at a restaurant advertised with a neon sign that says "NALDS," but I don't think that I want to eat there.

This is sort of like that time that I went to Wal Mart with my mother when I was 12 or 13 and spent hours cracking up over the fact that the bulbs in the L and MA were burnt out, and so we did our shopping in a store that advertised itself as "WA RT."

alleged

2009-11-12T18:15:00.005-06:00

This morning, while balls deep in my normal routine of getting ready for work while listening to Morning Edition on NPR, the anchor began discussing Nadal Hasan, the crazytron who thought that the best way to be a good Muslim is to ogle some stripper titties and then shoot people. The story kept referring to Hassan as the "alleged" shooter. "Alleged." I realize that there are legal reasons for this, but it still struck me as a little goofy. I stamped, hair half straightened, into the bedroom.

"Can you believe this?" I asked Boyfriend. "They're calling him the 'alleged' shooter. Didn't like, a lot of people actually witness him taking a gun and shooting people? I mean, am I 'allegedly' not wearing pants right now, or am I actually not wearing pants? What needs to happen for people to refer to him as the shooter? Do a bunch of nuns need to sign something swearing that they saw him? Does he need to be photographed next to a notary while shooting?"

"Well," replied Boyfriend, "eyewitness accounts aren't all that reliable. That's been proven. And you never can rule out Gene Parmesan."

I laughed so fucking hard.

this song

2009-11-11T21:11:00.001-06:00

... has been playing on loop in my head for about the last week.

Raveonettes "Last Dance" from Team G on Vimeo.

witch

2009-11-11T17:03:00.003-06:00

My father was in kindergarten the first time he watched The Wizard of Oz. He was completely dazzled by the film, but mostly mesmerized by the sheer unadulterated evil of the Wicked Witch of the West. When it came time for he and his brothers to choose Halloween costumes, my father chose what he thought was the scariest costume he could think of: a witch.

He didn't realize that witches are supposed to be female; he just assumed them to be a genderless monster, like a Frankenstein or a Dracula or a mummy. My grandmother didn't interfere with his costume choice, and so my father, age six, painted his face green and wore a black outfit and black cape and went trick or treating unaware that he was cross dressing.

schmoes in different area codes

2009-11-10T21:12:00.003-06:00

I spend a lot of time on the phone every day, talking to clients, mutual fund wholesalers, people who really really want me to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, headhunters who are trying to poach our brokers and toss them into the arms of a competing company while they take a cut of the signing bonus, random jerks who have the wrong number and act like that's somehow my fault, employees from other branches, caterers who won't fucking stop bothering me, unemployed financial professionals desperate to talk to our HR manager, and distraught people who are trying to borrow against their 401(k)s to make house or car payments. Our office is first in the phone book, so we really get the creme de la creme.

My day is filled with area codes followed by seven numbers, repeat three million times. As a result, I've gotten pretty good at memorizing what area code comes from what part of the country. It's funny, though, because with a surprising number of the area codes, I already knew where they were from and had a somewhat painful boy-related memory associated with it. It seems like I've spent much of my early 20's embarrassing myself in front of a geographically diverse group of men.

972. I'll never forget you, Dallas/Ft. Worth/Plano, Texas, mostly because of that one $500 phone bill I racked up being your partner in starry-eyed dumbassery. I spent so many nights overdramatically crying to you and begging you to visit. Once, I spent two hours on my back on the marble lip of the reflecting pool in front of Touchdown Jesus, consumed by how I felt about you. I haven't talked to you in, I think, two years? I hope you haven't gotten hit by a bus, and I hope that the years have helped you overcome your infuriating obsession with Dan Brown novels.

847. Don't hook up with a coworker, kids.

617. You shared an apartment with your ex in Sommerville, Massachusetts. You have a black belt in karate and speak Japanese and really love listening to heavy metal very loudly while playing driving simulation games on your PS3. The actor that you most closely resemble is Sidney Poitier, which is a bit of a non sequiter, given your hobbies and borderline obsession with Japan.

269. I feel like I was doing you a favor in dating you, rural Southwestern Michigan. You cheated your way through college and now you live on a boat and you write a blog that is painfully not funny and sort of sounds like it was written by a thirteen year old drunk on wine coolers and balls deep in an Aqua Teen Hunger Force marathon. I'm glad that the relationship didn't continue, but still sort of pissed that you broke up with me at a Halloween party. I was dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl because I hadn't planned on doing anything that year, but you called me at the last minute, and I grabbed what I could from my closet. I couldn't believe it when you said it was over, because I felt like you were probably getting a good deal. I got angry, and shouted at you, and had to walk home by myself in a short gray pleated skirt, thigh high argyle socks, and a white button down shirt that was much too small and too tight.

917. New York City. Big, overdramatic eye roll. I kept asking you if you were having fun. You kept getting more and more annoyed. I'm just not demonstrative, you said. You're acting pissed, I said. We were quiet for half an hour and after that weekend, I never talked to you again.

954. Oh, Fort Lauderdale, you and your marble floored palace of a monstrosity of a house. You lived on a cul-de-sac and listened to Rick Ross with the bass turned all the way up. I saw you the other week and couldn't believe that you were still sporting that gaudy oversized crucifix necklace that your aunt brought you from Dubai when you were like sixteen. One time, you told me that a Pretty Ricky song about phone sex reminded you of me. You will never personally understand the extent of your douchebaggery. I also hope that you never know how long it took me to get over you.

973. Dayton, OH, you were the worst best friend of all time. I still get angry sometimes, thinking about how you just one day decided that you'd had enough of me. I kept all of your secrets, I did everything you asked. I tried substances that I never should have dabbled in so that you wouldn't think that I was lame. I never told your girlfriend that you were sleeping with that married woman in Lincoln Park while you house sat for her parents. Crystal Castles ARE NOT the best band of all time. Neither is Man Man. You look like a homeless person.

773. Southern suburb of Chicago, you rarely laughed and you said the weirdest things when you were drunk, like Are-You-Going-To-Stab-Me?-weird. I ignored them because you had great hair, like Patrick Dempsey hair.

219. Sorry, you were a total rebound after 972. My friends called you "Lumberjack" behind your back because you were 6'5" and strapping and always wore unfortunate plaid shirts and work boots. You took seven years to get through college. Most of your vocabulary was monosyllabic. You have the same name as a famous victim of AIDS.

469. Dallas/Ft Worth, again. I was bored, so we texted a lot. I hope that you didn't save those texts.

503. What's up, Portland. I really tried to care about soccer, but it's difficult.

715. I can't believe that I've never dated or had an extended flirtation with anyone from my home area code. It's a pity; the accent is pretty cute.

Sometimes I feel as if I'd have been better off spending my early 20's carefully studying 19th century English literature rather than investing energy in dudes.

george bernard shaw

2009-11-09T17:16:00.002-06:00

When I was in high school, we adopted a kitten from my crazy cat lady aunt (from whom we are now estranged... another story). He was all silvery gray with green eyes and an unexpectedly high pitched meow. He grew up to be a gigantic silver thing, sleek with a twitching tail and almost scary obsession with killing mice. Because we lived in the country in an old drafty house, they'd always find a way in. Unfortunately for them, once they were in the house with the cat that I named George Bernard Shaw but called Bernard, there was no getting out. One night he systematically killed and beheaded probably half a dozen mice, maniacally dashing through the house and making a commotion all night. When we awoke the next morning, we found that he had laid them out in a row, headless, in the kitchen. Here, guys, you don't have to worry about dinner tonight; it's on me.

Thanks, cat.

He used to wake me up every morning by tickling my face with his whiskers. His favorite foods were olives, coffee, and mouse heads.

I woke up this morning to a text from my father letting me know that he'd been hit by a car and killed. My poor kitty. He was 13 and diabetic, so he didn't have much time left, and I'm sure that he died doing what he loved: chasing and attempting to kill things. Still sucks.

When I found out, it was really strange. I know, I know, I know it's just a cat, but I started crying in the shower and I couldn't stop crying. It wasn't just the cat, it was this entire fucking year. And even though I was rudely roused from sleep at 3 am by a cascade of ice water from a glass that my current cat upended, when I got out of the shower and got dressed, I picked her up and hugged her and thought about how losing someone, or something, that was or is a part of your family never gets any easier. She responded to my weird outpouring of pet affection and sadness by using her hind legs to try to push me away from her, and then running to her dish and looking at me like "Are you going to feed me, weirdo?"

Here are some pictures of the late George Bernard Shaw. He was a hell of a cat, and will be missed.

the meaning of lent

2009-11-08T18:12:00.003-06:00

As a child of practicing Catholics, one of the non-delights of my youth was attending Sunday school, and later attending Wednesday night CCD. Even though I hated it, forced attendance at St. D's ended up providing me with one of my favorite "are you fucking serious?" stories. I still sort of can't believe what happened that fateful Wednesday night in the late 1990's, even though I saw and experienced it firsthand.

Because there aren't many Catholics in my neck of the woods, one church served my Hometown papists as well as incense huffers from two neighboring school districts. The Town north of us had a permanent population of about 800 people, an impressive trailer park, and a reputation for producing children that didn't bathe. The Town North would later go on to be blown away by a tornado after my senior year of high school and impressively rebuilt with insurance settlements and donations and now every building has a sort of hokey "YOU ARE IN THE WILDERNESS AND WE MAKE EVERYTHING OUT OF LOGS HERE" theme. The kids from the Town North that attended CCD were surly eye rollers, even in kindergarten. The girl was a expert bitch face maker and seemed particularly adept at retreating her hands inside of her sweatshirts and holding the ends shut and always smelled like perm hair treatment. The boy had a square head and was, I guess, related to me somehow. A second Catholic boy moved to the Town North in seventh grade and would later go on to marry my childhood nemesis and get instantly and horrendously fat, like a peep in the microwave. The Town South was only 5 miles away from my Hometown, and almost identical to my hometown in population size and demographics. They were my high school's chief rival in sports, even when my dad was a scrappy, quick point guard Hometown high school basketball star in the 1970's. The kids from the Town South had what could best be described as horrible behavior problems and loved conspiring to torture the well-intentioned but ill prepared souls who volunteered to try to teach kids about Catholicism when all they wanted to do was watch Dawson's Creek. We had one teacher whom they christened as "Mrs. Lop-tits" because her last name kind of sort of almost rhymed with that (and I'm not sure that "lop-tits" is a thing, as I can't picture what that would even mean). There was a girl from the Town South who moved from the Twin Cities in fifth grade, a beautiful Mexican girl with a million siblings who were equally beautiful. She went on to become pregnant at fourteen by my town's resident creepy 19 year old high school dropout. The high school dropout went on to move to St. Louis and then attempt to befriend me on my now-defunct MySpace page by sending me a message asking my measurements and telling me that I look like I'm thinking "naughty thoughts."

That night, Mrs. Lop-tits led all of us- the kids from my hometown, the cranky juvenile assholes from the Town North, and the behavior challenged and attention starved ATV enthusiasts and future teenage mother from the Town South- from our typical classroom to the sanctuary of the church, explaining en route that we were having a "special speaker" address all of the Wednesday night CCD kids (everyone in grades 7-12). We all sat in the pews, whispering amongst ourselves and checking out the Catholic hotties in the grade above us sitting across the aisle, while an unfamiliar woman who looked to be in her mid-20's struggled to set up a projector screen in front of the altar. (Devotees may recall my church's history of projector misappropriation: The Infamous Bryan Adams/Dead Jesus Palm Sunday Slide Show )

Once everything was situated, the lights in the church dimmed and the woman began speaking. She had the heaviest Francis McDormand circa Fargo accent I'd ever heard. "Today (toodaaaaaeeeey), I'm gonna talk to you about sex." Immediately, alarm bells started going off in my mind and I hoped against hope that the projector screen looming ominously behind her was going to be used to display statistics and pie charts and Bible versus, or maybe pictures of kittens and puppies.

She started talking about how the first time that she had sex ever, she got pregnant, and how therefore that means that no one should ever have sex ever unless you want to have a baby, because our bodies are bad, bad, bad and dirty and should only be given lovingly to someone very special. Then she started talking about how abortion is pretty much worse than shooting the pope in the face with a shotgun. This is where I feared that the projection screen would be utilized. But it wasn't. It was going to befoul the church in the very next segment which the heavily accented presenter announced would be about "All the boo boos that can happen if you don't save sex for the husband or wife that God has picked out for you."

"That's right. We're gonna take a look at what can happen if you don't follow the rules."

Slide one lights up the screen. It's a vagina, covered with sores. "HERPES," says the succinct caption.

This woman obviously has no medical training. "As you can see," she says, sounding like Bobbie's mother from the now-defunct cartoon Bobby's World, "this is a woman who has caught herpes."

Next slide. An inflamed, purple penis. "And this guy has something, I'm not sure what, but it's oozing."

Next slide. Infected vagina. "This one is also oozing!"

Not only does this woman have no medical training, she also is terrible with descriptions.

Click, click, click, through what seems like a million slides of infected genitals. All of them are covered, in the words of the Disease Dame of Duluth, in "oozing sores."

At the conclusion of the presentation, the "Spews from Lake Wobegon" woman reminded us that if you have sex, you will get pregnant or your penis will rot off or your vagina will fill up with spiders. Don't have sex.

The church full of teenager's applause was Pavlovian, as we were too shocked to do anything conscious. We silently filtered out of the church, back to our classrooms, gathered our belongings, and waited on the grassy hill between the CCD building and the church for our parents to pick us up. We never talked about it again. And interesting fact: those two dozen or so infected cocks/ballsacks were the first adult male genitalia that I'd ever seen.

My dad's blue Ford Escort pulled up and I climbed in the passenger seat. "How was CCD? Did those kids from (Town South) behave themselves?"

"It was fine. We had a speaker, so we all went over to the church."

"Oh? What did you talk about?"

"Uh... the meaning of Lent."

"Why'd you need a projector for that?"

"Um... they showed us some art."

the ouches

2009-11-08T13:37:00.002-06:00

You know how when you're hung over, extremely hung over, and you think to yourself, "There's no way that I could feel any worse"?

There is a way, actually. You could be super hung over on the day after you decide to re-start weight training with that one trainer at the gym who resembles a female Wesley Snipes, and your muscles could feel aflame with the fire of a thousand skipped gym days.

nudge nudge wink wink

2009-11-06T17:52:00.001-06:00

I've got me SIXTY NINE FOLLOWERS, Y'ALL!

Thanks for reading. I hope that you all enjoy being part of a number that I find hilarious. Because it's a sex position!!!!

gtfo, coworkers. trying to poo.

2009-11-06T17:41:00.004-06:00

One of the most dreaded workplace situations is when you have to poop and you find yourself walking into the employee restroom at exact same time as a coworker. You've seen her. She's seen you. If you do end up following through with your colon's wishes, she will hear you pooping.

This is unacceptable, as I am extremely self conscious about the idea of anyone anywhere hearing me poop. When I'm FORCED to go at someone else's house, I always turn on the water so that they can't hear any poo sounds. When the horrible simultaneously bathroom entry happens at work, what ends up happening is one of three things:
1. I pretend to check myself out in the mirror until she's done, and then I grab the far stall and do what I need to do.
2. I just leave and come back about 10 minutes later.
3. I go into a stall and wait until I hear her flush to do what I need to do,
or
3. Both of us have to poop and both of us are unwilling to poo in front of others, so we situate ourselves in stalls at opposite ends of the row and we have ourselves a poo standoff, where both of us sit there and wait for the other to vacate the bathroom to leave the other to poo in peace. A poo standoff is horribly embarrassing, and I only let it go on for a few seconds before I just flush and wash my hands and leave, pretending like I'm done so that I can return in a few minutes and poo in peace.

