variations on a theme

Here are three conversations I've had within the past two days with people at work about how I'm going back to school. I've had more conversations than this about it, but this is a representative sample, and believe it or not, these were the three most interesting ones. Actually, I'm guessing none of you will have any trouble at all believing that.

* * *CONVERSATION 1.

Person 1: So, I'm going to be working part-time as of next week because I'm going back to school.
Person 2: Hey, that's great! What are you going back for?
Person 1: I'm going to be an English Major.
Person 2: Oh! What are you going to do with that?
Person 1: Well, pretty much all you can do with an English degree is teach.
Person 2: You could write!
Person 1: Yeah. I could do that now, though.
Person 2: Oh. That's true.
Person 1: Mostly, I just want an excuse to read books and talk about them.
Person 2: (Eyes widening) Oh, I can understand that! I love books! Have you read The Lovely Bones?

[As a matter of fact, I have read this book. It's told from the point of view of a murdered teenager looking down upon her wholesome family from a quite literal heaven. At one point she comes down from heaven and inhabits the body of a former classmate in order to have sex with the boy she had a crush on when she was murdered years before. The boy, obviously, senses her soul inside her classmate's body, and they have a heartwarming conversation, and in the meantime her classmate is up in heaven having a parade thrown in her honor (don't ask, because trust me, you don't care). And I think that's probably all you need to know about this book, not to mention all I can stand to say, except that it was atrociously written. It was airport reading, and it was so awful that it nearly put me off airport reading altogether, which would have been a tragedy, because browsing through the airport bookstore for something I'd otherwise never even consider reading is a completely innocent pastime which I am hoping to hang onto for a little while longer. Moving on.]

* * *CONVERSATION 2.

Person 1: I'm going to be working part-time as of next week because I'm going back to school.
Person 3: Oh, what are you going back for?
Person 1: I'm going to be an English major.
Person 3: Are you going to teach?
Person 1: Yes, well, that's about all you can do with an English degree.
Person 3: Have you thought about what grade?

* * *CONVERSATION 3.

Person 1: I'm going down to part-time as of next week.
Person 4: Oh, what are you going to be doing?
Person 1: Going back to school.
Person 4: Oh, really? What will you be studying?
Person 1: English.
Person 4: And what are you going to do with that, come back to insurance? Or teach?
Person 1: I don't know yet.
Person 4: Do you want to teach?
Person 5: I can see her being a teacher.
Person 1: (Helpless laughter)
Person 4: Oh, well, you're young.

* * *Suggestions for more interesting answers to the what-are-you-going-to-do-with-that question would be ever so welcome. I'm thinking "die in debtor's prison" might be too much of a downer, though.

THIS ONE IS NOT FOR EATING

My baby sister just text messaged me the news that this morning she expressed a male fetus weighing 6 pounds, 15 ounces. Well, okay, not expressed, because the doctors had to slice her open and extract the thing from her viscera, seeing as how it was disobligingly standing upright inside of her instead of doing a headstand like a good little fetus that wanted out of its mommy would do.

Ahem. What I mean is, congratulations to my baby sister on her baby baby. Also, sincere thanks to her for the opportunity to come up with ever more innovative, recondite, and just plain grotesque ways of talking about pregnancy and childbirth. Mostly, though, hooray for the miracle of childbirth! There's a new person in the world and he's related to me!

i have a thing for you all

It's some songs. Because I can.

Zager And Evans - In The Year 2525
The Knife - We Share Our Mother's Health¹
Smog - Whistling Teapot (Rag)²
Goldfrapp - Ride A White Horse³
Xiu Xiu - I Luv the Valley OH!
The Fiery Furnaces - We Got Back The Plague
Lou Barlow - Round-N-Round
Broken Social Scene - 7/4 (Shoreline)⁴
Beirut - Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)
Ben Gibbard - Farmer Chords
The Spinto Band - Oh Mandy
Shearwater - Johnny Voila
Jose Gonzalez - Deadweight on Velveteen
Timesbold - Longtime Man


¹ The Knife are playing at the El Rey in L.A. on Saturday, November 4th. Tickets are $32.75. It's the only concert I've wanted to see this fall that actually works with my class schedule, so I'm seriously considering it, and homework be damned. Anyone else interested? Please?

² The first time I heard this song I had accidentally hit the repeat button on the CD player, and I listened to it about 10 times straight through before I realized it was not actually one long, hooting, monotonous, callow, awesome song. I can wholeheartedly recommend this approach.

³ Unless I'm mistaken, and I don't see how I could be, the titular "white horse" is a Winnebago.

⁴ Can anyone with actual knowledge of musical theory confirm whether "7/4" is a reference to the time signature of this song?

A! N! N! O! U! N! C! E! M! E! N! T!

Ahem.

THIS IS SO EXCITING YOU GUYS!
Guess what the boyfriendicle did? Oh yeah. Uh huh. He started a you-know-what. A — yes, you do know what. I guess I can stop calling him "Boyfriend" now, since he's publicly admitted to having a name. It's Randall James! Or Randy, if you nasty.

Randall James! Randall James, welcome to this-here blogosphericle. Randall James, I thank you for bowing to the inevitable. Randall James, your blog is going to be awesome! Randall James, though, I must say I wish you would make your cruelty public. If you've got it, flaunt it. Don't hide your light under a bushel. That's what I never say. By the way, Randall James, I really like that you're Randall James, like Henry and William. Would you care for a pudding? It's Swedenborgian.

