an open letter to every living being on this planet, from me, incandescent and trembling with rage

Dear Envelopes of Blood and Suet, Filled With Rancid Bullshit:

Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck your mother, and fuck you again. Fuck you. Eat a giant bag of dicks, fucks. Fuck you. I hope a giant fucking penis with teeth eats you all. Fuck, fuck, fuck you to hell, and then fuck you some more. Fuck you everlastingly. I wash my hands of you.

Fuck you,
Piehat

I hereby declare a moratorium on post titles, unless I have something clever. Which will never happen. Although I might get annoyed with how previous posts are being listed on the sidebar if I don't give them titles.

From George Eliot's Romola:

"I am somewhat late with my siesta on this hot day, it seems. That comes of not going to sleep in the natural way, but taking a potion of potent poesy. Hear you, how I am beginning to match my words by the initial letter, like a Trovatore? That is one of my bad symptoms: I am sorely afraid that the good wine of my understanding is going to run off at the spigot of authorship, and I shall be left an empty cask with an odour of dregs, like many another incomparable genius of my acquaintance."

And:

The conjuror was going on, when a loud chattering behind warned him that an unpleasant crisis had arisen with his monkey.

I'm so glad I started reading George Eliot again.

where my head is

I don't have to. But I want to.

one-liners: shut your degradation hole edition

• Walter Matthau’s nose was the inspiration for the popular insult term “knob-end.”
• It’s a Facticle^TM. Tequila is more vindictive than other alcoholic beverages. Tequila, why do you have to be so hateful?
• PAY FOR SOUP / BUILD A FORT / SET THAT ON FIRE. Just a reminder that you will never be as cool as Jean-Michele Basquiat.
• Where does all my time go? Oh yes.
• SOAPWAD. ROTFLMFAO.
• The company I work for has implemented a program which they have elected to refer to, with absolutely zero consciousness of irony, as the “Ministry of Fun.” MiniFun will be responsible for throwing beach parties, as well as for a process so far described to us only as “Employee Recognition,” which I can only assume is a euphemism for “special treatment.”
• Nnngggfffbbbbbbggg. Suicide pact, anyo — hey! goddamnit, you couldn’t wait ten seconds for me?
• I despise rhyme, alliteration, and homonym-based puns. They are the cheapest and most jejune forms of wordplay. Together, they form the Axis of Wordplay Evil. I’m not naming any names here, writers of Sex and the City, but I’m telling you now, so that you don’t have to hear it from the next intelligent person into whose pants you ill-advisedly try to rhyme yourself at a cocktail party: It is not clever of you to have noticed that two words sound like each other. You’re mentally retarded.
• I managed to drag my hungover ass to my friend’s birthday party tonight (only 45 minutes late), and was rewarded with the knowledge that my friend’s housemate went to high school with my brother. How small is this world, hey? I mean am I right, or am I right?
• I love university bookstores. In future, I plan to hang out at the university bookstore all the time on weekends and during spring break and stuff. It is the closest I’ll ever get to being a college student. But it’s enough.
• Related: in the immortal words of Amy Campbell, Girl I Went To High School With (and fellow early-colleger): People are insipid. I’m getting that tattooed on my neck. With the following addendum: When given the choice between (a) reluctantly allowing you to achieve, through hard work and the sweat of your brow, certain goals which you have, after much hemming, hawing, harrumphing, and soul-searching, finally decided, to your own great relief, to attempt; and (b) liquefying your soul — faceless bureaucracy will, with sickening inevitability, plump for the latter every time.
• I'm outie. I hope you all are feeling better than I am right now. Cause 24-hour hangover + the death of all your hopes & dreams = some pretty intense malaise. Unfortunately, I know that some of my readers have even worse stuff going on in their lives than I do. I'm so sorry. Here's a very earnest kitten, who just wants us all to be happy.
  

the melancholy and very local palliative of fuzzy things

If you apply enough of them, even local palliatives can numb every damned thing.*

*Here's hoping.

beef. liver. bacon.

One of the things I vowed not to do on this blog is talk endlessly about what google searches have led people here. Because seriously, is there anything more boring to everyone in the world who is not me? No, no, and again, most violently, no.

But of course, if I resolve not to do a thing, then said thing is instantly and, one might say, always already, a fait accompli. That is, one way or another, come hell or high water, I will do this thing which I have sworn not to do. It's really kind of admirable, don't you think?

So: I've just discovered that someone recently arrived at my blog through a search for the term "Unmarried Females." It was capitalized like that, too. Sorry, whoever you are, I don't have any I'm willing to give up. Also, I still get several hits a week on the "liveblogging the puppy bowl" post. I'm told as well that if you do a yahoo search for "waiting for the miracle piehat," that's the page you land on. I think I'm ready to forget about that now, okay, internet?