My "no pooing in front of others" policy is so strong that once I held it for an entire week when my family and I went camping in the Black Hills in South Dakota when I was like 12.

gasp

2009-11-05T22:31:00.003-06:00

The other day, I was in a casual conversation with a coworker when he asked me about my religious faith. "You're Catholic, right?"

If this had been a year ago, I would have answered with a not very truthful affirmative to avoid making waves. But since this has been my year of (as Dave Chappelle would say) Keeping It Real, I decided that I was going to take a stand. No longer was I going to sit let my non-faith sit in the pit of my stomach, dishonest and shameful as a secret pregnancy. No, I was going to Be Honest because It Is Time That People Realize That Atheists Are Not Terrible People.

"Actually, I'm not religious. I'm an atheist," I told my coworker.

He audibly gasped, as though I'd told him that at night, I like to break into people's houses and kill their pet hamsters for fun.

So, the moral of the story is all that I accomplished with my honesty was convincing a colleague that I'm some kind of Hitler. Children, sometimes you should lie.

2012

2009-11-04T17:55:00.002-06:00

So there are all these commercials on TV lately for 2012, which is a film based on the erroneous notion that the Mayan calendar predicts that the end of the world will happen in about three years (as other, smarter people have pointed out, thinking that the world is going to end in 2012 based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends at that point is like believing that your car is going to explode when you reach 100,000 miles on the odometer. I mean, your car MIGHT explode, if it's American-made, but that's beside the point. The calendar is meant to be reset at the end. We'll go back to the year 0.)

Anyway, aside from the fact that the movie is doing all sorts of mongering and I do not envy tourists to Teotihuacan on and around December 21, 2012, the movie is mainly stupid because why the fuck are these people running around screaming and like struggling against the end of the world? The world is fucking ending. There really is no use fighting. And even if you do survive, for what? What are you going to do after literally everything has been destroyed? Are you going to go on that tropical vacation you've always wanted? How are you going to get there, Professor Foresight?

Watching John Cusack driving, panicked, down a crumbling interstate and explaining to his child that the government has built "ships" to save them makes me want to crawl into the movie, shake him by the shoulders, and try to talk some sense into him. The government cannot build "ships" that will withstand the apocalypse. There's no fucking WAY that we have that sort of technology.

If I knew that the world was ending, positively ending, and that everything that I knew and loved was going to cease to exist and it is blatantly obvious (even more obvious to me than it is now) that there is no such thing as God or salvation or what have you, I would seriously think twice before ensuring that my last hours were filled with panic and futile struggle against unstoppable destruction. Honestly, I'd probably just find someone with whom to have vigorous, filthy sex, and then kill myself.

marry me.

2009-11-03T18:06:00.004-06:00

... in love with these costumes, worn by Chicago Blackhawks Jonathan Toews and Adam Burish.

Based on these iconic costumes as donned in timeless cinematic treasure "Dumb and Dumber"

i wish i'd been a girlie, just like my dear papar

2009-11-03T17:36:00.003-06:00

The other day, I was out walking in my hipster neighborhood and met a peculiarly dressed hipster heading in the opposite direction. He wore skinny jeans, work boots, a red flannel shirt, and one of those plain winter caps that you're supposed to cuff at the bottom. His hair was unkempt and a little greasy and he sported a robust beard.

Hey, you're much too skinny to be a lumberjack. Those arms aren't good for cutting anything except lines of sub par cocaine!

I looked around for someone to high five for the stellar burning that I just inflicted upon his Ponytail-listening ass, when I realized that
1- I had said that in my head, not aloud.
2- I wasn't with anyone.
3- I have more than one Ponytail track on my iPod.

Joke-to-self fail.

Ghost of Halloween past

2009-10-30T18:25:00.002-05:00

I'm posting an entry about Halloween I wrote in a now defunct blog two years ago.

Due to the fact that my computer is on the fritz and in the custody of the Geek Squad, it's the best I can do whilst using my boyroomfriendmate's computer.

Let me preface by saying that I grew up in the country and we never had trick or treaters at my house, and that as a young adult I idealized the act of standing at the doorway in a pumpkin sweater, distributing fun sized Milky Ways and telling tiny guys in masks that they were scaaaaary. I never had that, and wanted it desperately.

Luckily, I quit my job with my old company in mid-October 2007, but not before lining up an early November start date with my new company. This lined up perfectly with a Halloween visit home. (I left in the middle of the day on a Thursday, picked up my cat and a few baskets of dirty laundry, and drove the 6 hours to the northwoods. Quitting a job you hate is so cathartic.) My grandparents lived in town, and I asked them if I could help them hand out treats at their house. I remember my grandpa sitting on the couch with a beer watching a baseball game while the doorbell rang, my grandma dutifully keeping a tally of how many trick or treaters they had on the side of her crossword puzzle. It's funny that whenever I think about my grandpa, I think of the time I spent with them that night, how warm it was inside, how chilly outside, how much it meant to spend time with them, especially since he's not around anymore.

Anyway, here's me bitching about children and how much they suck.

November 1st, 2007

Sassy children. Oh, sassy children. You bother me so.

Last night, I assisted my grandparents in manning their front door against the throngs of trick or treaters. And let me just say, there is a disproportionate amount of sassy children running around. It also appears that "thank you" is becoming a defunct phrase in our language, going the way of "cat's pajamas" and "neato" and "tomfoolery" (although I have exerted a lot of energy to resurrect the third of that list, with mixed results.)

Some of the pods of trick or treaters were adorable- little guys wearing plastic knight costumes over hooded sweatshirts, little girls with smeared princess makeup, kids in skeleton costumes who genuinely thought that they were scary (I pretended they actually were.) But then there were the too-old kids who came in a group of 8 or so wearing their (NAME OF HOMETOWN) sweatshirts and sometimes matted wigs from long-abandoned costume chests. Those kids sucked. And the worst was a pair of eye-rolling girls donning elaborate yet amateur makeup jobs and black wings.

"What are your costumes?"
(black winged girl, on cell phone, sighs, rolls eyes, places hand over end of phone and says in her snottiest voice, complete with sassy lateral head motions)
"I'm a Gothic fairy!"

I was so taken aback by her unwarranted outburst of too-cool-dom, especially from someone wearing elastic wings around her shoulder blades, that I didn't know what to say. I ended up kind of frowning and saying, "Ok... happy Halloween..."

But I should have said, "Wow, you're a Gothic fairy. And I'd be willing to, right this second, put ten bucks on you being knocked up before graduation."

I didn't.

Most of the other children just silently knocked on the door, held out their bags, and silently walked away. No response to anything. No thank you's.

I ended up feeling kind of depressed. Who the hell did these little whipper snappers think they were? If the children are the future, then the future is filled with jerks. Why would I do anything to preserve the environment for these little monsters? Put me on the waiting list for a souped up Porsche Cayenne, build me a McMansion in Naperville, and from here on out, only serve me food in unnecessarily large Styrofoam containers. I'm vacationing overseas, taking unnecessary flights, only drinking water from very small plastic bottles (which I will then throw by the roadside) and heating my house using solely coal power. These little twerps deserve to deal with my mess. That'll show em.

besties!

2009-10-25T10:26:00.002-05:00

Hey, I said to the very tall man with crazy hair, I like your glasses.
He smiled. Do they make me look smart?
You look extremely studious, I replied.
He laughed. That's what I was going for!
Success! I said. We high fived. A conversation can't go any better than ending with a high five.

And that was the extent of my conversation with Joakim Noah last night.

I think that he may have shown up to the designated University of Florida bar because he's tired of Chicagoans hating on him and his goofy ass ponytail and he just wanted to do some basking. He was treated as a god in that place. As soon as he sauntered in, about half a dozen hot blonde women like materialized from the floorboards. A small group of petite brunettes that looked like they might have each thought that they were Joakim's girlfriend quickly followed and positioned themselves, scowling, between the blondes and the basketball star. It was disgusting and fascinating and strange and made me feel like a midget.

neither in boston nor a college

2009-10-24T16:39:00.003-05:00

You know, every damn time we play them, Boston College manages to beat us because of something weird. Like a damn safety caused by Jimmy Clausen intentionally grounding the ball from the end zone. We find really bizarre ways to lose. It's like we're trying.

I once dated a Boston College alum. He had a secret porn obsession and only dated Asians.

I once attended a game at Boston College's "football stadium," a structure so impressive that it rivals the best that American high school practice fields have to offer.

While attending said game (of course, we lost due to something weird), my friends and I were hit on by some brosephs who asked if we wanted to go to "the gun show" and asked if we'd seen the movie that they made about their asses ("It's called THE FIRM! LOL OMG!").

Why they keep beating us will forever be a mystery to me, sort of like how I'll never understand why Everybody Loves Raymond ran for so many seasons while Arrested Development only ran for three, or why George W Bush was elected President twice.

swearathon

2009-10-24T08:42:00.002-05:00

This morning, right before I woke up, I had a dream that I was running a marathon and constantly distracted. I had forgotten to train in advance, and my ex boyfriends kept texting me PG-13 messages out of nowhere. I was irritated. About five miles in, a woman who resembled the crazy "I heard that he's a secret Muslim" women from that 2008 John McCain rally (the one that was parodied on Saturday Night Live) stepped out in front of me and tried to get me to stop and listen to her. She asked me if I was a secret Muslim like Barack Obama. I shoved her out of the way and called her a "fucker." She started crying and asked me what was wrong with me that I called her a fucker in front of her son, who was dressed like the Dutch Boy paint mascot and eating a candy cigarette.

???

garth, that was a haiku

2009-10-23T17:26:00.002-05:00

So some things have happened in the last week.

1. My mother was sent to and released from the hospital. She was there for a few days. In light of all of the general fuckery going on in my life this year, this did not please me. She said that the problem was in her intestines. I told her to tell intrusive people who asked that she has "butt problems." I don't know that she will, but telling people that you have "butt problems" is a great way to keep people from asking more probing (heh) questions. Runner up: "uterus problems."

2. My grandmother was sent home from the nursing home unit.

3. I got on the wrong train twice this week, because I'm a dumbass. Both times, I ran onto a train, breathless, as the doors slid closed after me. I reflected proudly on my luck at catching such an empty train bound for the Loop during morning rush hour. As it dawned on me that I was headed in the opposite direction of where I needed to head, I stopped feeling so cocky. I did this twice in a five day period. TWICE. This week has actually been characterized by crushing ennui, terrible spitting rain, and train problems. Just yesterday morning, I ran down the stairs in my subterranean train station only to have the doors practically pinch my nose in the process of shutting. Then I called the train a "dumb slut," and I'm not sure why, because if someone called me a "dumb slut," I'd probably just laugh.

4. I have these new, extra awesome galoshes, so even though the weather is like a balloon full of sadness, at least I can walk unscathed through puddles that are probably 50% battery acid, 20% drunken pee, and 30% tears of the unemployed. It's the little things.

5. There was an article about me, featuring my real name, in a Real Newspaper, about how, in addition to being a full time corporate shill, I'm also a full time ultra nerd who spends a lot of time furiously typing irreverent one liners at, say, Sarah Palin or Real Dolls or abstinence only education or organized religion. So, I suppose that I'm not as anonymous as the article claims that I am. It made the rounds in my office and I spent most of the morning and early afternoon sweating and blushing and worrying that I'd get fired. I showed my boss and he said that he didn't care, and then promoted me. Confusion!

6. Last night, I had to attend an elective (but not really elective) thing for work featuring a motivational speaker who was trying to "motivate" us to work harder, for longer hours, for a fraction of the amount of money that our corporate superiors get. I decided that in order to be a motivational speaker, you either have to have no self awareness (What I'm doing capital-M Matters) or no self respect (I'm full of shit. So? Fuck you, pay me).

7. The other week, I was laying in bed reading at like 8 pm (lately, my favorite activity) and I heard some commotion out in the foyer-- the pulling of tape, the cutting of cardboard, the cat running around, boyfriend getting up and sighing and muttering to himself and then the sounds of cutting and taping resuming. About ten minutes later, he practically bounded into the bedroom telling me that I must proceed to the foyer at once, for he had just made something awesome. He was like a kid. I walked into the entry area and saw that he had cut up some boxes and taped them together in such a way that they formed a multi-height cardboard tunnel/shelter/fort type thing. In the front of the structure was a half oval shaped hole that met the ground. What is it? I asked. "It's a castle! For the cat to play in!" He was so excited. He made my damn cat a playhouse of cardboard boxes. My heart grew about four sizes.

8. The times, they are a-changin around my office. The other day was the last day that my bosses (I have like five of them) could use the old school corporate credit cards. One of my bosses, who is from Ireland and cannot pronounce "Wabash" (WAH-bash, but he says wuh-BASH, which is a lot funnier if you hear it in person) asked me to accompany him to buy supplies for the upcoming Halloween breakfast/officewide costume party while the expense system still allowed for that sort of frivolity. We bought a bunch of candy and then he decided that he had seen a costume that he wanted to wear to work next Friday and did I mind coming with him while he ducked into the costume store for a minute? No, I said, I need a costume, anyway. The only non-lady-of-the-night costume that I could find was a sort of boxy Dorothy costume or an adult sized Winnie The Pooh getup, and so I opted for the Dorothy. My boss bought a keg costume. My boss is coming to work next Friday dressed up like a keg. I find this awesome, especially since our office is usually Serious Business.

you can't spell suck without USC

2009-10-16T17:50:00.002-05:00

Few things fill me with more irrational hatred than the University of Southern California's football team.

I hate them.

I hate their stupid colors. They look like an explosion at a McDonald's condiment stand.

I hate their stupid mascot. Trojans. Reminds me of condoms and all of the sex that I didn't have during my first two years of college. And I hate their stupid band parading through campus.

I hate all of their stupid quarterbacks except Mark Sanchez, and he only escaped my wrath because he's so dead sexy. But I hate all of the others. From the epic douchebaggery of Matt Leinart to the serial killer-named John David Booty to the quintessential California asshole Carson Palmer. All of them can eat a flaming bag of dicks.

I hate Pete Carroll. He looks like he owns a golden blow dryer and probably takes Christmas pictures whilst wearing turtleneck sweaters. I'm sure he's also a great downhill skiier. What a fucking dick.

I hate that the same celebrities that think they're geniuses because they made a few movies that some people like parade up and down their sidelines like a bunch of fucking Lakers fans.

I hate that they play mostly in warm weather. I hate that it's sunny for many of their games and that fans get nice suntans while watching their team outmatch fucking PAC TEN opponents (and occasionally lose to like Stanford or Oregon State or Washington). Football is for cold weather!

