My computer has definitively died. It won't even turn on. That's the first reason I won't be posting regularly until the middle of January when The Student Loan Sugar Daddy comes whistling to town, showering me with spa treatments and cashmere and a new laptop only to vanish suddenly in the middle of March.
The second reason is because I'm leaving soon for my Ski Adventure! Seven ski resorts in two weeks! Sounds great, huh? For me it's kind of like therapy. We're going to all of the resorts at which I've seriously hurt myself, gotten lost or buried, gotten kicked out of, or gotten yelled at by ski patrol. I like to close doors.
The third reason is because I'm a little miffed about the lack of comments on that Bob Villa post. That's all I'm saying. You've had all
kinds of time.
Sporadically for now,
Estella
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Merry Christmas!
I've got fourteen people here watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and the waffles and bacon poureth with much bounty. Love to everyone.
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Sears And Bob Villa Think Women Only Have Opposable Thumbs For Hand Jobs.
or
The Post That Has Virtually Nothing To Do With Christmas.
I saw a commercial today for Craftsman socket wrenches; it starts out with Bob Villa leaning over the open hood of a souped-up car with some greasy, puffed-up buzz-head in overalls and a fifty pound tool belt. They have a heart-to-heart conversation that goes something like this:
BOB: "What seems to be the trouble there, Buzz?"
BUZZ: "Well, I was working on my drive shaft you know, and I had just removed the shifter shaft and dug out all of the old brushing when I realized that the bolts were all completely rusted out.*"
BOB: "Well, shit, that's a heartache, Buzz, but you'll be glad to know that there's an easy fix for it..."
... and he launches in to his socket wrench sell.
THEN I see a
woman on the screen hovering over a Louis XIV chair. Blond pageboy held back with a tortoise shell band, lipstick that matches perfectly oval fingernails, pastel cardigan protecting shoulders. I can't remember exactly how this went, but I think it was something like:
INCOMPETENT WASP: [whines] "I was trying to fix the leg of this kitchen chair with my curling iron and a hammer, and now the little metal thingies are all... here, you try."
I hate Sears.
Sears hates Christmas and people with vaginas.
*Description stolen straight off of Google. Like I know shit about cars.
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No, seriously, Christmas is when?
Let's get the bitterness out of the way. Or, at least, let's do the bitterness first because let's face it; that's where the fun is.
1) R has this retarded giant stuffed reindeer that lives swathed in Hefty bags for 11 months out of the year and who gets yanked antlers-first out of the attic for December. R then props said reindeer up in the main hallway near the front entrance in a fairly predatory reindeer stance... regardless of what room you're in you will no doubt at some point catch this furry monstrosity or his monstrous furry shadow in your peripheral vision and split-second think that there's a furry hired assassin in the house. I hated this dusty bullshit creature plenty BEFORE I found the picture of R's ex-girlfriend RIDING on its matted furry BACK. And that's all I have to say about
that, frankly. I'm just that fucking disgusted.
2) Deciding to do a complete fondue dinner for ten people the day after you've just scrubbed your kitchen on hands and knees is an awesome idea, given that you get off on cleaning shit twice. NEXT.
3) There's this store about thirty miles north of me that has the most amazing FAKE stuff... fake designer handbags, fake designer jewelry... everyone's getting a Kate Spade bag or a Tiffany necklace this year. Fuck everybody who gives a shit. And fuck everybody who
doesn't give a shit, too. Christmas is a time for closeted resentment and seething frustration.
4) Off topic, I'm completely in love with the new Simply Red song "Sunrise"... the CD isn't available yet so I've been satiating myself by watching the
video. I could only do this once* because watching the aging and portly and increasingly rouged "Simply" interact with unbelievably hot "I think I'll pour this champagne over my breasts in slow motion while sensually writhing my supine body" supermodels makes me kind of sick. That fucking Simply. What an ass.
Oh. I apologize if I somehow inferred that there would be a "non bitter" segment. I could try to come up with one, but it would be all anticlimactic, like, "I still really like ham," and that's not going to do it, I'm afraid. Plus, to be honest, I'm not sure I'm all that crazy about ham these days. So I'd be lying,
*(seven times.)