One last thing. Tom Waits puppy food commercial. Cheeseriffic! His (oddly rhyming) lawsuits against the people using soundalikes in an attempt to drag his good name back into this sort of thing now make perfect sense.

day of jubilee

So I am desperately needing a major high-five from each of you next time you see me. Because: My boss quit his job this weekend.

And today, the air smells like spring.

Plus, this was sitting in the parking lot at my office when I arrived this morning.

It's just what it looks like: a pickup truck wrapped in plastic, with a case of Pabst on its hood. If that's not a good omen, I don't know what is.

animalistic week

You know how every so often, you have one of those days when about fifteen different things happen to you? Not necessarily all good or bad things, just a really freakish volume of activity? Last Tuesday was one of those days for me. In fact, last week was one of those weeks. I’m still recovering, so for now I’m just going to post the item I was supposed to have posted last Wednesday but didn’t have time to proofread before I had to leave town. I present it to you un-modified, so when it talks about “yesterday,” it means Tuesday, March 7th. I make no apologies. You people know me well enough by now.

-----------------------------------------------------------
March 8, 2006

For the second day running, the coffee machine at work is broken. Because the free coffee is the only thing about this place that doesn’t make me want to festoon my neck with brightly-colored rubber bands in order to cut off the blood flow to that brain thingy up there, I am just a little petulant today. Also, those cock-teasing management whores hinted earlier this week that they might fire my boss, but seem to have backed out. Next time I am putting roofies in the bottled water at the board meeting. Or something. (It’s apparently “Blog Against Sexism” day or something, so, hey, rape joke!)

But. Look at this furry lobbie. Isn’t it hilarious?

Sigh. Moving on. Yesterday morning, I spent a memorable half-hour in a darkened room curled into fetal position, as a young man rubbed my breasts with a phallic instrument covered in lubricant and made periodic essays at unspeakably awkward small talk, all the while peering intently at a little screen on which my internal organs somersaulted grotesquely. Some time after this surreal incident, mostly recovered (the goo wiped off my chest with a hospital gown), I spent a no-coffee break flipping through the Santa Barbara Independent. Because I really don’t care about this town, all I ever read in the Independent are my two horoscopes. I now transcribe this week’s installments for you (horoscopes have been edited for content [references to Paris Hilton playing Mother Theresa removed to preserve the sanity of the innocent] and to run in the time allotted):

Virgo: It will be a rather animalistic week, Virgo – or at least it should be.

Libra: Be on the lookout to find value in things that no one else esteems. Find the hidden beauty that everybody has missed. Hunt for riches in the least likely places.

Upon reading these, I set to cackling with glee, for what was I doing later that evening? Why, I was going to see the band Animal Collective. On one occasion, I forced the boyfriend and the Idler both to listen to this band, and neither has ever spoken to me again. And, hey, it has “animal” in the name! Bravo, Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology, spot-on!

So how was Animal Collective? It was completely awesome, you doubters. They sort of thrashed, in an art-school-hipster ethereal-noise jam band kind of way. I’m not what you might call a jam band person, and I was handicapped by lack of earplugs and exhaustion, as well as frustration about a bank fraud matter I’d just uncovered on the drive down to the concert (someone counterfeited my ATM card and stole $1,000 from me, but it’s OK now), so I can’t really claim this was my favorite concert ever. Most of what they played was longer, slower, and less song-like than I would have preferred, and I hadn’t heard most of it before, which is odd because I own two of their three albums. But when they played songs I recognized, songs with an actual beat, it was absolutely fucking incredible. Their songs are very vocal-heavy — nearly everything features at least two or three layers of weirdo backing vocals — and I have never, ever heard backup vocals pulled off so well live. I was completely impressed. There was nothing delicate about this show, which is what I was expecting — it was straight-up screaming noise and solid musicianship. Plus, the singer/guitarist wore a cap with ear flaps (always a good choice); the guy in charge of making electronic noises wore a lamp on his head (like a miner) and threw his white-boy afro around like a madman; and the bassist, dressed entirely in white, either had really strangely-fitting pants, or had a little boner for the entire show. Love for the craft, my friends, love for the craft.