I hate that their fans have already invaded downtown Chicago. I saw two old guys who also look like they own blow dryers gallivanting down Adams this afternoon, about an hour ago. They were wearing Trojans windbreaker pullover shirts and USC baseball caps and wore their jackets unzipped so all of the Chicagoans could notice how out of place and weird and lost they looked (after 5 on Friday, no one really sticks around downtown, unless you're out with your coworkers and are about to have a night that ends with you trying to make out with your boss. Not, uh, that that's ever happened to me). I wanted to ask them if they packed an entire wardrobe of USC Trojans clothing or if they planned to wear those same clothes tomorrow and the next day. I almost did, but then a really sick jam came up on the iPod.

But I mostly hate that they always beat us, and I hate that the prancing, preening, self-absorbed Gaston* of college football always manages to come out on top.

I will do something pretty bananas if Notre Dame wins tomorrow. I haven't decided what yet, but I welcome suggestions in the form of comments or emails.

Go Irish.

*Gaston, as in the antagonist in Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

while i pondered weak and weary

2009-10-14T18:09:00.002-05:00

Ever since I thought about the juxtaposition of Edgar Allan Poe and Raven Symone, I haven't been able to get this out of my mind. I didn't make this picture; it made itself. I am the vessel.

life is short: unless you're making microwave popcorn

2009-10-13T17:05:00.003-05:00

Today, as I was using the office microwave to heat up a bowl of frozen Kung Pao Chicken from Trader Joe's (the Bonaroo of grocery stores), I had a startling realization, one that may net me a Nobel of some type:

Microwaves slow down time.

I know this because every time I put something in the radiation box and set the timer, I walk away and do a bunch of stuff only to return and realize that only like 45 seconds have passed.

Forty five seconds, microwave? Really? Because I just took a shower and went online to pay my cell phone bill.

This isn't just my office microwave or home microwave; it's every microwave I've ever used. I can only conclude that the reason for this phenomenon is the fact that microwaves actually cause time to slow down to a near crawl.

What say you, science?

rosary

2009-10-12T19:14:00.002-05:00

My Grandma R, wife of the late Grandpa R, is not well since her husband's death. Neither have any of us, really, but she's taken a turn for the worse.

She was always perfectly mobile and at worst a tad nutty, but any eccentricities were a part of her personality rather than a product of her advancing age. The odd timing of my Mexico City trip placed me in another country when my mother told me that she'd been hospitalized with pneumonia. "She'll be okay, though," she told me. "They're just keeping her for observation, to make sure she eats and drinks and takes her medicine."

The next day I found myself in the Metropolitan Cathedral in what can only be described as the "super creepy church district" of Mexico City. Heavy gray buildings, some of which are sinking and surrounded by deep earthquake related cracks in the ground and unoccupied scaffolding, churches with Extra Scary Bloody Gaunt Jesus tacked onto a wooden cross behind the altar, ceilings covered in murals buried in incense soot. And in the middle of the super creepy church district is this big octagonal or hexagonal building that just screams "1960's/70's" design, and when you walk in, it doesn't feel musty and ancient and mysterious like the other churches, but rather like a Dallas/Fort Worth area superchurch, except that behind the altar is the mantle of Juan Diego, and beneath the altar are stairs that lead down to aisles and aisles of subterranean crypts lit with fluorescent lights. It's extra creepy down there because it feels like you're walking through rows and rows of filing cabinets, and then you realize that there are bodies shoved in the wall. Past the crypts is a gift shop full of sort of tacky pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the way that Mary appeared to Juan Diego) and various religious items to purchase from a person behind glass so tinted that you can't even see if there's anyone in the booth.

I was thinking of my grandmother when I was there, and thought that it might be nice to get her a rosary. She likes that kind of thing, I reasoned. So I picked one out that had iridescent white beads and a small delicate crucifix attached to the end and I gave a 200 peso bill to the invisible person behind the tinted glass, and without speaking, the person slid my change back beneath the glass, and I pocketed it, and left feeling happy that I was able to spend that much time in a church without belittling it. (I realized not too long ago that belittling the religion of others to their faces only makes the belittler look like an asshole.)

Later, I tried to pay for a cab with the money I received in change from the church gift shop, the cab driver refused to accept it. "Es falso," he said. The church gift shop had given me counterfeit money as change when I bought my sick grandmother a crucifix. Religion really doesn't change the fact that some people are just dickfaces.

At any rate, shortly after I returned to Chicago, she was sent home, and it seemed like things would be okay, but now, this. She's lost touch with reality. She is confused about what year it is. She is angry and sad and keeps calling the police on family members (and as a result, some pretty terrible family secrets have surfaced, just casually, today in a conversation with my mother*). She isn't praying before meals anymore, and she's always been extremely devoutly Catholic.

It sounds like maybe she's just grieving? Maybe she's reacting poorly to some medication? I suggested while on the phone with my mother.

That might be it, my mother replied, because we know that she's still there.

How do you know? I asked.

Because the other day your Uncle J was speaking to her and trying to reach her, and he suggested that she pray the rosary because that makes her feel better. Her face lit up and she told him the story about how you went to Mexico City and how you picked out a beautiful rosary for her and how she just loves it and can she have it because she'd like to hold it and pray for awhile, my mom answered. That's the only time she's seemed aware of where she is or what year it is, but it's encouraging. It was like she came back for ten minutes.

She didn't stick around, mentally speaking. She's been sent to a behavior watch ward of a local hospital. I hope that I get a chance to see her again and I hope that she remembers me. Everyone loses people that they love; it's a part of life. That doesn't mean that it's easy.

* I have a policy that while I overshare about my own life and personal stupidity on this blog, the last thing that I want to do is throw my family under a verbal bus, because even though they're not perfect and have kooky or embarrassing things about them, I still love them and they still did the trick for me. So I'm not going to get too far into what my grandma said or did because I'd hate for a family member to stumble to this remote corner of the internet.

ssssybaris

2009-10-07T22:12:00.003-05:00

I am itchy from watching the Sybaris commercial that just aired.

For the unfamiliar, Sybaris is a Chicago and Milwaukee based chain of "romantic getaway" hotels filled with windowless rooms with coed bubble baths and out-in-the-open showers and vibrating beds and champagne flutes with matching ribbons tied on the stems and strange protrusions designed for weird sex positions.

I'll occasionally catch a commercial for the sex hotel on local TV, and they really skeeve me out. Really, commercial? You're showing people that look as though they were beamed in from 1993 wearing skimpy clothing and making out all over the hotel room in which you want me to stay. Do you think that it's good advertising practice to show people on the cusp of fucking in that room? Do you think that staying in a room that is covered with remnants of semen and vaginal fluids and like bubble gum flavored lube and back sweat is something that I'd like to do?

I feel really bad about myself after watching that commercial. In fact, I may have just caught crabs from my TV.

DISGUSTING, DISGUSTING UPDATE:
I just read the website. You can book a room for the afternoon. FOR THE FUCKING AFTERNOON. If I'm ever a super rich and morally bankrupt man who desires a dalliance with an expensive call girl, I suppose I know where to go.

class

2009-10-07T17:34:00.003-05:00

Boyfriend is studying for Level 1 of the CFA exam, a pain in the ass endeavor that involves hours and hours and hours of preparation and thousands of dollars spent on study materials and test registration and missed Friday nights spent pouring over formulas.

The test is in early December, so there are only a couple months left in this several-months-long ass ache that has been his study regimen.

One of the aspects of the test prep is an online class featuring a live teacher lecturing remotely at a certain time each week. During the window that the class is taught, students can submit questions to the teacher, and he responds to them live.

I really think that Boyfriend is starting to bond with his internet CFA teacher. About five minutes ago, I heard him laughing through the door of his office and sort of talking. Ah, he must be on his phone, I thought. But then, I heard the sound of his teacher talking in the background.

He was talking to/responding to the internet teacher who cannot see or hear him and wouldn't know him from Adam.

I really hope that this CFA test situation isn't like that scene in The Shining (do not read if you're living in Albuquerque, NM and about to take a road trip up to Denver, BTW) when Jack's wife comes across his in-progress novel to discover that he's just been writing the same sentence over and over again, across hundreds of pages. I'll walk into the office one day, notice a stack of CFA notes, and begin paging through them.

"TIME VALUE OF MONEY = STAB STAB STAB Ha. Ha. Ha." it will say, over and over again.

And maybe the teacher is just someone from his imagination, like Norman Bates' mother.

love

2009-10-06T22:56:00.002-05:00

I love the Minnesota Twins a lot. A destructive amount.

Tonight was spent nervously checking and rechecking and pacing and reading pessimistic text messages from my father. After Carlos Gomez (some of you may remember him as the guy who flipped me off a few weeks back) scored the winning run in the bottom of the 12th, I shrieked an unholy shriek and ran, pantsless, into Boyfriend's office, where I found him clutching his chest in response to my outburst, CFA study materials spread out over his desk.

"You scared the fucking shit out of me," he said.

The cat ran and hid under the bed and didn't come out for about half an hour.

We're probably going to lose to the Yankees in the Division Series, because, as I have pointed out to others, if this were a Disney family sports comedy from the 1990's, the Yankees would be the scary hyper muscular rich kids with expensive uniforms and the Twins would be like the ragtag group of misfits that use like upside down sauce pans in lieu of helmets. Maybe we'll come up with an amazing trick play that will help us win the key game at the last minute (buoyed by the least likely of heroes, the fat catcher or the skinny shy outfielder or a girl), but I'm not too optimistic.

I don't know how much of the playoffs I'll be able to actually stomach watching.

I can't help it. My emotional ties to this team go back to a time before I can remember. I simply cannot watch some of their big games (playoff games? Impossible); I can only follow it on GameCast or check back every 10 minutes or so. If I try to watch the entire thing, my nerves get to me so much that sometimes I vomit or start crying (or both!). Like Eminem in that movie 8 Mile, except I'm not a rapper.

And I'm certainly not from Detroit.

das racis'

2009-10-05T21:21:00.004-05:00

The other day, I was at a local grocery store doing some miscellaneous buying of cat litter and paper towels and ingredients for chimichurri when I realized that I may as well multitask and deposit a check, since my bank has a branch in that particular grocery store.

It was early, and the main customer facing side of the bank had not yet opened. As I approached the ATM, I noticed a man standing very suspiciously against a stack of boxes containing Halloween M&M's. He was Latino, probably in his early 30's, with a goatee, tan pants, a tan shirt, and a close cropped/shaved head. He was leering at the little old lady sitting in the chair at the not-yet-opened customer service desk, scowling even.

I, of course, decided that this was obviously a Situation During Which I Much Act Urban and Aware, which is basically when I do a bunch of things that I learned from Oprah the one time I watched her show when I was, like, fourteen. I made eye contact with the Suspicious Guy (the whole time mentally extrapolating that because he looked tough and I thought I saw the edges of a tattoo peaking out from beneath his sleeve at the wrist, and also because that grocery store is sort of in borderline Latin Kings territory that he must be a gang member). I shielded the PIN pad from his gaze when I made the deposit, furtively glancing back at him to make sure that he wasn't sneaking up behind me, like a cat ready to pounce.

He stayed there, scowling at the old woman and occasionally looking over at me, until I'd made my deposit and completed my business there.

Ha, I thought, feeling Urban. I have prevented myself from being victimized.

About ten minutes later, I was leaving the store with my groceries and an inflated sense of toughness when I noticed that the bank was now open and the old lady was being helped... by the man in tan. Who apparently was an employee of the bank branch.

Yeah. I felt like a dickhead for making all of those assumptions.

word is bond

2009-10-05T19:04:00.001-05:00

Ever had a day that was so boring that all you can muster at the end of it is a series of things that make you laugh?

For example, the phrase "word is bond." And the pictures.

time to pretend

2009-10-04T20:10:00.002-05:00

My parents do not approve of my living arrangement. They're practicing Catholics (but not practicing too hard, as they obviously used some form of birth control since there are only three of us kids- Hey-oh!) and have some fairly traditional views about marriage/sexuality. Boyfriend has been to my family's house multiple times, and each time, we have had to sleep in separate rooms and when we're awake and in a room alone, I'm encouraged (strongly) to keep the door open so that we do not fornicate unlawfully on the floors of my parents' house. I've realized by now that it's really absurd for me to attempt to get them to change their minds, and that there's really no way to go about it without coming off like a real jackass, so I just grin and bear it. What can I do, anyway? Nothing, short of coming off like a snot nosed hippie whore.

So I go along with their rules and expectations without protest.

This "going along with their rules" was complicated when Boyfriend found himself in a housing conundrum and thought that it might be best for him to simply move in to my apartment. Mama and Papa MorningGloria were not to know, we resolved, because we are not boat rockers and I really hate awkward family holidays. I ended up breaking down and telling my mother that it was a financial arrangement and pleaded that she not tell my father.

That plan was shot to shit when, within moments of our plane landing in Minneapolis this July, Boyfriend began making small talk about mail delivery in Chicago. "Yeah," he said, "We're not even getting our mail anymore."

Good one, Boyfriend.

The conversation continued as though my father hadn't heard, but I knew that he knew. My mother confirmed that he knew and that he was glad that even though we were "living in sin," we weren't flaunting it or throwing it in their Catholic faces.

So now it's just something that literally everyone in my family, save my grandparents, knows, but that everyone just sort of ignores, hilariously. My parents were in town this weekend to catch a taping of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and, because they are what I would call ultra-frugal (to the point that one of the bags that they were using as luggage had a broken handle, and they didn't have an appropriate carrier for hanging clothing, so they just carried those items flopped over their arms), they asked if they could stay at my apartment rather than spend money on a hotel room.

Sure, I said. And then I turned to Boyfriend and said, you're going to have to find a place to stay this weekend while my parents are in town.

So for this entire weekend, we were pretending like he doesn't live with me. I yielded my bed to my parents and slept on the couch. My dad accidentally walked into the second bedroom (aka Boyfriend's office) when he was looking for the bathroom. No questions were asked about my roommate or why it appeared that only one bedroom was being used for sleep. No conversation was made about my living situation. Whenever the topic of discussion would veer in the direction of Boyfriend, where he lives, what he does with his time, where he was currently, someone would politely change the subject as though a very sensitive political topic had been raised.

Before they arrived, we went over the place with a fine toothed comb and removed any items from common spaces that could be construed as "flaunting." Like his gigantic Florida Gators mug that he keeps on top of the refrigerator. The novelty inflatable penis that I won at a local Sex/Literary symposium that he decorated with a felt tip pen to say "(NAME)'S COCK." The framed pictures of his family. The Tim Tebow jersey. The paper bag full of flavored condoms and lube that I got for making a donation to Planned Parenthood. All of his issues of The Economist that had been delivered to my mailing address. The rechargeable hair trimmers that normally sit on the back of the toilet. The oral sex candy sitting on the windowsill in the bedroom. Any and all paraphernalia related to marijuana type pursuits.

Even so, I really appreciated it when my father, after kidnapping the old-ish issue of Sports Illustrated that featured Joe Mauer on the cover and taking it into the bathroom to read while pooping, did not comment on the fact that the subscription, in Boyfriend's name, was addressed to my address.

Reality successfully suspended, peace successfully preserved.