What? I'm going to bed now. As for the rest of you, you simply must visit RandallJamesBlog and show him some good lovin'. Instanter!

an aside

Hits on my blog today which list bogus referrers: 19. Nine claiming to be from Israel, one from Ukraine, one from the Maldives, one from Japan, one from the U.S., and six from the U.K. Most of the listed referrers are Russian LiveJournal friends pages which, needless to say, do not in fact link to me. This seems like a singularly ineffective way to disseminate spam. Has this happened to any (either) of my readers with blogs of their own? What's the game here?

in which i engage in a gendered activity, and then talk a little bit about underpants

I'm having a problem. By Christmas shopping time this year, I will be broke ass. That is my problem. In a nutshell. But I recently came up with a brilliant solution to this problem: I will make things for people, because I can totally get away with spending two dollars on a piece of crap from the drugstore if I act like I put effort into personalizing it. Right? Right. So I'm teaching myself to embroider, because it seems like the easiest possible thing, even if it does involve a needle and thread and therefore smell a little too much like Traditional Gender Role for my perfect comfort. I will simply have to remain vigilant against the temptation to embroider things with flowers, or wedding dresses, or the phrase "I'm too pretty to do math" — you know, whatever it is the girls are into these days.

Anyway, so, in hot pursuit of what I am already beginning to suspect will turn out to be the chimera of cheap and lazy Christmas gift procurement, last night I embroidered my first embroidery ever. Would you like to hear about it? Yes, yes you would. Here it is: I embroidered a muted postal horn onto a pair of pink thong underwear. (And, hey, speaking of underwear, I just barely discovered that I put mine on inside-out this morning. That's endearing, right?)

Moving away (sort of) from the topic of underwear: if any of you would like to request a specific item with specific embroidery, please do so now. In fact, if you don't ask me for something specific, you're likely to get a leotard from American Apparel with some random Morrissey lyrics stitched onto it. Because that's my idea of a joke. And also of the perfect Christmas gift.

with mint jelly

I've been working on a post about Cool Hand Luke for a couple of days. (Why? Oh, why does anyone do anything?) But I can't seem to work it into a configuration that both seems unlikely to offend anyone, and actually says what I mean (and only what I mean). So for now, I'm going to talk about Sin City instead. Don't worry, I'll be brief, because all I have to say about this movie is that I saw it today, and there was no single moment of it that didn't make me want to eat my own kidneys, raw.

***correction(s)***

Boyfriend, or as I sometimes like to call him, Fact-Checker, has pointed out that the Anthony Stewart Head commercials were for Taster's Choice, not Folgers. That will teach me to rely on Google to verify my memories of the '80s, I guess. IMDB has the true story, plus more interesting facts about Mr. Head. I must absolutely take issue with his ranking as only the the 5th sexiest man on Buffy. What kind of crazy lunatic would rank him anything but number 2?

Fact-Checker also claims it's "1234 1234 rock facts rock facts rock facts" — three rocks fact and not merely two, as I previously represented it. Would anyone like to take my side here?

finally, a realistic commercial

This plus the Anthony Stewart Head cachet equals one new customer for Folgers. No, I do not care if it tastes like windshield wiper fluid.

Today, I:

1. had a nosebleed
2. was complimented on an article of clothing I was wearing by a woman running full-tilt past me along the sidewalk
   
3. found out I got an A in math (99!)
   
4. received a pair of jeans in the mail which are a full six inches too long, and which i do not plan on returning
   
5. learned about the aardvark (a member of the family tubulidentata!), the numbat (they have a degenerate jaw!), and bandicoots (it means "pig-dog"!), with special emphasis on bilbies (from now on I believe in the Easter Bilby!)
6. discovered that my hair is now long enough to make bangs
   

Why is it that I feel like numbered lists are any better than bullet points? Stupid, stupid.

So who's up for a pilgrimage to the new American Apparel for some pre-Fiesta pubic lice? Bring your rat-tails.

bullet points with a fist punch

• Today I bought these because I'm starting to get awfully nervous about this. One day, one day I'll be a grown-up.
  
• Question: How is it possible that Angelina Jolie's nipples are visible through her wetsuit? Answer: They are made out of diamonds. (Cf. Pynchon, Thomas, V.) You don't believe me? She just punched a fucking shark in the face in this movie. You do not even want to know what her balls are made of.*
• Big news: there is a special new birth control pill out now and it is called "YAZ." I don't want to start any blasphemous rumors, but.
• Ha ha ha ha ha sigh.
• I must give propers to Ginger (you may know him by another name which starts with the letter M and isn't as clever) for inventing the word "decockitation" on Friday night. And he was drunk, too. Boyfriend countered with "penisectomy," which is also excellent, but it turns out he didn't invent that one, so I can only give him half-credit. This is a conversation, by the way, that I didn't remember having until it was described to me this morning. In fact, I still have no idea why we were talking about castration. I didn't think I was that drunk, but ain't that always the way.
• This cat (warning MySpace aaah!) has something to say to you. That something is "deedle deedle deedle."
• As far as I'm aware, none of you have yet begun work on your rat-tails. You get one more warning, and then I'm going to start cutting off bits of my own hair, braiding them, and super-gluing them to the backs of your heads when you're not looking. That goes for all of you. Even the girl(s). I am as serious as a heart attack. Well, okay, maybe I'm only as serious as the mumps, but you still don't want those.
  
• And now good night, moons. I will leave you with a quote from Deadwood's Calamity Jane. Don't take it personally: "Fuck yourself with a fist punch, up the ass, today, at the present moment!"
  

*It's adamantium. 12341234 rock facts rock facts!