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Sorry about the lack of posts; we bought the Christmas tree last night and had to deal with all of R's bullshit bachelor crap decorations (nothing says "Christmas" like a leaning tree with beads, tinsel, garland, M&M lights, chili pepper lights, all-blue-frantically-flashing-epilepsy lights... and when I say "Christmas", I mean "tasteless and flammable". It's not a Christmas tree in this house unless everything we own that lights up or wraps around is included. Including the "straight out of fuckin' Tijuana" Christmas star which is huge and hot pink and I'm pretty sure someone stole it off the wall of some cantina somewhere. I can hear the tree gasping for air through all that shit), the kids got into a huge fight about who was going to put the lights on the house (Christmas is
when, exactly?) and then we all had fondue. I haven't bought a single present. I do have all sorts of stuff to tell you but it gets to wait until tonight. I'm going to go scrape some tinsel out of my tree's gills so it can breathe.
Trees have gills.
Sometimes tinsel gets stuck in there.
Scrape them out with a spatula.
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I went to the porn store this afternoon for more White Elephant gifts, and after successfully avoiding the low looks of all the lone "hands in pockets porn trollers" I made it to the counter with my Lovin' Lamb and my chocolate tattoo stencil set. The girl behind the counter was straight up "I totally just work here" and really made me feel pretty gross for checking out the glass dildo collection behind the counter. Then I saw
these.
"These are the cutest things I've ever seen," I said, throwing two on the counter.
"Really?" she said, her tone exactly the same as if I'd just confessed that I like to be tied to the hood of classic cars and peed on. "What about
puppies? Aren't
puppies cute?"
"Puppies??" I asked incredulously. "Do they make these with little rubber PUPPIES you can suck on? Because I see the little penises, " I said, pointing into the bins, "and I see the little vaginas, the little butts... and this one looks like a little rubber liver, but I don't see any puppies."
"Uh,
no. They don't make them."
"OH. THEY DON'T? BECAUSE I COULD REALLY GET OFF ON SUCKING A LITTLE RUBBER TERRIER, I THINK. I SURE WISH YOU HADN'T MENTIONED HOW CUTE
PUPPIES ARE... I HAVE TO GO HOME AND LICK MY ACTUAL
DOG NOW."
If you're working in the biggest porn store in Arizona and there's a porn cafe and free porn coffee and a porn video rental club and free porn seminars and a really good porn return policy, DON'T BE AN ABERCROMBIE CUNT TO THE PORN CUSTOMERS.
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I GOT COOKIES FROM
DAYMENT TODAY!!! Thank you, Dayment! I went to bed last night at six and when I woke up a half hour ago I scratched myself and thought, "Man. I wish I had some
cookies." AND THEN I
DID!
The shell raptor guys got all bent out of shape and snatchy about the cookies. I had to let them
have one. They told me to tell you it was wonderful; all soft and chewy... The one complaint: not enough entrails.
Julia Roberts is on Oprah today, and I'm casually Endusting my living room table when I hear Julia actually say, "I don't like to think that I'm the center of the universe,
but..."
Fuck that. I'm watching
Joe Dirt on DVD again. David Spade seems pretty positive that he's not the center of the universe.
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What It Is.
It's two in the morning.
It's me and Christopher Cross and eighty-hundred dusty library books spattered with arbitrary hot-pink Post Its.
It's me justifying a cocktail based on the principle that I haven't had a single drink
TODAY.
It's Anne Tyler rolling her eyes.
It's me calling S at 1:45 and her picking up with "I AM
SO FUCKED" already spilling out of her "paper-due-on-Romantic-imagination-tomorrow" mouth.
It's two chewed up Bic pen tops at my immediate chewy command. Not like those goddamned Houdini nubbins. Fuckers.
It's knowing that if I can just get this crap done I can spend all day tomorrow cleaning my "I threw a party for three hundred people last weekend and it shows like a sticky motherfucker" house.
It's not being at all excited about that last thing.
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I'm Exhausted And Completely Out Of Nubbins.
So the paper is done. Huge thanks to
Dayment and
B² for their enormous help. Dayment was there to offer rational assistance when my brain was still accepting information. We had conversations like,
D: "You should change X to Y and get rid of Z."