2016

2009-10-01T19:49:00.002-05:00

Ever since I was a tiny one, I have adored the Olympics. I remember trying to emulate Kristi Yamaguchi's twirly jumps from the 1992 games, a young skiier named Picabo Street, Bonnie Blair on speed skates. Michael Johnson's golden shoes, the team gold medal for the 1996 women's gymnastics team on Kerri Strug's one legged vault. Sitting in the study lounge of my dorm during the 2002 Winter Games (and skipping many classes in the process and getting into a little bit of trouble with one professor). Living in Athens during the build up for the 2004 games and snickering at all of the canvas facades unrolled over construction that was still incomplete by the Opening Ceremonies. Caring altogether too much about men's swimming last summer.

During the games, summer or winter, do not ask me to do anything. Sorry, I am watching the Olympics, and will be for the next two weeks or so.

Tomorrow, the International Olympic Committee will announce which city will host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. My adopted hometown of Chicago is one of the four finalists and is rumored to be either the narrow frontrunner or narrow second placer, depending on who you ask. Our mayor, Richard Daley, a gentleman who is basically Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons minus the MAYOR sash and plus a grating Chicago accent, has become completely obsessed with getting the Olympics for these last few years. People are getting excited. There are banners everywhere. The President and his wife and Oprah are in Denmark trying to convince people that Chicago is awesome and deserves the games.

I really, sincerely hope that Rio De Janiero wins the bid. Sorry, Chicago. I love you, but if we get it, life will suck for Chicagoans for the next several years. Let me put on my crabby trousers and explain to you the reasons:

1. Mayor Daley is a slimy scheming buffoon with nothing but his own legacy on his mind. He's doing this prove that he's better than his father, Richard J. Daley. This is RMDaley's Iraq, and I predict that it will be similarly over budget.

2. Nothing, nothing, nothing gets done in this city with out a clusterfuck moneygrab first, and then barely any money ends up going to making sure that a quality event. Here's the Olympic Stadium... it's Soldier Field with a bunch of rings painted on it. That will be $50 million dollars.

3. They've promised that the taxpayer isn't going to be on the hook for this, and then completely reversed their stance on the measure. Property taxes are going to skyrocket. But, people have told me, I will be able to rent my condo out for ninety billion gazillion dollars during the Olympics. Hey, I respond, have you considered the fact that the city knows that people are planning on doing this and they're sure as shit not going to let a revenue opportunity like that pass them by? I'm sure that they'll institute some kind of ludicrous permit application procedure in order to allow people to do something like that, and after the permit is submitted, I'm sure that the city and the county will both take a chunk. That is how everything works in this city.

4. Public transportation. The CTA is marginally okay at transporting the daily morning rush of any given weekday. Trying to take the red line immediately before or after a Cubs game is a nightmare. Imagine 10 Cubs games occurring simultaneously, everywhere. I hate the people who already live here enough as it is. Imagining my means of conveyance overrun with people unfamiliar with public transportation etiquette- the pole huggers, the loud talkers, the personal space invaders, the people who get up like three stops before their stop and ask you to move out of the way so that they can get to the door, the people who won't get out of the train to let other people off-- they're going to invade.

5. The South Side. I used to live about six blocks east of Washington Park, the proposed site of the Olympic Stadium. Where I lived was pleasant, tree lined, quiet, and a little ecclectic. Head six blocks west, to Washington Park, and it's a completely different story. I wouldn't walk on the southwest side of that park in broad daylight, and I certainly wouldn't venture west of the park at night. I shudder to think of tourists getting lost in the area west of the park after late evening events. Or, come to think of it, directly south of the park. Or, the area around the 51st St Green Line stop. Once, I made the mistake of trying to take the green line home from downtown, and I saw a guy smoking crack on the train, just nonchalantly. It was my third day in Chicago. Knowing the Daley Method of dealing with problems, what's probably going to happen is that the underserved people who are already there are just going to get pushed out, swept aside, and Daley is going to try to pass it off as some sort of neighborhood improvement.

6. Holy shit, kids are being beaten to death on the street and we're worried about the Olympics?! Having seen City of God, I know that Chicago is not alone in its problem with street crime, but our kids are fucking beating each other to death. Dozens of Chicago Public School students have died violently this year. It's barbaric. It's criminal for our city government to turn its back on this problem in the name of Mayor Daley's obsession with his legacy and his cronies' obsession with the money that they can drain from taxpayers.

7. I have never been to Rio De Janiero. I've always told myself I would go. Maybe if they win the games, the first couple of weeks of August in 2016 will consist of me on a South American vacation rather than me getting pissed off at tourists gallivanting around slowing everything down. Vacation 2016!

I should add that even though Mayor Daley makes me seethe and I dread the possibility of this blowing up in our faces, if Chicago does win the bid, I will volunteer and do what I can to make sure that it doesn't suck as much as it could. Begrudgingly.

breakfast of champions

2009-09-29T22:31:00.004-05:00

From age 20, I've been a heavy heavy user of a popular stimulant. It was difficult for me to even get going in the morning without it, and it wasn't uncommon to see me with a giant Olsen twin sized cardboard cup with a corrugated java jacket while walking to class or sitting at my desk or riding the train.

I drank so much coffee that it's a wonder that my resting heart rate and blood pressure are still so freakishly low (my theory: my circulatory system really does not give a shit about me and is doing the bare minimum). It's a miracle that I don't have a stomach lined with ulcers. But I don't, and a couple of months ago, I decided that my coffee consumption was above what is probably normal or healthy for a prolonged period of time and that I should cut back on it.

The first couple of weeks, I went cold turkey- no coffee of caffeine at all, and whenever I wanted to drink something, I'd just have water. It was torturous. I wanted to make myself a round bed out of crumbled up post its and spend all day at work sleeping beneath my desk. I became jealous of my cat and her slothful but enviable lifestyle of lounging around for hours, then running around for about 20 minutes trying to find something to murder, growing bored, finding a new place to sleep, and sleeping again. (Repeat ad nauseum.) I started going to bed at like 10 pm. It was bad.

But after that first couple of weeks, I noticed that I actually had more energy in the mornings, that I slept better at night, and my skin was looking a lot brighter and smoother. Food tastes better, and I don't get heartburn when I run anymore. It's really pretty excellent.

Now, I only allow myself to drink coffee once or twice per week max, for special occasions, like the first day of the return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte, or shitty occasions, like I woke up in the middle of the night due to the fact that I had another nightmare about BOB from Twin Peaks trying to sell me a car and I couldn't sleep for half of the night. Or during the time that I was in Mexico City and spent most of my waking hours breathing in smog or tripping over cobblestones or exhausting myself by trying to understand Spanish.

Anyway, if you drink a ton of coffee, like I used to, and you've been thinking about trying to cut back, by all means don't delay. It improved my overall feeling of mood and balance.

If you drink a ton of coffee and really don't give a fuck, then by all means continue as planned. Far be it from me to interfere with anyone's habit. At least refrain from calling it "EX-presso." As someone who worked as a barista after her senior year of high school, that shit still drives me bananas.

a conversation that just occurred

2009-09-29T17:43:00.002-05:00

Me: You remember my friend (B), right? That guy? You've met him.
BF: Which one? The black guy?
Me: What?
BF: The one who went to Harvard? The dorky black guy who went to Harvard?
Me: Um... Harvard? I don't have any dorky black friends who went to Harvard.
BF: Oh, never mind. That guy's from 30 Rock.

nightmare

2009-09-28T21:06:00.002-05:00

Last night, I had a dream that I was captured and imprisoned by a religious cult who confiscated my cell phone and told me that I'd have to have sex with their leader, a gross older gentleman who resembled a red headed cartoon man prototype from the 1980's, maybe GI Joe's dad or older, more gay looking brother with side burns and a robust mustache.

Everyone else in the cult was pretty much a sci fi nerd type. The one funny moment in the dream was when I decided that I was going to try to make the best of cult life and I told a joke about the kitchen looking like Mordor. Yeah, I don't know.

Anyway, they had a house that looked like it was in a city. It was across the street from a park. It was gray and took up almost the full lot upon which it sat, and it went up about four or five stories and it had some of that obnoxious Victorian gingerbread house trim. I tried to run away multiple times, but each time I got outside, running became difficult. My legs turned to mush and it felt like I was running in water. Each time cult members caught me (they were trained to catch escapees), I tried to pass it off like the whole thing was an accident. They never believed me, and they always dragged me back to the Supreme Leader, who would cry and tell me that he thought that I loved him, and why would I do something like this to him? And I would have to apologize over and over again and agree that I couldn't wait until we all played that role-playing game that everyone had been practicing for.

I was afraid that I was going to develop Stockholm syndrome, so every second that I was caught in the cultland, I made a conscious effort to think about how much I hated it and how much I wanted to escape.

My chance finally came when we went to a sci fi supply store (because the cult was super into reenactments) to buy some new fake swords. I ended up blugeoning the Supreme Leader with a prop axe on a chain and ran out of the building before waking up.

It wasn't that scary as far as dreams go, but I couldn't sleep after that.

It was sort of like The Manson Family meets Comic-Con.

I have fucked up dreams.

losing five years

2009-09-27T10:52:00.002-05:00

Notre Dame football is going to give me an aneurysm.

I wonder if insurance companies are going to start charging higher premiums to graduates of schools with fucking frustrating football programs. I'm pretty sure that at least 40% of my future health problems will be directly attributable to Charlie Weis and his minions' shenanigans.

business professional

2009-09-26T09:17:00.003-05:00

It's weird to see work people in regular clothes, especially if the "regular" clothes in which you see them still aren't all that "regular." They're at a casual work function, so they're in polos and awkward business jeans that their wives probably ironed.

I can say this because I work with the type of men who have very 1950's arrangements with their wives. They work, and the wife stays home and gives birth to daughters, as a karmic exercise in forced empathy. I'm serious about the daughters thing; out of the probably 10 men in the office who have sired children in the past year, 9 of them have been girls. Since male sperm determines the sex of the child, I'm convinced that it's something in the Brita filtered water that we all drink.

Last night, a gaggle of coworkers in Business Jeans descended upon a Local Piano Bar popular with kids who have never had a fake ID celebrating their 21st birthdays, wide-eyed vacationing couples from the exurbs or downstate or out of state who probably earlier that night dined at The Cheesecake Factory, and people like my coworkers, mostly city folk who put up with the excruciating theatrics of the dirty minded pianists in the name of free booze. I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere between "Like A Prayer" and ignoring all music in the name of an overly paternal and not that much older than me coworker lecturing me on what I should be doing with my career, I went from sober as a judge to super duper drunk. I suspect that what happened is that getting lectured makes me nervous, and I'm a chronic interrupter who tries to break the interrupting cycle by drinking or eating while someone is talking to me.

We ended up leaving and heading to a place with a financial market themed name, which turned out to be full of financial type dudes who probably expected the place to be filled with gold digging women with fake breasts straining their spaghetti strap tops, eager to meet financial type dudes. Apparently the dudes there did not get the memo that financial types may be temporarily rich, even gold diggers have realized that the rug can get pulled out within a matter of days. They've moved on to faking swine flu to meet sexy doctors.

Sometimes, even doing "fun" things can be a very lonely exercise.

... and TWINS

2009-09-22T12:31:00.005-05:00

Every now and then, it's important to take mental health days off of work. Today is one such day.

I sort of feel a little hung over, due to the fact that I sat right behind the visitors' dugout at the Twins/Sox game at US Cellular field last night and sporting events without beer are sort of like sex without orgasm, and so obviously I had to drink enough to act silly and shout at Carlos Gomez-
loudly enough that he flipped me off on his way into the dugout at the end of the game, thinking that I was a Sox fan (I'm not.) That's the danger of sitting so close to the players, I suppose. That and foul balls to the temple.

It's okay, Gomez. You're still my favorite Twin (I like you even more than Mauer), even though you suck this year and you flipped me off. It's cool.

I suppose getting the ol' "fuck you" from a player on your team is better than being filmed on the KissCam with your brother, which is what happened to me the last time I attended a Twins game.

third and long

2009-09-19T07:52:00.003-05:00

Sometimes, after work drinks turn into five hour Jack/Diet Coke smorgasbords. I made the cab driver go through a Wendy's drive thru last night, so that I could get a spicy chicken sandwich.

I had never had one of those before in my life.

And now, it's 8 am, and I am awake and still sort of dizzy, but unable to sleep because of the looming specter of college football, specifically Notre Dame football.

I feel this way before all football games, no matter who we're playing, that my heart can either be filled with manic, unimaginable joy today or I'll spend the evening angrily drinking and complaining about Big Ten officiating and Charlie Weis and how he would probably be better suited as offensive coordinator of my former all women's dorm's flag football team than an arrogant, stupid play calling multimillionaire with a northward migrating pants problem.

I realize that not everyone gives a flying fuck what's going on in the world of big dudes who sort of go to school smashing into each other in the hopes of someday being paid to professionally smash into big dudes and fuck Miss Universe contestants and drive around in comically large, awkward cars that are altogether too shiny. I do, and believe me, if there was a way to extract my emotions from the game and manage to make it through an entire season without throwing something, threatening to punch various members of our defensive line in the crotch, crying, or being unnecessarily mean to someone just because they went to Michigan, Boston College, or USC, I would. I hate how much I love Notre Dame football.

It didn't used to be this way. When I was a kid, I basically did whatever my dad told me to do, sports fandom-wise. Therefore, I loved the Minnesota Golden Gophers (in 1990, when the basketball team lost to Georgia Tech in an Elite Eight heartbreaker, I cried unconsolably on the entire drive home from White Bear Lake. I was six.), the Minnesota Twins, the Minnesota Vikings, and the Minnesota Timberwolves. When I arrived at Notre Dame as an 18 year old kid who thought she might go to medical school someday, I really didn't know the first thing about the football team. But something in the air and food and grass there poisoned me from within, and by the end of football season my freshman year, I was running around campus with my friends A and M after a rainy game, playing slip-n-slide in particularly slick areas of South Quad and randomly screaming "GO IRISH!" to equally enthused passers by as we celebrated an expected victory over West Virginia. My sophomore year, we started out 8-0 before one of the most pathetic showings in the history of bipedalism resulted in a heartbreaking loss to Boston College that caused me to return to my dorm room and sob in my pillow until my head hurt. Junior year, a couple of girl friends and I road tripped to Ann Arbor, Michigan and slept on the floor of a fraternity house and drank vodka and Gatorade while trying to find friendly tailgates and braving the "boos" of the Michigan faithful. We lost that game approximately seven zillion to zero, and I thought at that time that yes, I probably did personally hate Brady Quinn. My senior year, we bussed to East Lansing, Michigan, where I celebrated a victory over Michigan State by accepting a dare to flirt with a sophomore on the charter bus ride home and proceeding to date said sophomore for almost three mostly crappy years.

And through the ups and downs of a football team that alternately seems to be on steroids or Xanax, sometimes during the same game, I have yet to be able to emotionally separate myself from their victories and defeats. I'll still be there, week after week, and while I may turn off the TV in disgust or opt to just stop paying attention, I could never ever just walk away and pick another team that isn't as heartbreaking. I bleed blue and gold, whether I like it or not.

items

2009-09-17T18:03:00.004-05:00

How does one become good at writing limericks? Try as I might, I cannot write a clever limerick. I wonder if the part of the brain that controls freestyle rapping aptitude also dictates limerick ability.

Tangentially related: if this is true, then MF DOOM must write kickass limericks.

In Mexico City, the soon-to-be-released Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

is being marketed with the title "Lluvia de Hamburguesas."
(Which means "Rain of Hamburgers.)