Now, moving on to the part that some of you might actually care about: the venue. The show was at the Vanguard, which is on Hollywood Boulevard just a few blocks from where I used to live, so you can picture the neighborhood. It’s one of those converted warehouses where the bathrooms have attendants and they charge $6 for a bottle of water at the bar (I am not even exaggerating). The blandly industrial façade of the building has been oh-so-carefully preserved; you have to go around to the side of the building and through a chain-link fence to find the entrance or any other indication of the building’s current purpose. Inside, last night, it was a sea of art school hipsters wearing ballet flats and thrift store fake fur collars over their $85 camisoles. After drifting for a while and not tipping the bathroom attendant (bank fraud! $6 water! no money left!), I ended up on the balcony, where the red fluorescent lights were unfortunately too dim for me to read my book. (Yes, I am actually this cool: I tried to read Villette at an Animal Collective concert. Y’all run along home to your mommies, now.) Instead, having an entire squishy couch to myself, I took a little disco nap while the second opening act was on (First Nation: lots of harmonizing vocals, pretty and boring). By the time AC came on, the floor was packed, but the balcony never even got crowded, and the view was better than it would have been for me, as a tiny short little person, on the floor. The balcony even had its own bathrooms. And, oh yeah, the sound was excellent.

I leave you with the following overheard exchange between two 18-year-old hipstertards:

Guy: This place is like a rave!
Girl: Well, I’ve never been to a rave, so.
Guy: Well, it’s just like this.
Girl: This is kind of hippie.
Guy: Yeah, raves are kind of hippie.

I’m not really sure what these two were on, but it was certainly not the heady cocktail of fatigue, aggravation, and blown eardrums I was tripping on at the time. Lord love 'em.

one-liners

• At this point I am prepared to have as many as ten of Will Robinson Sheff's babies. This one's for you, boys. But this one made me giggle.
  
• Why? Dear god why, why the fuck?
• A good phlebotomist is surprisingly hard to find. Yesterday, I was serviced by a good phlebotomist, who left only a tiny green bruise as evidence of her needle's journey into my vein. (I'm very sleepy right now.)
  
• Magical Grid of Bad Emo Hair.
  
• A confession: I've been watching Sex and the City. It's really really very, very bad. But I'm compelled. Why? I don't know. Why does anyone do anything?
  
• Boyfriend doesn't have enough fingers to do the "ies." This'll hafta do ya.
  

and her name means "cat" in japanese

I'm no mad slavering Neko Case worshiper, but I like her a lot. Plus I know some of you out there are convinced she's the girl Jesus. So: it's been brought to my attention that if you pre-order her forthcoming album, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, for $9.96 from Amazon (it's released on Tuesday), you will be able to immediately stream it online (in Windows Media format). Run along now, you have someplace better to be.

i am moderately well-travelled within my home country

I'm seriously geeking out about this tool for creating a map of the U.S. states you've visited. I've had a little map on my wall for years with the states I've been to circled. It is time to throw that mother out. Technology has finally caught up to my lifestyle. Anyway, I'm at 24 states, or 47%. I'm now thinking that when I go back to Maryland for my brother's wedding in May, I should try to find some kind of tourist attraction in Delaware. Look at that stupid little white spot.

I have to say, I'd feel better about this map if it colored the states I've been to blue. Seeing all those red states is giving me the vapors.

There's also a version of the tool for "countries visited," but I'm only at 1% of that map. Tss.

What's y'all's maps look like?

i am now impressed

I have three things I want to talk about. I intend to do so in a witty and eloquent fashion, but I’m warning you right now, it’s another liquid-brain week for the Piehat, so there’s a very good chance all you’ll get is sloshing sounds. But let’s see, let’s see.

Item: I went skiing. In all honesty, I don’t think I can exactly claim to have skied, but I went skiing. I rented equipment. I put on ludicrous volumes of clothing, including but not limited to: long underwear; butt-ugly ski pants; sweatshirt; jacket; ski socks; ski boots (which, for a person philosophically committed to flip flops, was quite the traumatic experience); gloves; hat; goggle-like sunglasses. I was hot. It was impossible to walk in the ski boots. I rode up a hill on the shuttle, which was a trailer pulled by a bulldozer. I took off the gloves and the jacket and drank a shot. I didn’t take off the hat because of my truly awful haircut (about which more later). I rode down the hill on the shuttle. I ate some french fries. I rode back up the hill.

I put the gloves and the jacket back on and took a “lesson” from a certain “Heinz,” a first-class (German) bastard, during which I learned how to put the skis on and take them off. I failed absolutely to learn anything else, including how to stop myself from flying uncontrollably down the hill, leaving crushed children in my wake, by any means other than intentional grounding of my person. I became very good at getting back up after falling over. (I don’t count this as a skill I learned in the class, because I figured it out myself long before “Heinz” got around to showing us how to do it.) Finally, I was abandoned by the rest of the class when it became clear that the hour or so left in the lesson was not sufficient time for me to make my way to the foot of the hill so that I could learn how to ride the ski lift.