ME: "Yes, you're right; that's so much better. Thank you."
B² showed up hours into the darkness as shit was falling down. Our conversations were more like:
B²: "C'mon, one more paragraph!"
ME: "NO."
I left B² at five am so that I could drive down to campus, sneak into the English building and turn that fucker in. If it's there before the prof gets there in the morning, then technically it got there the MINUTE after she left the night before. Really. It's some kind of theorem.* I was even all prepared with my dismayed and spontaneous "Oh, I'm so sorry I missed you!" note. I'm just that good. Or... bad. Whatever.
Now I get to work on the annotated bibliography that I keep telling people I've finished. Finished
thinking about, maybe.
And, without further ado, the
No Share Monster.
*Hey
Sonya, what's a "theorem"?
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I've finished the concrete draft of the paper... I'm now suffering the shockingly needed proofread. Well, zinfandel and I are doing it together. Zinfandel thinks that I should see how many times I can use the word "inevitable". I told him no; I already
know how many.
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Twelve pages.
One nubbin.
Very little cohesion.
No main point.
I'm going to bed. My nubbin will be here though. Keep the nubbin company until I get back.
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I'm nine pages in.
If I can get fifteen pages and be in bed by four, then I can sleep for a couple of hours before I proofread this insane piece of crap. I'm having
flashbacks.
And I lost two of my nubbins. I'm pissed. It's me and the other two squashed, screaming nubbins now.
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I have a paper on Thomas Nashe and Boethius due tomorrow. This afternoon my computer did the computer equivalent of throwing on a sportcoat, casually juggling car keys around and going out for cigarettes... LEAVING ME FOREVER WITH THESE GODDAMNED KIDS. When I rebooted I got that "safe and tiny" version of Windows, which could be the scariest shit I've ever seen in my LIFE (and, in case you were curious, is the computer equilvalent of a heart-racingly hopeful birthday card from your recent ex-boyfriend that your hands tremble to open but it's just signed "JERRY" and that's it) and of course my paper was gone. I managed to restore to sometime in late fucking OCTOBER and regained my BASIC OPERATING SYSTEM, but now I'm on the second page of a twenty page paper and my best idea is to just do a comic book of Boethius and Nashe wrestling.
I pulled all four little black rubber nubbins off of the corners or my laptop screen and I'm chewing on them right now.
Out of spite.
They get stickier if you suck on them for a while.
I love you, and I mean that.
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Google Fiction! Searches Incorporated Into Brief And Awesome Tales! Part... Like, Six.Tracy stood just inside her front window, peering anxiously through the miniblinds at the neighboring houses. She glanced at her watch. Five forty-two. The garbage man should be rolling through any minute. Tracy stretched her neck and surveyed the street again. Her trash can was the only one ready for emptying; its black lid yawned back, pop cans and styrofoam and toilet paper and a burned-out CPU and the door to the oven and a bunch of milk and other dairy products bursting out the top like a giant garbage pinata. All of her neighbors, Tracy saw, had left their cans primly rooted in their accustomed spots. There would be no pickup for them, it seemed. And why would there be? Even from her poor vantage point Tracy could see that the other cans were neatly closed and hollow; no sticky chicken blood on the handle, no dried vomit running down the side...
Wait! Something was happening. Tracy gulped her coffee and stared. Aha! Mr. Emersen from across the street! Tracy watched him quickly shuffle down his driveway, his oxygen tank bumping along behind him. He paused behind a tree "Old Sick Ninja In A Robe" style, gulping back the oxygen, rheumy eyes on re-con duty. He slowly made his way across the street and stood hunched in front of Tracy's can. The next thing she knew he was hobbling through his front door dragging his tank
and her oven door. What looked to be a pint of plain yogurt was pinched to bursting under his left arm.
Before she could even react, other neighbors began spilling out of their houses... Armless Mrs. Teal running toward Tracy's house with empty-sleeved abandon... Jim Finnegan racing by on a kitted-out Little Rascal, hook-arm outstretched to snatch Tracy's CPU and a gallon of egg nog before racing back home, taking the curb in four-wheel drive... Mysterious Illness Allen, shriveled and weeping in the arms of his capable caretaker Vanessa, pointing weakly to the styrofoam peanuts and shrieking...