Additionally, "The Hangover" is called "What Happened Last Night?"

My dear friend Ms. K was just over and my cat, displaying excellent manners, proceeded to walk over to the plastic bag next to the garbage can, lock eyes with me, and pee on the plastic bag. This is the way that she tells me that her litterbox needs changing.

Speaking of pee, I heard that during Latin American soccer games, bags of pee are often thrown in show of... support...(?) for the home team. This was worrisome to me when I learned that I was to attend the Mexico/Honduras World Cup qualifier last Wednesday. I did not get hit by pee. The burly chauffeur/bodyguard who accompanied us made sure of that.

On the flight back from Mexico City, I sat next to a Left Coaster with whom I chatted. Turns out, we had the same high school music quasi skate punk phase wherein we listened to bands with lead singers who wore wallet chains, like MXPX and Less Than Jake and The Swingin' Udders and The Mad Caddies.

Very few things drive me into a more acute panic than the sight of mariachis approaching, instruments in hand. One of the things that is scarier than approaching mariachis is if one or more of the mariachis sort of looks like Jim Jones.

Every time a season of America's Next Top Model starts, a part of me hopes that Tyra Banks will act in a way that isn't embarrassing to watch. That hope has yet to come to fruition.

Aztecs were fucking shitballoons insane. From what I've garnered, theirs was a civilization built around the notion that killing people is totally fun.

I did not get kidnapped in Mexico City.

ay ay ay

2009-09-03T17:19:00.003-05:00

If you're like me, then you enjoy travel in theory. In theory. When the time comes to actually put shit in a suitcase and pick outfits and decide whether or not you really need two different pairs of natural colored wedges over the course of the next ten days (you don't), and when the time comes to wait in line for waiting in other lines in the airport, and by the time you're standing there nervously as the person looks at your passport and scrutinizes it,* you're thinking, fuck this noise. However, once I've arrived at my destination, the inconvenient asspimple that is transit slowly disappears from my memory and I spend the rest of the trip trying to distract myself that in a few short days, I have to go through the whole process again.

This time, I'm feeling strange, apprehensive. This is partly due to the fact that every single person to whom I've mentioned my upcoming foray into the capitol of Mexico has responded with a "Really? You're going there? Why would you go there?" with their eyebrows raised. I realize my destinations are probably different than theirs; they return breathless with accounts of weeks spent on beaches in Cancun or Acapulco (I'm sure they're beautiful places, but, with all due respect, yawn) and when I was 20 and studying abroad in Greece, I used my spring break to take five years off of the life of my mother and venture to Egypt with only a small duffel bag of clothes, a Lonely Planet travel guide containing key Arabic phrases, and my Indian boyfriend. I love going places that others don't care to visit or wouldn't appreciate. I loved Athens and its grittiness and angry cab drivers and shouty jerks on the train and constant smell of diesel and cigarettes. It's just concerning to me that every single person I've talked to about this has had the same response.
(Eyebrow raise) Really? Why?

So I'm a little bit nervous about this. This will be my first time out of the country since a short trip to London in 2006, and I fear I've lost my ability to blend in that I'd honed so well in Greece. I hope that I don't get kidnapped, or bitten by a rabid dog (When he was a child, R used to go to DF every year, and on one visit, he was running down a side street with some of his cousins and was bitten by a rabid dog. He had to undergo a series of painful shots in the stomach. Since hearing about this story, I am seriously afraid of this happening to me). I don't want to get sick and have to go to a hospital, because of a story that R told me about how when he was about 12 and undergoing a dental procedure and the power went out in the clinic and he had to just sit there with a drill embedded in his teeth and the dentist just kind of holding it there until the power was restored.

If I do disappear, I have designated certain key individuals to perform certain key tasks. R is to stay in Mexico City and not rest until I am found. Mr H is charged with attempting to get to my apartment before my mother gets there and get rid of all of my embarrassing stuff. Ms. P is to take my cat. Ms. I is to let people in the interwebs know. My boss has been charged with paying kidnappers whatever they ask for, ransom-wise. My other coworkers I have instructed to say only nice things about me to any news outlets.

root, root, root for the home team

2009-09-01T20:52:00.003-05:00

When I found out, it was around midday on a Tuesday. I started shaking and the sound of my mother's voice grew softer on her end of the phone as I felt the vomit rise up in my stomach, the tunnels close around my eyes.

Are you okay? asked Coworker.
No. I burst into tears and he hugged me awkwardly in the middle of the office and I sort of slumped against him, and no one else knew what to do except knit their brows and tell me that they were sorry.

I flew to Minneapolis on Thursday.

Wearing a black dress that you sometimes wear to work to a funeral forever changes the meaning of the dress. The cousins all came; all fifteen of us were there plus the two great grandkids, who were too young to really understand what was happening. My brother and the five other grandsons were pallbearers; I read at the pulpit (that reading from Ecclesiastes that everyone reads at funerals- "A time to love, and a time to hate..."). I cried much more than I thought I would and my face remained puffy into Monday. I sat through an entire praying of the Rosary without complaining that much; I just read the program over and over and thought about how every time I saw him (almost every day as a child), I'd say goodbye to him thus:
Me: See you later, alligator
Grandpa: After while, crocodile
Me: Hasta la vista!
Grandpa: Pogue Mahon!*

We sang "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" as the casket was rolled down the aisle of the Catholic church, per years of Grandpa's requesting it, and I thought as my throat closed, thanks for ruining the 7th inning stretch for me, Grandpa, but I also thought about how I'll always have to be a Twins fan, it would be cosmically enforced, because otherwise Grandpa's angry spirit would inhabit my kitchen, spilling flour and turning on burners until I repented. He had also asked us to go out and drink beer for him after his funeral, so we did. Lots of beer. And my older cousins manned the jukebox at the bar on main street, queuing up an eclectic and jarring assortment of old Megadeath songs and New Kids On The Block.

I learned that his last words were a sex joke:
"(Grandma's name), tomorrow we gotta call Julie in Hudson and ask her to sign us up for that rhythm method class." And then, he went to bed, and then, lights out.

I saw my father stricken with grief in a way that gave me nightmares. It's hard to see your father completely beside himself.

What was the worst was the fact that the old line "He's in a better place" didn't work this time, because I don't believe in better places anymore, but the night after he died, I dreamed about him. We were in the movie Casablanca (I've never seen it, just parodies of it.) and the dream was in sepia. We were wearing trenchcoats, and his looked funny on him because he was so round. He was getting on an old timey plane, and I was standing on the tarmac, and I was crying. "Aw, hell," he said. "Now don't start with that. You know I have to take off now."

And then he said "Here's lookin' at you, kid." And then he was gone.

*"Pogue mahon," for the uninitiated, means "kiss my ass" in Gaelic. I thought, well into my adolescence, that it meant something to the effect of "later." My grandpa was such a smartass.

grandpa r

2009-08-25T13:15:00.002-05:00

I just found out a few hours ago that my paternal grandfather passed away. I was very close with him, so this is really hard.

I'm going to be away for a few days (unless I can muster the tear-free minutes necessary to write about how he was one of the top ten human beings to ever exist), and in the meantime, keep on truckin.'

when you grow up

2009-08-24T17:09:00.004-05:00

Today at work I had my "mid year review," which basically consists of me going into my boss' office and him asking me some questions and then the two of us going off on a tangent and then realizing that time's up.

(I have a good relationship with higher-ups at my office, which is awesome, because I've never had a job before that hasn't included elaborate punching-boss-in-face fantasies. I had one boss who I hated so much that I would have dreams- very pleasant dreams- that involved him sitting in his desk chair and leaning back and me sneaking up behind him and violently pulling the back of the desk chair backwards, tipping him over and sending his frog-legs flailing.)

At the end of the review, Boss said that I should expect for them to lean on me more, because I do a good job.

In the meantime, he said, let us know if we can help you figure out what you want to be when you grow up.

That's a question that I haven't really thought about much for the last few years, as listing all of the things that I thought I might do but now I realize that I probably won't (Going to law school! Getting a graduate degree in econ! Writing a book! Performing in plays! Resume vocal training! Becoming a stand up comedian! Becoming a police officer! Traveling all around the world!) I really still don't know what I want to be or what I want to do. Hang out? Be awesome? Do fun things with people I like? Laugh and drink and eat? These are not professional goals, and it's difficult to even muster the energy to consider everything I'd have to push aside if I became more focused. I've hoarded ambitions, and I feel like I have to do some spring cleaning and throw some of it away or I'll get stuck.

it's raining taints

2009-08-22T11:20:00.003-05:00

This week was one of those weeks that had me comparing it to a "taint" to a stranger by Friday morning and drinking excessively by the evening. If this week were a person, I would have punched it in the soft spots and not even felt bad about it.

One of my main conundrums in this taintly week was the fact that Old Man Football (Brett Favre) recently Benedict Arnolded his way over to the Minnesota Vikings, rivals from the state over from his old team, the Green Bay Packers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I hate the Packers. I've been trying to convert to liking the Chicago Bears, because I'm not planning on moving back to the Minneapolis area in the forseeable future, but now that Favre is there, I've been forced to reconsider. I've decided that although I won't technically benefit monetarily from it, Favre's contract extends to me, that I'll hang on for one more year.

R and I went to a sports bar near my apartment to watch the purple ones compete in a preseason game against the Kansas City Chiefs (true fact: I didn't even know that the Kansas City Chiefs were a thing until I was probably 13 years old, and then I only knew because their training camp was in River Falls, Wisconsin, which is not far from where I grew up). I'm not sure that anyone else in the bar cared about the game, but we were excited. Me for Brett Favre, him for Percy Harvin, because people who went to the University of Florida all automatically love to get together and circle jerk about how awesome they are and about how the SEC is the best bla bla bla. To a daughter of the Big Ten, this is maddening, because not only are they fucking cocky in a way that only southern people can manage to be cocky, but also they are right.

But I digress.

After psyching myself up by drinking several beers and clapping my hands and taking R by the shoulders and saying in a hysterical voice, "BRETT FAVRE PLAYS FOR THE VIKINGS NOW AND HE IS ON THE SAME TEAM AS ADRIAN PETERSON AND PERCY HARVIN!", the game started.

And Mr. Favre's performance can best be described as "taint." It was a taint of a game. Not much happened and no one looked that good, and Favre only threw four passes.

If I hadn't been so drunk, I would have been pissed. Afterwards, we went home and watched The Sword In The Stone for about the three thousandth time and I thought about how horrible it will be to try to emotionally navigate my way through another underwhelming season for both the Vikings and the Fightin' Irish. I don't know if I'm equipt to handle it.

(Also, Adrian Peterson? Totally not ugly.)

confirm/ignore

2009-08-19T21:25:00.004-05:00

You know what may or may not be an awesome* idea?

A "people I've banged" application on facebook that would appear right beneath the "relationship status."

After having sexual intercourse with someone, you send them a request. "EXXXXXXN says that you guys totally did it. Is this true? (CONFIRM IGNORE)"

At the very least, checking up on the facebook sexual history of the paramours of friends would be a good way to know when it's time to tell them to head to the clinic to get tested for probable chlamydia.

*Awesome if it happens to others.

You know who you remind me of? That crazy lady.

2009-08-18T21:50:00.004-05:00

I have recently discussed with my dear friend Ms. K (and mentioned to another friend, Penpal) the troubling phenomenon of men telling women that they resemble celebrities and automatically thinking that the woman on the receiving end will take it like the greatest thing that anyone has ever said to her ever. This is especially disheartening when the celebrity to which one is being compared looks/acts nothing like you or is known largely for being crazy or publicly addicted to cocaine and sex tapes. Additionally upsetting: the fact that brown hair + boobs =/= every single brunette celebrity in the world.

Let it be known that I don't resemble anyone famous, in the least, but coworkers of mine have felt compelled to inform me, over the course of the two years that I've worked where I work, that I resemble the following celebrities in the following circumstances:

1. Lindsay Lohan. This is the biggest wiggidy what compliment that I've ever gotten. I don't even know what to do with this.

2. Marisa Tomei's character in The Wrestler. I was hoping that the image that I outwardly project says "washed up stripper," especially in a professional environment.

3. Ann Hathaway's character in Rachel Getting Married. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the arch conservatives with whom I share an office actually thought that I was a little unhinged, just because in some of their minds, anyone who thinks differently than rich white dudes is automatically wrong, and continuing to believe the "wrong" while constantly bombarded with the "right" is indicative of some kind of issue.

4. Tina Fey. This was only because I wear my glasses a lot and the person who said it can't really see too well. He's a squinter.

5. Rose McGowan when she had a gun for a leg in that one zombie movie that came out a few years ago. I would love to look like Rose McGowan; however, I do not, which makes the creepy way that this statement was delivered even creepier. Did he expect my panties to drop when compared to a zombie assassin?

6. Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill. This was over cocktails, and this wasn't a "you look like..." but rather a "you remind me of..." And I asked why, and he said, "Because you wouldn't fuck around if anyone fucked with you." Splendid.

I know that I can't be the only one that this has happened to.

I'm not trying to be an asshole here; I realize that not everyone is a creative compliment giver, which is why I always graciously thank them with a "That's very nice of you to say!" because they're really trying to be nice/friendly (or they're assuming that I automatically bestow extra special blow jobs on any guy who says that I look like someone famous, but I try to give the benefit of the doubt). However, I would hope that any male who would happen to read this (or any woman who happens to hang around men at all) would internalize the message of this post: that "You look like Famey O'Starlet!" is a lazy compliment and can often be construed as a bit insulting. It's best to avoid celebrity comparisons altogether, unless you know the complimentee very well and are okay with the possibility of her giving you a dirty look.

Tall glass of Haterade

2009-08-18T18:06:00.003-05:00

I swear that this post won't be the second consecutive one devoted almost entirely to the topic of football, but I do need to address something disordered in my sports allegiance:

I hate the Green Bay Packers more than I could ever possibly like any team, which is why I was practically pirouetting around the office today after learning that Brett Fahv-ray would be donning the purple jersey of the Minnesota Vikings, their division rivals, this year.

I stopped and thought for a moment, and realized that my attitude toward many sports teams/franchises is influenced mostly by haterade.

I am a hater. A classic, run of the mill hater.

Another example of this is the fact is my attitude toward the Oakland Athletics, who I continue to hate despite the fact that the original reason I hated them is because they used to be the Twins' division rivals back when there wasn't such thing as a Central Division in baseball. It's really too bad, as the A's in the late 1980's and early 1990's had some of the most spectacular mullets and facial hair ever assembled on one team (and also Jose Canseco, douching up the place).

mistake

2009-08-13T22:23:00.004-05:00

Former Atlanta Falcons quarterback/current, future, and forever bag of shriveled dicks Michael Vick was convicted in 2007 of running a dogfighting operation on his property in Virginia. I don't want to go into what he did to those animals, because it makes me pretty angry and everyone already knows. Needless to say, he wasn't feeding them Milkbones and asking them who was a good boy.

He served time in prison and was released and cleared to return to the NFL again by the commissioner. Within the last few hours, it was announced that he has signed with the Philadelphia Eagles and could possibly be on the field by mid-October.

