Sunday, July 30, 2006

in which i discuss the finer points of asshaberdashery

School is over mofos!!! Done, done, done! I even had a conversation with my writing instructor on Thursday about what a great writer I am. Capital fellow.

So, do you guys remember that asshat insurance company guy who once told me I looked 30? Well, he was in my office again on Friday, and during the course of a visit that lasted only 5 minutes (seriously), he managed to offend me in four separate, fairly elaborate ways:
  1. He complained to me about how he has to go to another wedding in Hawaii and it's soooo expensive, because his wife has to buy a new dress. I'm confused about why a $125 dress (his dollar figure) would be his main concern when he also has to buy plane tickets and stay in a hotel in Hawaii during peak season. Wait, no I'm not. But I am baffled as to why he thought I would be sympathetic.
  2. When he complimented my hair and said something about how it must be easy to take care of, I stupidly responded by laughing and telling him that I haven't brushed my hair in months. He said, "Oh, really? Are you going to grow dreads?" In all seriousness. All seriousness, folks. Unless I'm missing something major about the appearance of my hair, such a question would appear to be ridiculous on its face, yes? To be fair, though, I knew it was giving him too much credit to expect him to respond to that assertion like a human being, and I went ahead and said it anyway. So I guess I was asking for it.
  3. He complained about how he lives like an old man because he never goes out, goes to bed at 10:00 every night, and spends all his free time with his wife and his dog. Oh, and he looks really old, too. I almost, almost, almost told him that noooo, he only looks about 30 or so. (He's actually 23, get the joke?) But I pitied him so, forced as he is to spend every evening with his dog and sartorially profligate wife, and I couldn't be that cruel.
  4. Lastly, at the end of our time together, the two of us played out this little skit we do every goddamn time he sees me where he asks me how my boyfriend's music is going, and I say, "Oh, it's fine, yes, he's still playing guitar," and then Asshat goes, "Has he played any gigs lately?" and then I go, "No, he's never played a 'gig,'" and he goes, "Oh, I swear you told me he had a band," and I go, "Yeah, he and I used to have a band together as a hobby, years ago, but we never played any shows or anything, it was just for fun," and he goes, "Oh, I could swear you told me your boyfriend was in a band," and I go, "Nope," and he goes, "Are you sure?" and I go, "Uh huh," and then he spends some time trying to convince me that I must be forgetting something about how my boyfriend is in a band without me that plays gigs all the time, until eventually he gives up in disgust.
I'm beginning to think this guy might be toying with me. If so, he's possibly the greatest comic genius the insurance industry has ever seen. If not, he's arguably the greatest chucklehead. The former wouldn't be saying much at all, the latter would be saying, oh, quite a lot.

Moving on. In other news, I've decided that what the world needs now is more boys with rat-tails. Ha ha, boyfriend! You thought I was going to give up on that, didn't you? Never! GROW ONE YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

Okay, so I'll leave you with this. SBTB QOTD. The best thing ever to happen on this internet of mine. Boyfriend, I've had to work so hard to keep this a secret until such time as I could blog about it. I don't quite know why, but I didn't want it to come to you directly from me. I wanted it to come from the internet. More pure that way, I guess.

I want pancakes.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

closer and closer

Today I finished the last requirements for my History course. No more History, forevermore. I forswear it.

Tomorrow I take my Math final. That last exam I wasn't sure if I passed? 93.51%, babies. I am too sexy for my calculator. You may kiss my ring. Nooo, not that one, try again.

Tomorrow I also have to write an in-class essay on the thematic differences between Raymond Carver's stories and Altman's adaptation of said stories for Short Cuts. Let me just see if I can get this straight. In the stories, some common themes I've identified are:
  • loneliness
  • isolation
  • sorrow
  • divorce
  • drunkenness
  • sex
  • violence
  • envy
  • wistfulness
  • fishing.
However, I'm thinking it might be a problem that this is all I got out of the movie:
  • Tom Waits plays an excellent drunk. (I've said it before, and I'll say it again.)
  • Robert Downey, Jr. is brilliantly deranged.
  • In 1993, Tim Robbins looked shockingly good in motorcycle cop regalia (and I do mean shockingly; it's forcing me to question my entire belief system, folks).
  • Black people are mean, unless they're married to white people, who appear to have a civilizing effect.
  • Children die, except the disgusting ones.
  • Lyle Lovett's hair has never, ever looked like it belonged on a human.
  • You bastard. You bastard.
The know-it-all guy in my class thought the plotline about the kid getting hit by a car was completely fucking hilarious. Every time we saw the kid lying on his hospital bed, he'd guffaw loudly and go, "He's going to die!" I'm not completely sure Altman was playing it for laughs, but far be it from me to question someone else's interpretation.