Tracy, whitefaced, closed the blinds.
"Well," she thought. "That explains it. I guess it's true:
diseased people can't throw anything away."
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The Tuesday That I Thought Was A Thursday Until Ten Minutes Ago.
or
I Need To Maybe Tape A Calendar Underneath The Coffee Table.
1) I had a long talk today with
Dayment about enetation commenting. She was under the assumption that because I've been a paying enetation subscriber for six months that I would know to install it. After we established that I'm essentially "html" deaf and blind,
and she sought out another commenting system, we talked about cats and chickens and jobs and all sorts of things. That's the first time I've made "non blog" contact with a "blog world" person; unless you count my all-night drunken AIM exchanges with
B². Which I don't. Because he's family. Anyway. I feel all fuzzy inside.
2) I had the craziest dream last night, and
Bob, you were in it. I don't remember the details, but here are the highlights:
a) a restaurant that might have also been the Safeway Food and Drug;
b) a table for four on the frozen food aisle;
c) Bob explaining that the guy across from her was her agent, not her boyfriend;
d) Me stopping a shocked but polite
Kelsey Grammar , grabbing his hand that wasn't holding a shopping basket and pressing it to my heart while proclaiming my love for him;
e) Me suggesting to Bob and her "agent" that we should just sit in the restaurant-slash-grocery store until breakfast! ... Yes! Um, no. I got shot down.
f) a boat with a hatch that was just small enough to trigger the obligatory asleep claustrophobia;
g) a little baby that smelled like ham;
h) and, I think it goes without saying, The President of The United States of America on a forklift.
2.5) Kelsey Grammar?!?!? Yeah, I don't know. The rest of it... okay. Makes sense. But Kelsey Grammar, man... I don't follow.
3) The night of the "
Lovin' Lamb" party (mine was black, though, for nefarious innuendo as far as the Christmas eye can see), I managed to unwrap the "obviously a spare gift wrapped by the host in case there aren't enough" present; a candle that I swear to god is some sort of "crab meets olives meets weeds" combo. It alternately makes me crave Tabasco and makes me want to throw up. I can't figure it out. I might be getting addicted to it; I'm close to gouging little pieces out to hide in my pockets and rub on my inner arms.
4) And finally,
The Giant Mystery Chicken in all of his chickeny glory. I don't think I need to point him out. His chicken posture exudes cockiness.
5) BEST. PUN. EVER
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I meant to post about the horrifying dual-Christmas party experience that I suffered this weekend, but I can't yet because a) I'm meeting with a woman who hasn't told me that she won't chair my thesis committee, and I think I should have something aside from a rash and a chewed pencil to show her in... two hours and twenty minutes; b) I still can't think about certain hazy aspects of that second party without having to physically shake images from my head or laugh hysterically while punching a pillow in the face.
I promise, though, that when
I can deal with it,
you'll hear about it.
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The Worst Thing That R Has Ever Done
or
You Best Cut The Line, Motherfucker.
I had just gotten home from class Wednesday evening and I was curled up in a chair, enjoying a glass of cabernet and listening distractedly to Extreme Makeover while reading Playboy when the phone rang.
"I'm SO NOT HERE," I said to R. I knew in my soul that it was one of three people, and I also knew with complete certainty that there was no way that I could talk about a) my parents' furinture business, b) M's baby's third tooth, or c) S's ex-husband without my head literally exploding into the receiver and all over the Playboy. Which would be a shame. It's the Fiftieth Anniversary one.
R picked up the phone.
"Hello?... Yeah, she is. HOLD ON A SECOND."
UN. REAL.
I turned to him with the devil perched and smirking on my forehead and I pointed my finger into his lava core.
"TEN FOLD," I mouthed, my ear already sweating.
He is now officially available
FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. PARTICULARLY FOR SISTERS-IN-LAW, EX-WIVES AND UNEDUCATED MEN SELLING ALUMINUM SIDING. UNLESS YOU'RE INTERESTED IN COVERING THE MOUTHPIECE IN EMBARRASSMENT WHILE GRUNTING "NO THANKS, I'M REALLY NOT INTERESTED", I'D START LOCKING THE DOOR TO THE BATHROOM, MOTHERFUCKER. IT'S
ON.