The other night, I made a bad call and turned on the local news (Corruption! Greed! Be angry, Chicago!) and saw a story on how Vick had visited a youth center to talk to kids about how dogfighting is wrong. He called the actions that landed him in prison and cost him the NFL's most lucrative contract "a mistake."

Really, Michael Vick? So you just accidentally happened one day to not on purpose buy a bunch of dogs and then you sort of messed up and spent months training/torturing them to oops! make them mean and ready to fight and then you slipped up and started publicizing it (accidentally!) and one day you walked outside and all of these people had magically and erroneously shown up at your house and then you completely not on purpose in a moment of instantaneous judgment decided to take bets on the dogs fighting each other, which also happened non-purposefully? Am I supposed to believe that all of these things just whoopsie daisy fell into place? I call giant dog food can full of steaming bullshit.

A "mistake" is when you make a left turn when you knew that you were supposed to take the right turn. A "mistake" is a typo. A "mistake" is ordering a vodka/Red Bull at last call. A "mistake" is when you accidentally CC your boss on a personal email. A "mistake" is when you spend $22 to see Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince in 3-D IMAX and don't pee beforehand. A "mistake" is a momentary lapse that happens that leads to a palm slap to the forehead in retrospect, a "Aw, man! That was kind of dumb!" kind of moment. A mistake is when you make a wrong choice, and then things happen to you as the result of that choice. A mistake is not you make a wrong choice and then keeping it up with the wrong choice making.

I am fucking sick of people acting like assholes and then saying it was a "mistake."

Bernie Madoff did not "make a mistake." He did a series of things, one building from another, over the course of years that was leading to a desired result: he wanted to steal from people. He succeeded wildly in stealing from people; what he failed in is being a decent human being. No mistakes there.

Chris Brown did not "make a mistake." There's no such thing as accidentally beating the shit out of someone.

John Edwards did not "make a mistake." Oops! My pants are off! Oops! I have an erection! Oops! I am fornicating with a woman who is not my wife! Oops! I'm also promising things to her! Oops, I am having an extramarital affair! Fucking give me a break.

This guy who, from his seat in the bleachers in Wrigley Field, threw a beer at a Phillies outfielder on Wednesday, actually did "make a mistake." A hilarious, you-can't-make-this-stuff-up-about-Cubs-fans-and-their-clownishness mistake.

Michael Vick did not "make a mistake." He straight up tortured and killed animals for his own entertainment and pleasure over the course of several years. I sincerely hope that during his first game in an Eagles uniform, he tears all of the ligaments in his throwing arm. Accidentally, of course.

unilingual

2009-08-11T21:34:00.004-05:00

For someone who has dated practically an entire United Nations worth of men from various cultures/backgrounds, I sure am a linguistic asshole. I have failed, in my one score and half a dozen years, to master any language other than English, and even the brand of English that I use is mostly made up words and obscenities.

There really is no excuse. I took years of Spanish in middle school, high school, and college, and yet have only managed to grasp the extent to which I am not capable of speaking Spanish. I studied abroad in Greece and picked up a few key phrases and swear words (my favorite is St'archidia mu, which means "I write it on my testicles" and should be used to express rude disdain for a person or idea), but my experience with the modern Greek language only helped me get my articles confused when I tried to speak Spanish. To make matters worse, when I returned to the States, I decided to make moves to become a francophone. Rather than learning French, I un-learned what Spanish I had retained.

My neglect of the Spanish language returned to bite me in the ass since I started dating R, who is the product of a Cuban father and a Mexican mother and a 90% Spanish-speaking household and a part of Miami that might as well be called "North Cuba." He doesn't speak English with an accent, but he does throw some amusing malapropisms into everyday speech, like how he thought for his entire life that a "hamper" was called a "damper," or how he always confuses "lemon" and "lime" (one thing I did not forget from Spanish class is that lime=limon and lemon=lim), or how he occasionally uses the word "mascot" instead of "pet" (because in Spanish, pet=mascota, a word which I sort of like better, anyway).

At any rate, visiting the fam is an exercise in sitting back and being quiet and trying to understand their rapid, slang-saturated Spanish, and it's about to get a little more challenging, because in less than a month, I'm getting flown to Mexico City for ten days.

I'm a little nervous. This will be my first time out of the country since a trip to London over three years ago and, like I mentioned, I'm really bad at talking in not-English. What happens if I get lost? What happens if I go out at night while wearing a red trenchcoat and red fedora with a yellow band and get arrested because la policia mistake me for international supervillian Carmen Sandiego? What if I take a day trip and ingest some bad water out of a drinking fountain near Tenochtitlan and spend several days hooked up to IV's as Montezuma gets his revenge on my imperialist bowels? How will I tell the hospital staff that I'm mildly allergic to shellfish? What if I accidentally refer to "the pope" as "the potato" or offend someone by telling them that "I have 26 anuses" rather than "I am 26 years old"? How will I explain to them my humiliation and sorrow for my international gaffe?

I ran these and other concerns by Boyfriend the other night as he was explaining the gigantic alien hugeness of the city he considers his second home.

But what if something crazy happens and I need to speak for myself? I asked, looking for reassurance. I can find someone who speaks English there, right?

He gave me a tooth gritting look and said, "Honestly, no one there really gives a fuck if you only speak English. Don't worry, though. You'll be with people who've spent a lot of time in DF; we'll take care of you."

Perhaps I deserve this. Perhaps I deserve to feel like a completely dependant child-alien for a week and a half in the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Maybe this is the kick in the ass I need to actually prompt me to put some real effort into learning how to speak Spanish beyond insults and nonsense sentences that brought me so much amusement as a seventh grader. In the meantime, I will be cramming by watching telenovelas on Univision.

on the internet, you never die

2009-08-10T18:43:00.003-05:00

This morning, I was greeted at work by an email from a former acquaintance of mine. The email had no text, just a link to the Chicago University of Iowa Alumni Club August 2009 newsletter. Hm, I thought, that's interesting, until I noticed that I am on the front page of this newsletter.

First off, this picture was taken about three years ago. Second, I did not go to the University of Iowa. Third, I barely even talk to those guys anymore. Fourth, I am not wearing anything that suggests that I attended the University of Iowa; I am simply standing with some people who are wearing Iowa stuff.

Let the lesson here be that if you are photographed doing anything ever, don't rule out the possibility that you could end up on the cover of the newsletter of an alumni club for a college which you did not attend, three years later.

Or, if you're a black guy at the University of Wisconsin, you could end up finding yourself photoshopped into a cheering crowd of white people that you do not know at a football game that you did not attend.

smiley face with nearly a dozen chins!!!!

2009-08-06T21:02:00.004-05:00

.... because many people, I sort of hate .

RIP John Hughes

2009-08-06T17:29:00.002-05:00

So John Hughes is dead. Without him, one of the greatest creations of modern cinema, a beacon of light hearted hilarity in a world with too few Wet Bandits, a classic rich-boy-in-Winnetka-beats-underpriviledged-robbers story-- Home Alone-- would not exist.

I'll say it, and I'm no longer ashamed to: Home Alone is one of the greatest movies of all time, and certainly my favorite Christmas movie.

It's funny-- cartoon violence on actual, real people! With crow bars! And that part where Joe Pesci's head gets set on fire!

It's edgy-- My childhood sensibilities were shocked- SHOCKED! by the filthy mind and language of "Buzz," Kevin's older brother who in an opening scene inquired as to whether or not French women shaved the hair off of their armpits or frequented nude beaches.

It's poignant-- Kevin's friendship with his neighbor, the rumored "South Bend Shovel Slayer"? And then the Slayer turns out to be a lonely old man who misses his granddaughter? Tear jerking.

The music is more Christmassy than Jesus-- This agnostic's favorite holiday is Christmas, and the music in the film is just perfect. I wish that I could marinate gingerbread cookies in the soundtrack.

It's local-- When I was studying for my Series 7 and 66 exams (stock broker licenses, essentially), I nannied for a wealthy family in a northern suburb of Chicago called Kenilworth. Median house value upwards of $1M or something absurd. Just north of Kenilworth was a still rich but not so filthy Pritzker level rich suburb of Winnetka, and in Winnetka is the actual house that was used to film Home Alone. I personally drove by the house very slowly on several occasions in a way that could have been construed by the inhabitants as creepy, but I was only trying to comprehend how a house that looked so imposing and gigantic in the movie could look so pedestrian from the street. The director must have done something fancy with camera angles or lenses or something, because while it's a very nice house, it's very unimpressive compared to how it looks in the movie. I remember thinking how hilarious it would be to put on ski masks and attempt to break in on Christmas Eve, you know, as a joke, but I was sure it had been done.

vehicular hoe-micide

2009-08-03T17:32:00.004-05:00

In a publicity move that could be dubbed, "Remember how Nissan is a thing?", the Japan-based car manufacturer today revealed its design for the all-electric LEAF vehicle. The hatchback will hit US auto dealerships in 2010. The good news is it can go about 80 miles without being charged. The bad news is it is a hatchback, which is pretty much the vehicular equivalent of these adult onesie pajamas:

"Put it in the rear!" your car will say.

I've always had a strange relationship with cars, and I mostly blame some traumatic incidents from my childhood. I learned how to drive on a manual transmission 1992 Ford Escort wagon with an electric blue factory paint job and a squirrel tail affixed to the antenna by my father. The first time he let me get behind the wheel after passing my drivers' permit test, I killed the engine at least two dozen times and flattened a painted turtle with a decisive crunch sound because I did not yet have spacial understanding of where I was w/r/t the wheels. Then I started crying, and then my dad made me get out of the car and he drove home.

After passing my driving test, I'd occasionally drive what my dad had christened "Blue Thunder" to school. I was so embarrassed by the squirrel tail that my dad duct taped to the antenna like a flag of hayseedery that one evening, I ripped it off and threw it in some weeds by my house. The next morning, I woke up to find that my dad had replaced it with a raccoon tail and about a yard of silver tape (how he found a dead raccoon in between my removal of the squirrel tail and the time I needed the car for school the next morning, I'll never know.)

I was car-less for the early part of college, unless you count my stint in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when my host family bestowed upon me a sky blue 1982 Dodge Ram pickup which I would drive with the windows down while smoking clandestine Parliament Lights. Once, I locked the keys in the ignition while stopped for gas in a Shell station near an underpass. I paced up and down the aisles while I waited for the longest twenty minutes of my young life for my host mother to arrive with duplicates and miscreants offered to break into my truck for me for $10.

My next car was a green 1995 Dodge Intrepid that I maimed by backing diagonally into a pole attached to a carport in an apartment complex in South Bend, Indiana. I brought it with me to Chicago, where the tires were slashed and the windshield smashed on my second to last day of work for Americorps. I stopped caring for it; it began looking like hell. The driver's side mirror dangled like a dead molar from its rightful place, saved from annihilation by two wires that never gave up. A thick coating of dust smothered the paint. It was towed thrice in ten days one March, and I ruined a pair of pink satin ballet flats wading through the mud of the impound lot at Sacramento and Chicago avenues.

Finding it to be a liability and realizing that the city sees personal vehicles as revenue generating machines, I parked it in the garage attached to the worst place I have ever worked and left it there for three months. On the day I quit, I validated my months-old parking receipt and the last thing I did on my way out of that godforsaken hellhole was stick that office with a $1200 employee parking bill on my way up north to Wisconsin for a built in two week vacation before I started my new job.

When I rolled into the service station at North and LaSalle, the (bored) employees laughed at the sad state of my vehicle and offered to fill up my tank and check the coolant and oil for $50. Ok, I said. I had been out of coolant and out of oil. "You would have died if you took this on the expressway," one of the no longer laughing employees.

I don't really miss having a car. The city of Chicago has gotten pretty ticket happy in the last couple of years, and normally, the CTA serves me well and provides much better people watching. At least I know now that when the time comes to buy a car and if I need a car that says "put it in the rear," Nissan has me covered.

wait wait

2009-08-01T11:59:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite things in all of science's creation is to download NPR podcasts and listen to them as I run errands.

Unfortunately, walking around and listening to headphones hasn't been a carefree activity since the night a few years ago when I was followed home by a man who attempted to enter my apartment building after me and assault me. I ended up fighting the guy off (probably the most badass thing I've ever done; the fighting of the would be assailant involved me pushing him into my door way and bodychecking the door shut on his torso and then pushing him the rest of the way out while he shouted that I was a "fucking bitch who deserved it"-- Bad. Ass.), but ever since then, I have been someone who scares easily. I also become irate when frightened. The other day, R thought that it would be funny to sneak into the bathroom while I was showering and pop his head into the shower and say BOO! and I ended up unloading dozens of swears on him, throwing water at him, kicking him out of the bathroom, and telling him that I didn't want to see or speak to him for a full thirty minutes.

At any rate, I'm never able to escape the fear and wariness that incident forced me to feel. I'm ultra cautious, always looking around and doing that thing where you put your key between your index finger and middle finger so that if someone attacks you and you have to punch them, you also stab them. I wear only one earphone. I mentally accuse about 2/3 of the men that I see walking down the street of being secret rapists and psyching myself up to fight them, if necessary. It's fucked up.

If I ever were to be assaulted while walking down the street, dragged in to an alley or what have you, I'd be furious with everything. Furious with myself for not preventing it and furious with the attacker and everything that happened to him in his life that caused him to feel that attacking women is an okay thing to do, but mostly furious with the fact that (as irreverent as this sounds, I'm not being facetious) the assault would ruin NPR for me, forever. What am I supposed to listen to now? Regular radio?

Having a vagina is terrible sometimes.

a summary of my current thoughts

2009-07-30T21:11:00.000-05:00

we are all going to die

2009-07-29T18:43:00.002-05:00

Exhibit A: This story about a Swedish factory worker who was attacked by a robot he thought was turned off. The robot seized the worker by the head and severely injured the man.

Exhibit B: EATRS, the military robots powered for long periods of time by consuming organic material (including flesh/carrion). Despite the "PR offensive" on which the inventors of said evil robot future world dictators try to assure a frightened public that the robots will not actually eat people, I think that anything that requires that kind of PR campaign should maybe have the brakes put on. Soon, we will have dead old people powered cars. Mark my words. I only ask that my remains be used to power a really sexy car, like a Ferrari.

Exhibit C: The president of Alpha Kappa Alpha and her fucking creepy wax doppelganger. Could the military's flesh eating technology possibly be employed in conjunction with wax making techniques in the future? Are we heading for a word of humans confined to the indoors while evil twin selves, rendered out of wax, rule the outside world, eating pigeon corpses for fuel as they do our bidding?

all the single ladies! all the single ladies! all the single ladies! etc

2009-07-29T13:37:00.003-05:00

I can't think of anything more boring and time consuming than a professional wedding photo session, especially one with a wedding photographer who wanted my brother and his new wife to constantly make out and do stupid shit like pretend to be having an intimate moment when really all they were thinking about was how hot the sun felt and how all of the customers at the winery were gawking at everyone and how the man photographer was giving off a bit of a pervy vibe.

You'd think that a wedding photographer in northwestern Wisconsin would be accustomed to photographing Scandinavians. Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes are known for a lot of things- hard work, statuesque frames, blonde hair, and lutefisk come to mind- but being demonstrably affectionate and playful with loved ones is not one of them. We* don't really touch each other more than necessary, generally speaking, and the thought of making out on camera is about as appealing as moldy lefse.