I am getting so drunk on Friday.

Friday, July 21, 2006

let us all shed a tear

For we will all be missing Imperial Teen at the Knitting Factory tomorrow night. And they have new songs, too.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

loud mouth noises

My horoscope this week says that I should "Liberate [my] grunt." Apparently "making loud mouth noises loosens your inhibitions, boosts your confidence, and lubricates your power." It sure doesn't feel like my power is getting lubed up, though, when I'm out there every day screaming "FUCK! FUCK! FUCKING MOVE YOUR FUCKING MOTHERFUCKING ASS!" at all the other cars on the road. And those are some of the loudest mouth noises I know how to make.

As you may have noticed, I'm having some school issues right now. I have approximately one more week to go, and a third of the class work left to do. I took a math test yesterday that I'm genuinely not sure I passed. (I'll now remind you that if I don't get straight A's in all of these classes, I lose a year of my life.) I was seconds away from turning in an assignment in class last night when I realized that everyone else had done it in a completely different format than me, so I rushed home, re-did it, and emailed it to the professor. Who told us at the beginning of class that he only checks his email once or twice a week. This was half the grade for a stupid pass/fail one-unit class in research skills that they tack onto freshman comp., and I'm now concerned that I've failed that class, which I couldn't even re-take without re-taking the whole shebang.

I have this problem where my — instructors? professors? I never know what to call them at a community college — say something and I understand it one way, but every single other person in the class understands something else. I'm pretty sure this is because I'm hearing more or less what the words really mean, and everyone else is somehow magically pulling the thing that was actually meant out of their asses based on, like, the instructor's facial expression or something. In other words, I don't speak Human, I only speak Book. Except that it happens with written assignments, too. So, anyway, I'm constantly terrified that I've done whatever the assignment is completely wrong and will fail it because I don't listen right.

And here's another goddamn thing. My writing instructor firmly believes that "it's not just this thing, it's the other too" constructions are comma splices. He's commented on the same exact construction in two different papers. (And, I might add, that's the most substantive feedback he's given me.) In both papers, I had fucking sentence fragments all over the place, I had excessive parentheticals, I had far too many emdashes, I started sentences with "and" and "but," and I'm pretty sure I even did things that are closer to comma splices than that. But no, that's the only thing he doesn't feel is acceptable as a stylistic choice. And I probably did it in my third paper, too. This is why I'll fail freshman composition.

Actually, I have to admit, I'm mostly upset with my instructor because he gave me only a 97 on my second paper. And I don't know why. He gave me no concrete indication of what made it not as good as my first paper. Yes, I know, 97 is still a very good grade. But let me tell you a little story. I was sitting in the classroom on Monday, waiting for class to start, when another girl in my class started asking the rest of us what grade we'd gotten on our second papers. Everyone remembers from elementary school that asking people what grade they got on something is just an excuse to talk about what you got yourself, right? So, of course, after carefully establishing that she had a higher grade than anyone who had actually bothered to answer her question, she started talking about how she got a 95 and she had written it in, like, 20 minutes the day it was due, and her father even read it and told her it was bullshit, and yadda yadda yadda.

So it's bad enough that I spent all weekend on my paper and someone who wrote hers on the same day it was due (though 20 minutes has got to be an exaggeration) got a grade only two points less than mine. But it gets worse. Later on in class, the instructor was trying to start up a discussion on race, and we were talking about, er, the n word. (He made us watch an episode of Oprah featuring the cast from Crash. Let's never speak of that again.) At her very first opportunity to speak, this same girl busted out angrily, "You know, they really need to decide whether it's okay to use that word or not. I mean, they've been trying for all this time to fit in and be like everybody else and now there's this word that they can use and we're not allowed to? They just need to make up their minds about it."

I'm going to let that sit for a second.

And then I'm going to point out that this is the same girl who tried to argue that there are, in fact, plenty of positive images of women in movies, cause what about Snow White and Cinderella and stuff?

And then I'm going to point out that she wears these big, fat, white, puffy Dolce & Gabbana sneakers every single day, which if you had ever seen them you would understand to be an even more reliable indicator of mental retardation than the above comments.

So, what I'd like to know is, how bad must my second paper have been, really, if it was only 2 points better than hers? It's upsetting.

* * *

Ha, UPDATE: I got an email back from my writing instructor, who says that I did the assignment fine. He also says — well, I'll blockquote it, just because I think it would look good in a frame:
Your writing, by the way, is always clear and all of your chosen topics are highly interesting. The level of sophistication should earn you a grade higher than an A. It's a real pleasure following your thought on paper.
I'm thinking of embroidering it on a pillow. I'm also thinking of writing him back to say, "then why, then, the fuck did I only get a 97 on that paper?"