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I'm in class last night (the last class of the semester) and we're discussing
Twelfth Night and someone mentions that the BBC film wasn't fantastic and then I'm reminded of a truly horrible Shakespeare film catastrophe that Kenneth Branagh surprisingly took evil part in and so I ask, "Has anyone seen that ridiculous version of
Love's Labours Lost with Alicia Silverstone?" whereupon "I'm Mesmerized By My Own Hair" Girl turns to me and goes, "Um, are you thinking of
Clueless?"
No.
No, I'm not thinking of
Clueless, you life-sucking, Frappacino-addicted, rayon-suit excuse for a woman.
A-HA. But here's why I had little room for haughty maneuverability:
I'm in class last night (the last class of the semester) and we're discussing
Twelfth Night in terms of gender transgressions, specifically the autonomy that Viola's cross-dressing lends her, and I say, "There was another text that we read this semester that included a female character who pretended to adhere to Petrarchan stereotypes in order to allow herself more independence and mobility... what was that? Remember? With the countess? And she agreed to marry the count and the lord and that other guy who had saved her, but she really wasn't going to marry any of them and we found that out because the visitors from the future were hiding behind the wall of the castle waiting for their time-machine to come back and their earpieces were... "
I was thinking of Michael Crichton's
Timeline.
Nevermind. I'll just be over here, thinking about
crap.
The perfect excuse to make fun of someone until they cry and leave the room, and I go and fuck it up with Crichton. AGAIN.
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I was frantically rooting through some crap in the "office" a few minutes ago; I have a paper proposal due in three hours and I was hoping to find something--
anything-- to use as a "this is totally off-topic but at least I'm not completely retarded" guide. What I found instead was a paper I wrote two years ago on
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The title page looks like this:
"Reflections of The Self As Seperate To The Whole In The Works Of Samuel T. Coleridge"
or
"'Does This Dead Bird Make Me Look Fat?'
Mirror Images and Faulty Perceptions In
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
The paper requirement was twenty pages. Mine was nine and a half. I got a big fat A.
Sometimes I forget how fucking good I am.
It's marshmallow breaktime, yo.
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I Just Ate My Weight In Baba Ganoush And Boy, Was It Expensive.
1) I don't really have the wherewithal to outline my entire trip blow by hideous blow. I purposefully didn't mention that I was going
here for Thanksgiving because I didn't want to deal with my own haughty hypocrisy.
Ha ha! Not really. I was just in regular old denial. The only reason that I agreed to go (read: "didn't chop my hand off at the wrist and then say 'Aw, shoot, and I just finished packing my shittiest clothes and everything!' while applying an obviously too-loose and somewhat hard-to-survive tourniquet") was because R purchased a super deluxe
TRAILER! With a super deluxe potty and a super deluxe shower and a super deluxe stove and everything! So when I said I hadn't showered since Wednesday? That's because I'm just a dirty person. R caved and cleaned himself. He even
shaved. What a dirt pansy.
2) R actually went in on this trailer with another guy a few months ago. Partners. The other guy took the trailer out first so he could pop all the tires and roll it over on the freeway. Sweet. That's not really pertinent but it's funny as shit.
3) At night, when 100,000 insanely drunk whitetrash campers were busy throwing magnesium and gasoline into their campfires, and dirtbikes were racing each other blindfolded, and hottie seventeen year olds were asking random guys to hold their Coors so that they could get their baby tees over their heads, I was sleeping. C was out with a bullhorn, a digital camcorder and a fake "GIRLS GONE WILD" neck lanyard. Because C is a genius and my idol.
4) I told R that for Christmas I want a personal trainer.
"Do you want to get back into triathlon mode?" he asked. "I know a guy who specializes in stamina training."
"No," I answered. "Let's start small and see if we can just get someone to make me stop eating Pringles. Like a Pringles Sentry."
"Ooooh." His eyes get wide. "We'll need four trainers then; one for regular, one for sour cream and onion, and then two backups for when you bludgeon the first two."
R underestimates my bludgeoning.
GIRLS GONE WILD scams
work, Dog.
"Pringles Sentry" sounds like "Keyless Entry". Only with more bludgeoning. And less opening.
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