After the wedding party was photographed in every possible configuration (Now the bride's family! Now the groom's family! Now the groom with both sisters! Now the groom with one sister! Now the bride with all of the sisters from both sides! Now the groom and the bride's brother! Now the bride's brother and the groom's sisters! Now just the guys! Now all of the girls from the bride's and groom's side! Now everyone's dogs! Now everyone's cousins slapping five and pretending to be talking about physics! Now the parents pantomiming being stuck in invisible boxes! Now the mimes!), I sat down in my lung constricting (thanks, breasts) black dress and talked about finance with Boyfriend and the bride's banker father. All we heard was "KISS! Now KISS AGAIN! KISS AGAIN!" while the bride's maids cooed and giggled and clapped and my brother came up with snarky comments about why constantly making out on film was stupid and tacky. Not sure if the photographer picked up on what he was throwing down, but it was still pretty funny.

Teared up during the wedding itself, but held it back because I wasn't about to have a church full of people watch me ruin my meticulously applied makeup or carefully crafted reputation. One tear escaped, and I turned toward the altar to catch it. The other noteworthy moment from the ceremony itself was when the ancient, red-faced priest (it was a dual Lutheran/Catholic service) stood up to say a prayer and blessed the marriage of "Adam and Anna," even though my brother and his wife are not named either of those things.

I had to give a wedding toast at the reception. Nothing bad would have happened to me if I had opted not to, but I was sort of shoved into it due to the fact that none of my other family members would do it. My dad has a crippling phobia of public speaking, my mother spent the days leading up to and including the wedding crying unpredictably and uncontrollably, and my sister just made that pained expression that little sisters make when they don't want to do something and rolled her eyes. Me it was, and like I always do when I want to avoid emotional engagement, I attempted to make it funny. People laughed, but then the sisters of the bride gave their toasts and both of them cried, so I felt like kind of a chump.

I think something like 350 people were there, which is basically every single person that I had ever met before the age of 18 plus all of their relatives. The wedding more than filled up one of two hotels in town. I spent the boring part of the reception (the part where you eat chicken and no one is drunk) chatting with the Best Man, a childhood friend of my brother whom I've known since I was about 5. His other groomsmen looked awkward in their tuxes and talked about the Minnesota Twins. (Very few and far between is the man that does not make the "I am in a tux and do not really like it" face every time he dons formal attire. My old prom dates wore that expression,** my brother wore that expression this weekend, and my father wore that expression. The only men who I can think of off the top of my head whose facial expressions do not betray their disdain for tuxedos are James Bond, George Clooney, and Jack Nicholson.)

My 20-year-old sister and I have always been told that we looked alike, but once you get us in matching dresses, with matching hairdos and matching makeup, people started confusing the two of us. Once people started drinking at the reception, the "OMG YOU GUYZ R TWINZ!" comments started flying.

The bride danced with her father to an instrumental rendition of "Edelweiss," which is an excellent non creepy departure from the traditionally most awkward/weird portion of the wedding dance. My brother and mother danced to a string quartet arrangement of Van Halen's "Jump." Boyfriend caught the garter that Brother originally said that he purposefully threw to him, but then amended his story the next day, claiming that it was pure happenstance that he just happened to throw it right at Boyfriend. I did not participate in the bouquet toss.

The night ended with a giant swaying sing along to Billy Joel's "Piano Man" and my mother insisting that she drive us home while swerving all over the road and crying and my dad talking about how all of the relatives had a great time and how Boyfriend and I should have a similar wedding.

I'm not engaged, but that was a minor detail to him.

After it was all over, everything felt like the day after Christmas. I didn't want to look at my dress, and dozens and dozens of pictures kept appearing on Facebook like so many pimples after rubbing one's face with lard. It was all over, and I spent the rest of my time up north mini-golfing (with many swears) and eating cupcakes and coming down with a bad cold, which I'm pretty sure I gave to everyone on the plane ride back. I'd rate the weekend Victorious on a scale of Catastrophic to Triumphant.

* My family's national heritage is half Swede/Norwegian, half filthy Catholic countries like France and Ireland. So I'm not suffocatingly Scandinavian like the bride's family, but I'm still not the world's snuggliest.
** Or maybe they just didn't like me.

wedding crash

2009-07-21T21:56:00.002-05:00

Getting ready for this wedding has been like getting ready for the motherfucking prom, and due to my increased push for physical readiness for the ceremony and ensuing photographs, I'm concerned that I'm not emotionally ready.

I haven't even had time to think about what it will be like to watch my little brother get married, standing there in a tuxedo, exchanging wedding rings with my future sister-in-law. I used to tease him by rhyming his middle name with "Poops In His Pants." I used to make him cry by telling him that he used to have a kid sized airplane that really flew but that our younger sister ruined it and spread the broken pieces across the yard. We would play a game together when we were single digit aged that we called "sword fighters" that consisted of us wearing Mickey Mouse ears and capes from the costume box and brandishing plastic swords, pretending that we had to save someone from kidnappers (the subject of the saving ranged from the Flutter Ponies to Kirby Puckett). We always prevailed and afterwards we'd sit outside on the picnic table sometimes, singing into the empty acres and eating popsicles. He was a rowdy little kid, and even though we weren't often deliberately mean to each other, we often pissed our mother off, and when we did, her favorite punishment for us was to make us sit on the bottom step and hug for ten minutes (very effective deterrent). Our dad would take us both outside every night, weather permitting, and toss a baseball around until it got too dark to see. My brother got really good at throwing a ball up in the air with one hand and batting deep into the field next to the house, and throwing pop flies to himself in the yard while my interest waned and I spent more time practicing piano or reading. He went through his "I am an undersized middle school boy who hates to take showers or get his hair cut" phase, I went through my "hair cut in pageboy and parted down the center straight A's all the time" phase. We never really fought, but once I got to high school and became nearly overwhelmed with extracurriculars and he started getting serious about baseball, our interactions diminished. He transferred from our home district to another with a better baseball program and I went off to college, and he started growing up, getting interested in Cold War history and studying for his ACT's and dating a series of blondes I never quite liked. I went off to college and began experiencing parties and boys and academic challenge for the first time, focusing more on boys and parties than I should have, but whenever I would go home for holidays, we'd stay up late sitting at the kitchen counter talking politics or religion or other things that can only be discussed with an understanding family member, drinking iced tea and eating leftover pie. He went to college west of home to play baseball and I studied abroad in Greece and we'd maybe talk once a month, and he decided that he was going to quit the baseball team and join the debate team, and I decided that I was going to leave the non profit sector and join the financial sector. He began getting more serious with his girlfriend and last summer, he called to tell me that he was buying an engagement ring and I was the first to know and then he and my future sister-in-law were engaged and they asked if it was okay if they had their wedding on the day before my birthday, and of course I didn't mind. In January, when I was going through my horrible health adventure, he was one of the first people I told, and he and my sister were so supportive of me that it almost broke my heart to know that they were there (despite the fact that my brother still identifies himself as a practicing Catholic). And then he asked my sister and I to stand on his side during the ceremony, and then he was offered a full scholarship to a law school in Minneapolis, and then he and his future wife bought a house together (at twenty three years old, he buys a house) and then suddenly it's today, and he's getting married on Saturday, and I realize that I haven't done any thinking about how things are going to change, if things are going to change within my fairly close-knit family. I don't know if I want to dwell on it. Whatever happens, I'll miss the way that it is and was.

karma police

2009-07-20T18:17:00.002-05:00

I ate a bowl of moderately okay tomato soup today and on my way out of the restaurant, I was accosted by a man in a long robe with paint on his forehead.

"You! Young lady! You have good karma. You know about karma, yes? Did you know that karma is the only path to enlightenment?"

I tried to be polite, but I really fucking hate it when people accost me on the street, because usually they want to talk about something annoying, like my eternal soul or being saved or contributing to Greenpeace or Save the Children or whatever. When I hear the word "saved" in reference to a person, I picture rows and rows of person-sized jars filled with jellied person preserves. People rubber cemented into scrap books. I don't want to be saved, and I have no need for religion right now, and I especially don't have need for people of any faith informing me that they know what is best for me.

And the funny thing is that I'm pretty sure that even if karma were a thing, I'm pretty sure that I don't have very good karma. I was an Americorps volunteer and I try for an environmentally friendly diet and I support social equality, but at the end of the day, I've been pretty rotten to some pretty great people in my life, taken them for granted, strung them along. I have been actively unkind to men and to family members. I am a shit talker. Just over five years ago, I pretended to be friends with someone so that I could actively sabotage them. Gossip Girl shit. And that was when I actually believed in God. I've gotten a lot nicer since I've concluded that this is it, this is all we have, and we have to make the best of it because when we die, it's lights out. If his glorious religion gave him the insight to look at me, of all fucking people, and say that he could tell that I had "good karma," well. He is either embarrassingly unperceptive or full of shit.

After he just wouldn't take the hint and kept opening and pointing to colorful pictures of charts with animals and arrows ascending to the top of a pyramid, I decided to be a little more assertive.

"Sir," I said, "I really don't believe in any of this, I don't care how colorful and pretty the pictures are in your book. I know that this must mean something to you and that it gives you strength, and that's wonderful, but to me, it means nothing. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in anything."

He left to bother someone else.

wardrobe malfunction

2009-07-17T20:59:00.003-05:00

It was raining the other day during the window of time during which I normally schlep the half mile or so from my apartment to my gym, and I couldn't find my umbrella and I couldn't find the detachable hood that sometimes connects to my windbreaker, and it was too hot for a hooded sweatshirt, so I decided to do something entirely against my nature: wear a baseball cap.

Baseball caps were never something I could pull off. Caps are for that super toned super tanned pink hatted woman who I always see in the gym at like 9 am on Saturday mornings, and she always looks like she's been there for about an hour, and she wears an entire matching workout outfit that goes with her hat, and she always looks painfully adorable. Her face lacks the worry requisite to people who have to work for a living and she wears an injuriously large diamond bauble on her left ring finger. Caps are for Anna Kournikova grunting and thinking about Enrique Iglesias mid-overhand serve. Caps are for ladies who golf and who own brand name socks and who sometimes ride on boats. My own preconceived notions of who can and cannot wear baseball caps has disabled my ability to pull them off.

After donning one to shield my face from the sprinkles, I can't see myself wearing one for utility again because holy diminished upward peripheral vision, Batman. The brim's obscuring of everything above me was unsettling and, I felt, unsafe. What if an anvil were to drop from the sky and land on my head? The brim of a baseball cap would prevent me from detecting the presence of a rapidly descending and very heavy object until I was rendered into an accordion person who expands and shortens while walking down the street. What if a vampire in bat form were to attack me from above? Nothing would prevent my turning into a vampire and having to endlessly point out the inaccuracies contained the Twilight series (for example, I'm pretty sure that vampires don't play baseball during thunderstorms because they have to because they're just so very powerful and awesome at baseball, because that is the stupidest fucking thing that I have ever heard).

I'm not planning on rewearing a baseball cap anytime soon. I'll leave it to lady pink hat and others who don't care of a piano drops on them.

Speaking of clothing, I almost had something horribly embarrassing happen while at work the other day. I was wearing a black dress with a sash that ties around the waist and sort of hangs down in the back, almost to the same length of the skirt. I made a trip to the bathroom and as I walked out, I felt a strange sensation on the back of my leg. I reached back and discovered that one end of the sash was tucked into my underwear (I really have no idea how that happened) and the skirt was pulled up beneath the sash, almost exposing my right ass cheek. Thankfully, I was able to remedy the situation just in time to avoid my boss rounding the corner and seeing much more of me than he would care to see. Emerging from a public or semi public restroom with skirt-in-panties is one of my biggest fears, even scarier to me than having my credit card stolen, but not scarier than falling down the stairs or being caught outdoors in the city without shoes. Accidentally tucking your skirt into your panties is a great way to broadcast the degree to which you have failed at life.

cellar door

2009-07-16T17:16:00.002-05:00

A disturbingly high percentage of the people I've encountered this week seem to have a pretty bad case of the grumpies. I was completely cursed out by an enraged (and I think drunk) client over the phone the other day and ended up telling her that she needed to calm down. She threatened to pull her money out, and I told her to go ahead and do it, because we don't want to do business with people who scream at strangers on the phone. Score twelve for me. Negative some dollar amount for my company. * I wonder who composed the Menard's theme song. I hope that they did something else with their life, because how depressing to look back and think, and all I did was compose the Menard's banjo theme song.... * I'm pretty positive that my feet have shrunk over the last year and a half. * Someone I went to high school with is getting a divorce. Someone like three years younger than I. I suppose it was inevitable. * Playtex Gentle Glide tampons have a commercial airing now that describe how the small cotton vagina plugs expand once in their warm pillowy home. They demonstrate this point by showing a young woman in a skirt joyously twirling at the news of this new way that tampons are expanding nowadays. My question is: do I really want something that reminds me of a twirling skirt lady in my love tube? * Confetti parades are the ultimate example of not thinking of the consequences of your actions.

it just did.

2009-07-15T18:18:00.001-05:00

the funniest thing I've read in quite some time

2009-07-13T22:17:00.002-05:00

Stranger than Eviction

It's about this guy with a crazy landlord. That's all you need to know. I don't want to spoil the fun.

rats

2009-07-13T22:07:00.001-05:00

This morning, I declined a freshly toasted bagel with cream cheese, lox, capers, and tomatoes in favor of a shitty cup of fruit on the bottom yogurt*, I ducked out the back door so that I could cut through the alley on the way to my train station of choice. As I shut the door behind me, I made a quarter turn to see a fucking enormous rat scuttling along the landing one flight of stairs below me.

The thing was massively gigantic. It looked well fed, and like it could probably take my cat in a fight. I live on the third floor. That means that the rat is capable of ascending stairs. It might as well have sprouted wings and bit me in the eyelid.

In movies when women scream, it comes out as this almost orgasmic, high pitched, breathy trill. It is accompanied by a pretty yet frightened looking scream face and a manicured hand placed daintily on the sternum.

In real life, when I scream, it comes out as a sort of guttural roller coaster of sound, starting slowly and then accelerating until it is a full on yell. Like:
aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAA!

The door flew open and R peeked out, concerned but also laughing at me.
"What?"

I kept making whatever horrified face I had been making and did a terrifying, high kneed prance back into my apartment. "It's a rat! Omygodomygodomygod! It's going to come up here and eat our faces in the night! It's going to bite through the door and attack the cat! It's eating our garbage and growing strong!"

When I came home tonight, all of the garbage was cleaned off of the back stairway. He may have laughed at my horror and fear, but at least he removed the rat food.

*Fruit on the bottom yogurt is one of my biggest pet peeves. I bought yogurt in an individual container for my convenience, not because I want to sit there for five minutes rhythmically jabbing a spoon to the bottom and attempting to amalgamate a strawberry derivative with the consistency of menstruation into the actual yogurt itself. I gain nothing by feeling like a participant in the yogurt preparation process. Fucking mix the goddamn yogurt and fruit together yourself, yogurt company.

fuck you, diet

2009-07-09T22:35:00.002-05:00

My brother is getting married on the 25th. I am in the wedding and for the event, I must wear a one shoulder dress. I won't get into my personal objections to evening dresses with only one shoulder (Tarzan goes to prom!), but I will say that I am not built perfectly for this particular dress.