In fact, I never made it to the lift. I made it to the foot of the “magic carpet” (like the moving walkway at the airport, only, you know, on a snowy hill) at around the end of the second hour. My friend and I then proceeded into the lodge, where we consumed artichoke dip and soda pop and grunted unintelligibly at one other until the slopes closed.

That sounds all kinds of awful, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. It snowed for a few minutes. That was nice. And actually, the moments when I wasn’t rigid with fear were fun. Eventually, if you beg enough, I may post a picture of me lying sprawled on my back in the snow, legs askew, arms akimbo, laughing desperately, bad haircut hidden by stocking-cap.

Which brings me to my next item. Does anyone else remember, years ago, when at least one or two of you people used to joke about making action figures of me? Like, I don’t know, Kung Fu Fighting Piehat, or Twin Set Piehat. I’m guessing I might be the only person who found this interesting enough to remember. But anyway, I have a new one: Ugly Dyke Piehat. Alternately, Let-Her-Boyfriend-Talk-Her-Into-Cutting-Her-Hair-Too-Short Piehat. Yep. Sorry to use the term “dyke.” I have no issue with lesbians. This haircut? It’s freaking me out. I can’t be responsible for anything offensive I might say. I cried for an hour after. I’ve never had a haircut that I really hated before. It scares me a little that I hate this one so much, since I’m pretty sure the only reason I hate it is that I genuinely think people might mistake me for a lesbian. What’s the matter with me? What is so wrong with being thought a lesbian? I don’t know. I’m finding out distasteful things about myself all the time. Anyway, if you see me caked in pink glitter at any point during the next month or so, rest assured that I didn’t run over a passel of twelve-year-old girls, I’m just trying to fem it up.

Another thing? Every part of my hair is now my natural color. Who else is totally freaked out by that?

Last item: School. I’ve talked to everyone in the world about it at this point, but let me make the formal announcement: I AM GOING BACK TO COLLEGE. College! I’m working through my issues with this, all of which, if you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance I’ve already tried to get you to reassure me about. So let’s set all that aside for the moment. I’ll just say: I am decided. I am doing this thing. I am firm and committed. Which is a good thing, because if I wasn’t, I would have given up a week ago, when it first became clear that school doesn’t really want me back. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m persnickety enough that the difficulty may have been what resolved me once and for all. School is over me? Fuck that bitch, he’s taking me back whether he likes it or not.

The difficulty is that between the three colleges I’ve attended in the past 11 years (11 years, fuckfuckfuck) I have attempted something like 70 units, and have a GPA of, best guess, 1.80. In order for UCSB to guarantee admission — which at this point is my best option — I must have a GPA of at least 2.40, and I must have at least 60 but no more than 89.5 transferable units. And the last 30 units have to be from a California community college (currently: 19).

So far, I’ve had to jump through innumerable flaming goddamned hoops to figure out what classes will and won’t transfer to UCSB, and I still don’t have any real answers. Once I figure that out, I will have to get my high school transcript. (How could that possibly still be important at this stage?) I will also have to take a math assessment test, and worse, a math class. I took a sample math test and could barely do the first level, so I might have to take more than one math class. I will definitely have to take two semesters of Freshman Composition. In order to get my GPA up, I will have to re-take 4 or 5 classes I failed or nearly failed, including one class I’ll have to retake online from an old school because it’s not offered at Santa Barbara City College. And, if I want to start at UCSB before I turn 30, I have to do all this by the end of this year, while working full-time, without letting my employer find out that I’m taking any classes.

So far I’ve met with three counselors at SBCC and UCSB. I’ve applied to two different community colleges for Summer 2006, I’ve filled out a FAFSA, I’ve tracked down course descriptions back to 1995 at two different schools, and I’ve spent hours making Excel spreadsheets detailing every possible GPA scenario. If burning the old school records and starting over completely was an option, I’d do it in a hot minute. But I was told at my first counseling session that not disclosing previous classwork is considered fraud.

So I guess this is what they mean about the whole “permanent record” thing, huh?

From the At Least I'll Always Have This file: yesterday, someone found my blog through a search for the word "perverse."

sigh

I require a new pair of light brown mid-heel pointed-toe slingbacks. The pair I've had a very happy relationship with for many years are now officially past their prime. Mainly because, ever since I wore them for a week straight when I went back east for my sister’s wedding in November, they’ve been harboring the clammy ghosts of eastern seaboard winter foot-sweats.

Skiing and school reports TK. I mean it.