Now I'm shutting up about school.


Wednesday, July 19, 2006

request

Please, please, please, will someone remind me why I want to go back to school? I'm not kidding, not even a little bit. I really can't figure it out right now. I know there are are reasons, though, so give them to me, please. As many as you can think of.

Also, a hug would be nice.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

george w. bush likes to fuck cats, is what i'm saying

So. There's video and photos here (I found it through here) of that catfucker we've got running this country giving a sneaky, uninvited neck massage to Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. Who it just so happens is a woman. Heeeeey, pop quiz!!

This incident is an example of:
(a) a stand-up guy just trying to be nice to one of his fellow world leaders who he thought looked tense
(b) a monkey accidentally set loose among a group of international statespeople
(c) a first-class catfucker making sure that the only woman in the room is good and aware that she can't expect men she barely knows to respect her personal space, much less her right to run a country of her own

Every woman in the world has probably experienced this same move a few times. When it comes from a man you don't know well, it's not a kind gesture, it's a power play — the guy is telling you that he doesn't have to wait for either tacit or explicit permission to touch you, he can do whatever he wants to your body, and he can do it any time he wants. But he's disguising it as a little gift to you so that if you get upset, you'll look like the one who's being unreasonable — after all, he was just trying to be nice. And it's a pretty good bet that Merkel is familiar with the strategy; just check out the look on her face.

I don't think that this is a conscious thing that men like The Catfucker do, and I certainly don't mean to say it's never okay for a man to give a woman a shoulder rub without asking her permission first (uh, speaking for myself, to anyone who knows me well enough to read this blog, please feel free! anytime! just watch the sunburn!). But when it's a man you don't know well enough to have established that level of familiarity with, and especially when it's someone you're having professional (or political) dealings with, there's an implied threat there. It's a watered-down and disguised threat of physical violence, and the message is, do not challenge me, little lady, because I don't even have enough respect for your right to control your own body to ask before I touch you in a familiar way, so you certainly don't think I'd feel any compunction about hurting you if you got in my way, do you?

For more, be sure to check out this video of The Catfucker using a woman's clothing to clean his glasses.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

it's morrissey week in pieland!

So, here's a funny thing that happened to me. On Friday, at my company's barbeque, while I was busy getting red and splotchy, this British guy who works in my office told me that he had looked at my MySpace profile and seen that in answer to the question about who I'd like to meet, I'd replied, "Morrissey." He then told me that Morrissey went to his school, and in fact he was from the part of Manchester whence also emanated the Happy Mondays, and others of that kidney. He didn't know any of them, though, he just saw them around town sometimes. Can I just say, I think it's completely awesome that a person would go to the trouble of telling me something like that just because they read on my MySpace profile about how I'm ironically obsessed with Morrissey. People are fun.

Also, this is fun.

And now back to paper-writing. If anyone would like to come over to my house and kill me right now, I will totally come and pick you up. I'm afraid I won't be able to give you a ride back home, but you can have my car if you want.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

no! no!

Bad The Hoff! That is not what puppies are for.

Monday, July 10, 2006

some dizzy whore, 1804

Hey guys, check it out, it's Morrissey reading Byron in the bath. And Morrissey's bathmat, which reads, "THERE IS A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT." Morrissey, pompadour rustling in the wind, being handed a package wrapped in plain brown paper by a very happy little boy. Morrissey mooning through the snowy streets of smalltown America wearing a giant black overcoat (and walking kind of like the Sheriff in Deadwood). Morrissey reading Le Petit Prince on a street-corner. Morrissey snapping a photo of the Dairy Queen. Morrissey in a hat at a drugstore counter. Morrissey on a motorcycle (a white Indian, natch). Morrissey defacing private property. Morrissey in glasses, mooning on a windowsill, his camera gazing at him wistfully. Morrissey in the country. Morrissey sitting on a haystack. Morrissey driving a red tractor. Morrissey banging a drum, encircled by cows. Morrissey mooning in a cemetery, Morrissey carrying a large dog through the snow, Morrissey mooning in a cemetery, Morrissey mooning in a cemetery, James Dean's giant transparent head, Morrissey mooning in a cemetery.


An idle question: if Wilde beats Keats and Yeats, do you think Byron beats Wilde? And wouldn't that be a much cooler game than rock-paper-scissors?