I tried it on a couple of weeks ago, and it fit pretty perfectly, except for the fact that it made my two distinct breasts into one squished oval shaped breast. If I had gone up a size, the rest of the dress would have looked stupid, so I decided to suck it up and diet, for the sake of boob shrinkage.

I have never been on a diet before, an actual formal diet. I've definitely gone through phases where I've deprived myself of appropriate amounts of food, but that only lasted about two, three days tops. And during a short phase where my nose ate candy on a regular basis, I started looking pretty bony. Everything on my body has pretty much stayed the same since I was about 18, and I've never had an occasion on which I felt compelled to reshape my body.

And so this particular diet is pretty hard on me. I avoid red meat and substitute fish, and only eat meat or fish at one meal per day. I force myself to eat yogurt for breakfast every morning and I drink and refill my water bottle twice per day. I eat a shitload of vegetables and I'm pretty sure that my head is about to sprout asparagus spears at any moment. I've stopped eating things that are fried or over processed, and I avoid bread and pasta but will eat rice. I'm avoiding caffeine. I've started going to the gym five times a week rather than the usual 2-3. All of those things are well and good, because I love vegetables and fish and running makes me feel badass. Great. Delicious. Fun. Healthy.

The part that really fucking blows is the fact that I've eliminated most sweets and salty snacks and all foods that are obviously bad foods, and I live for sweets and salty snacks and the occasional bad food. The fact that I have denied myself is making me crave them even more, and it's getting as intolerable as attending improv night sober.

Yesterday, I spent the entire afternoon intermittently googling pictures of cupcakes. After the pictures stopped satisfying me, I cruised on over to Yelp and started reading reviews of bakeries in my area that specialize in cupcakes. I imagined how delicious the cupcakes would taste, how when all of the cupcake was consumed except for crumbs, I'd use the stickiness of the frosting left on my fork to pick up the last sweet remnants. And then lick the fork.

Last night, I had a dream that I was eating two McDonald's cheeseburgers with extra pickles and a side of hot fries. I was sitting in the McDonald's at Clark and Monroe, the one with the giant glass walls, in a booth by myself and I was just tasting the cheeseburgers and chewing and smiling and drinking Diet Coke and feeling the bubbles pop in my throat. That was the entire dream. I'm pretty sure that when I woke up, my tastebuds were erect.

Boyfriend is of the physical constitution that allows him to eat pure baking grease and red velvet cake and venti Starbuck's Frappuccinos and still not store any body fat. Every night, he eats what he wants. Tonight, it was orange chicken. Lou Malnati's Deluxe Chicago-style pizza last night with cheese that stretched out his arm's length. Sour Patch Kids at the movies and Hershey's Dark Chocolate bars for a snack and Dove Chocolate Covered Raspberry Ice Cream for the munchies and Salt & Vinegar potato chips at any old time. It's torture within my own four walls.

So, I offer this diet a gigantic fuck you.

Why isn't my body just made of Play-Doh? It would be way easier to wear this dress then. It would also be easier to hide in oddly shaped places.

Cat-olic

2009-07-08T22:21:00.002-05:00

Oh, I am punching myself in the face for that horrible pun.

It's so very appropriate, though, in captioning the following picture, of my little cat (note the taillessness) apparently honoring the crucified Lord and Savior via a gentle placing of the paw at the foot of the cross.

That is not my crucifix.

(already posted this elsewhere, for anyone who knows my actual truthful real life not secret spy identity, but it's fucking hysterical.)

it's not polite to stair

2009-07-08T20:16:00.002-05:00

A series of unfortunate childhood falling incidents have led me to fear descending staircases to this day. I hate, hate, hate going down stairs. I clutch the railing and take each step like a recent recipient of a replacement hip joint, gingerly letting each foot feel the ground upon which it is about to settle before allowing my weight to transfer. It doesn't help that most days, weather permitting, I wear very tall, precarious shoes, since I like being as tall or taller than my male colleagues. If there were a fire at work and I had to exit via the forty odd flights of stairs from my desk to the safety of the ground while wearing my business shoes, I would mostly likely be found after the smoke cleared, charred and gripping the railing at about floor 15.
I adore running up stairs; I skip stairs and practically barrel people over as I take them two at a time on my way out of subterranean train stations, on my way up to my multi floor high walk up apartment. I love racing myself and elevating my heart rate and imagining that I'm running up a Mayan pyramid on the Yucatan peninsula or stadium stairs in the Super Dome. I am all about going up stairs, it's going down that petrifies me.

This is why, if I were a crazy billionaire building my own Neverland-style mansion compound, there would be plenty of stairs for hasty scaling, of course, but also fireman poles and twisty slides so that I never have to walk down a staircase.

back like that

2009-07-07T17:20:00.002-05:00

For the last week or so, every single day that I've spent at work, sitting in my shitty, shitty chair has let to excruciating upper back pain. I feel like something's pinched back there.

The chair itself is probably from the Clinton administration, and since someone closely related to the company may or may not have made a notorious, embarrassing, high profile $87,000 rug purchase in the height of the financial crisis, I figured that they could spring for a new one for me. You know, because my disproportionately ample breasts combined with a bad quality chair make for back pain, which leads to crankiness, which is no good for anyone.

But, no, my boss told me, company policy is that I need a doctor's note in order for the office to purchase a new chair. A prescription chair? I asked.

It won't be a problem for me to get the doctor's note; I'll just go to a chiropractor and scream until I get my way, but the notion of a doctor-ordered chair got my mind turning in all sorts of goofy, twisty ways.

I pictured it arriving in a big amber colored pill bottle with a white plastic cap. It would be really hard to twist off (damn child proof caps on chair sized pill bottles!) but once the cap was removed, there'd be a beach ball sized wad of cotton at the top of the container. "Sit as needed," the directions would say, "Do not take with alcohol."

Later this afternoon, as I was walking home and bopping along to my iPod, the song "Back Like That" by Ghostface Killah made an appearance on the shuffle function. What if that song were about back problems? That changes the entire meaning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjlVtzUq-sA

borscht and scandal

2009-07-06T18:22:00.006-05:00

Today, while listening to the absolutely hysterical translation skills of whoever was translating Russian President Dmitri Medvedev during press conference with Obama RE: putting a lid on the nukes, I noticed something hilarious. Maybe it's because Sarah Palin, my favorite Alaskan governor ever, has been in the news on account of the fact that she's resigning, effective the 26th of July (also, the 26th of July is my birthday, so happy birth anniversary to me, love, God). Or maybe it's because I've got my scandal pants on and am overly hopeful for another schadenfreude-cascade-inducing debacle to emerge from the Alaskan wilderness.

Anyway, I noticed something uncannily familiar in the face of the Russian President, and it took me a second, but I think I finally put my finger on the fact that Levi Johnston, the teenaged father of Bristol Palin's teenaged lovebaby, bears a sort of uncanny resemblance to Putin's bestie.

Don't believe me?

Check 'er out:

So my theory on why Sarah Palin quit is not because of some looming iceberg scandal or the impending rapture or Jesus asking her to personally install the Alaskan Natural Gas pipeline or Sarah just bein' straight up looney tooney or whatever. I firmly believe that Sarah Palin quit because her grandbaby is the legitimate heir to a Russian political dynasty. She's putting Tripp's future ahead of her own.

You sure can see Russia from parts of Alaska. You can also kayak from one country to the other for a good old fashioned one night stand. And Dmitri beget Levi. And Levi beget Tripp.

fake engaged

2009-06-29T22:32:00.002-05:00

He was an angry, overachieving half Lebanese, half Sicilian Floridian son of two lawyers with a chip on his shoulder and a penchant for filthy misogynist hip hop listening without irony. I was a 21 year old college senior who had just been dumped by a boy who simply could not date a girl who was not Indian (sorry, he said). I was ripe for revenge, the sophomore was itching to look cool to his friends. And we met, and we started dating immediately, and it was horrible, and it went on for three years.

Three years of long distance fighting and angry phone hang ups and doubts about faithfulness and revenge breaking up with each other and then revenge making out with random guys at parties (pretty sure that he wasn't making out with guys at far away parties, but girls, but you never really can know). I was incredibly poised and mature, and by "poised and mature," I mean "petty, overemotional, untrusting, and untrustworthy."

One of our biggest early points of contention was over his refusing to display our relationship status on a fledgling social networking site called "Facebook." Back then, the only way to be a member of this "Facebook" was to be a student at a small handful of universities, most of which were pretty snobby and could have been accused of being elitist. No matter how many times I asked him, he always said that he thought that Facebook relationship status was stupid and needn't be displayed.

This really hurt my feelings in a way that I couldn't explain. After I found out that he had been cheating on me for the first six months of our relationship with his high school girlfriend, a sorority girl from the University of Florida with the same first name as me but much bigger hair who wore much more makeup, the entire relationship took a turn for the worst and devolved into me trying to hurt him as much as he hurt me.

Maturity!

When I found out about the cheating, he vowed to quit and he was Very Sorry and he Didn't Know How To End Things With Her and she was in a Very Fragile Emotional State and he would Tell Her Immediately and Get Rid of Her. I should have broken up with him right when I found out that the jerk was fucking a goddamned imbecile (I know that she's an imbecile because I stalked her MySpace page, and she was just terrible and she like quoted Rascal Flatts and had a whole lot of sparkley kiss face graphics), but I didn't. Part of me thought that if we were officially in a relationship on Facebook, that would represent a victory over her, over the cheating. He never agreed.

Instead, about a year and a half later, my best friend Mr. H (who occasionally garners mention on this blog), and I were talking about Facebook and how people were in the habit of using it as a way to find out information about each other without actually talking. We decided that a hilarious experiment would be to change our relationship status to "engaged" to each other and see how long it took for some stranger to congratulate us on the upcoming wedding. (Ha! Joke's on you, Facebook stalkers!)

So, we did, and a few days later, I got a distraught call from the Angry Boyfriend, who was always insanely jealous of Mr. H and who honestly thought that something was going on between us (there was not).

It's a joke! I explained. Besides, you think that Facebook relationship statuses are stupid, anyway!

No, he replied, you have betrayed me.

He broke up with me that night.

We ended up getting back together and breaking up multiple times, but it never quite stuck as hard as that time.

Now, he works as an investment banker in a building that just happens to be less than a block from where I work. I run into him from time to time, sometimes when I am alone, sometimes when I am with a dining partner. Sometimes we talk amiably, sometimes we just wave, sometimes I pretend to ignore him because, to be honest, he still conjures feelings of shame and discomfort and I don't particularly enjoy interacting with him.

Even now, even a few years later, the first thing that I think of when I see him is not how he cheated on me or how we used to fight all the time or how I went to London to visit him or how excited he was when he found out that he got offered a job in Chicago. It's how he once broke up with me because I got joke engaged on Facebook to my best friend.

eye spy

2009-06-29T19:24:00.003-05:00

My right eyelid is swollen up. It looks really scary, and I think that there's something wrong with my contacts, but my prescription is expired and I don't want to go through the headache of going to the eye doctor and taking that horrible eye puff glaucoma test. I hate that fucking thing.

Who lobbied congress to make it so that an eye doctor visit was required once per year? My prescription hasn't changed since I was 16 years old and it's not like you can overdose on contact lenses or abuse eye glasses. ("Doctor, we found him dead wearing four pairs of Transitions Lenses, one on top of the other. It was beyond what his body could handle. He defecated himself before he died. Terrible, really. Tragic.")

I understand the need for eye exams, but requiring a doctor's note for a pack of soft contacts when I just need one fucking new pair seems overkill.

First world problems!

you are not elaine

2009-06-26T17:18:00.002-05:00

Today is my mother's birthday. I don't talk about my parents much on here, because I live in a paranoid world wherein I just assume that one day they're going to find this and shit is going to hit the fan. I'd rather shit hit the fan over my foul language or high risk behaviors instead of shit hitting the fan over me telling over a dozen internet strangers family secrets that are embarrassing to anyone but me.

However, this story is hilarious, and apt, since it's her birth anniversary.

Like many mothers and daughters, we used to fight a lot. Like many mothers, she always wanted what she thought was best for me, and like a lot of daughters, I spent many of my teenaged years thinking that my mother was totally lame and soooo unfair. By the time I got to college, we had a reasonably okay relationship, as I was 500 miles away and rarely came home. Except when I decided to be a sassbox.

Right before I studied abroad in Greece, we had to make the trip to the nearest consulate to acquire my student visa. There wasn't anything anywhere near Hometown, of course, and so we were faced with the unfortunate drudgery of driving to and from Chicago in early January. The parents of my bff, Mr. H, were kind enough to take my mother and I in for the evening at their house in the suburbs so that we didn't have to make the 12 hour round trip drive in one day.

Mr. H and I have been close friends since we were 18 years old. We have not dated and do not plan on dating, and my mother, like Billy Crystal, always had problems understanding a close male/female friendship.

On the very long ride very gray home after spending the night with Mr. H and his family was when the hilarious fight happened. She was talking about what a nice boy that Mr. H was, asking if he had a girlfriend. I shouldn't have gotten out the ol' sass pistol, but, like most idiot 20 year olds, I couldn't resist.

"What, do you want to date him? Mom, you're married! To my father! I cannot support this!"

She didn't like that at all and began to badger me about why I had not dated that nice boy. I explained to her that he and his friends were my friends and I didn't like any of them in a pants-taking-off kind of way.

My mother, agitated, began to explain to me that never again in my life would I be surrounded by so many single, attractive, smart, Catholic boys and that I would be an absolute fool to go through four years at Notre Dame without at least picking one of them out and dating him till the cows come home.

I explained that I didn't even want to get married until I was 30 and that meeting someone at the age of 20 and dating them for 10 years didn't appeal to me, plus I had never really lived out in the real world and suspected that I had a lot of growing up to do.

She said that while I was "growing up" (I think she used air quotes), ugly girls would be marrying all of the cute guys.

I said that she was being ridiculous and I'd rather be with an ugly guy who's really funny than a dumb Notre Dame jock.

She was getting angry. "Why don't you even consider trying to see things from my perspective? I don't want you to be unhappy. I just think you're wasting yourself hanging around with guys all the time, guys that you don't want to date!"

I responded, sort of impishly, "I like my social life the way it is and want to preserve it forever and ever."

That was the last straw. Mom was turning bright red, and her patience had run thin.

"When are you going to realize," she said, her voice raised dangerously, "THAT THE WORLD IS NOT SEINFELD AND YOU ARE NOT ELAINE?!"

I didn't dare laugh, but holy shit was it difficult.

I love my mom, and I love these little stories of silly fights we had, because they're in the past. We had a bit of a rocky relationship when I was growing up, but now I look at her and she just seems cooler and cooler to me, someone that I want to emulate, not in career choices or lifestyle choices, because hers wouldn't make sense for me. But the person she is, the way she handles problems-- how fucking tough and smart and curious about the world she is-- is really admirable.

And this admiration that I've developed for her as an adult is part of the reason I agreed to run the Chicago Marathon with her next year, even though I hate running and I think that marathons are stupid. I want to do this with her, maybe to make up for past insolence and maybe to express my newfound friendship and also to prove that I really am not trying to be Elaine Benes. I can't imagine Elaine ever running a marathon.