Saturday, July 08, 2006

an animal within an animal

I am so excited about these quotes I found from old Greek dudes about how freaky the lady-parts are. (I cannot remember where I found them, though, which is really frustrating me.) This first one refers to the theory (which has yet to be proven, so far as I know) that too little heat in the womb while a fetus is, you know, fermenting or whatever, prevents the body from being formed correctly, resulting in a lady-fetus. Oh, and there's a little intelligent design thrown in for good measure.
So too the woman is less perfect than the man in respect to the generative parts. For the parts were formed within her when she was still a foetus, but could not because of the defect in the heat emerge and project on the outside, and this, though making the animal itself that was being formed less perfect than one that is complete in all respects, provided no small advantage for the race; for there needs must be a female. Indeed, you ought not to think that our creator would purposely make half of the whole race imperfect and, as it were, mutilated, unless there was to be some great advantage in such a mutilation.
And this one really needs no introduction:
In the middle of the flanks of women lies the womb, a female viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks, also upwards in a direct line to below the cartilage of the thorax, and also obliquely to the right or to the left, either to the liver or spleen; and it likewise is subject to prolapsus downwards, and, in a word, it is altogether erratic. It delights, also, in fragrant smells, and advances towards them; and it has an aversion to fetid smells, and flees from them; and, on the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal.
I have to say, boys, you don't know what you're missing. It is so much fun to have a little pet inside of you!

And, finally, this one's from good old Siggie, who's very like an old Greek dude, in so many, many ways:
The wish to get the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis, and what she may reasonably expect from analysis – a capacity, for instance, to carry on an intellectual profession – may often be recognized as a sublimated modification of this repressed wish.
So, folks, there you go. Now you know the really real reason I have this urge to get educated enough to carry on an intellectual profession.

Friday, July 07, 2006

You guys! You guys! It's Fridaaaay!

Full disclosure: I'm unironically wearing legwarmers today. Well, you know, as unironically as it's possible for me to do anything.

On the way to work this morning, I saw:
  1. An Audi TT with the vanity plate "QSIMODO." That's right, butt car.
  2. A van with a message across the back that read, "DO NOT TAILGATE. DOGS INSIDE." I considered tailgating in the hope that this would cause the back doors to fly open and the dogs to come out. And then the dogs would all come into my car and be my dogs.
  3. A man riding his motorcycle in boxer shorts.
It's definitely Friday.

Not visible on my way to work is the freeway overpass just after the northbound Carrillo entrance to the 101, which since Wednesday has had the words "IF YOU ONLY KNEW!" scrawled across it in three foot tall letters. There should be more wistful graffiti. I think that would be nice.

My summer classes are halfway through. Or will be after this weekend. I was supposed to have to write an in-class essay last night, but through the judicious combination of my lucky earrings and my lucky parking spot, I ensured that our teacher would spend too long explaining to us how to form a thesis and therefore have to cancel the in-class essay. We also spent a good deal of time watching Da Ali G Show in class this week, so I'm getting more and more reconciled to this school thing.

Monday, July 03, 2006

explodingdog: because i love it

Explodingdog is a dude named Sam who draws pictures from titles that people have sent him, and I've spent more time in the past week looking at his archives than I've spent sleeping. Well, that is a slightly massive exaggeration. But I couldn't narrow it down any farther than this.

eat a bag of dicks!!

  • That's what I'm going to program this thing to say. And then maybe I'll make a picture of a puppy for when people are nice. But probably not.
  • I think this is totally rad. Especially the Santa Monica Pier.
  • Also, here are some tiny little people in foodscapes. Most rad as well, wouldn't you say my good fellows, cheerio what eh!
  • ...aaaand it's Jello City! Wicked boss! Am I allowed to combine slang that way? Good God I'm bored.
  • "Then, he can shoot out his immaterial fiber or third attention to an object, concentrate on it and attain happy lucky feeling through the success of concentration." I'm denting my navel right now. It helps the boredom. No it doesn't.
  • You can't escape, people. How many times must you be told?
  • Okay, really, what could be so fucking bad for these motherfucking bunnies? Suck it up, guys. Points for creativity, though, obvy.
  • Speaking of bunnies:
  • Take that.
  • I'm afraid I have to ask you to ruin any appreciation for Weezer you might have left after hearing that "on drugs" song by reading this essay written by Rivers Cuomo. For a class at Harvard. From which institution of higher learning he and his giant brain just matriculated. Want to hear my favorite part? "I wondered if Muslim women veil their faces at least partly in an attempt to promote this kind of peace in both themselves and the men around them." Yes, Rivers. Yes, yes, yes! Those dirty sluts are just trying to avoid stressing everyone out with their evil, tantalizing faces! (You may proceed directly to the word doc here if the preceding PieSnarkTM was sufficient to meet your sarcasm needs with regard to this item.)
  • This here is a story about a tribe living in Brazil in which "nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art." Is it just me or is that really terrifying? On the other hand, the inability to do math would be an absolute mercy.
  • It's long past sleepy-time for me, now. I have another paper to write tomorrow before girding my loins in preparation for the dreaded Peer Review. Wish me immunity.