I got a notice a while ago that Blogger is discontinuing my preferred method of blog publishing. So, as you can see, we’ve done a little switcharoo around here. I’m going to go through the imported posts and make sure all is well, but it looks like they all showed up with two Ds for a double dose of blogging.
Happy Monday, my friends.
I read somewhere (Twitter, probably) that Coke Zero tastes like “existential bankruptcy.” Well, having finally tried it, I can only agree.
But…it does taste more like Coke Classic than Diet Coke. So I guess that means that Coke Classic also tastes like “existential bankruptcy,” but Chapter 7 existential bankruptcy (“real” bankruptcy) as opposed to the Chapter 13 (“reorganization”) bankruptcy of Coke Zero.
Your life is filled with terrible emptiness either way. I think I’ll stick to water, then.
(Sometimes I like to take a metaphor not to its logical conclusion, but much farther than it should ever go. You’re very welcome.)
You people, with your stupid little blogs filled with pictures of your stupid “perfect afternoons.” You can suck it.
You know who you are.
You’re the people who go to the state fair and take pictures of funnel cakes. The folks who go apple picking and laugh and laugh and take pictures of everything, pictures that are “just so.” It’s infuriating. You’re the people who somehow manage to make and do everything by hand, despite having seventy jillion children under the age of nine — all while cataloguing it and sharing it with your adoring fans online.
You, with your perfect autumn light. You, with your sunny dispo-fucking-sition. You — you most of all — with your simple, glorious recipes and seemingly endless free time.
I hate all of you.
Oh, I’m going to keep reading, of course. But I’m still going to hate you, all the same.
Okay, internet. My secret fantasy is actually real, and now I’m completely disappointed. I had been fantasizing about a Twitter trend that couldn’t possibly exist: #TMITuesday. Like #MusicMonday and #FollowFriday, it could perk up the workday and allow great swathes of people to participate with their favorite faceless swarm of cyber-citizens in a new way: A massive tasteless oversharing with strangers. (Like that’s new — hah!)
But a quick Twitter search revealed that it does in fact exist (thought it doesn’t trend very high), is mostly about farting, and isn’t as amusing as I had hoped.
Here are a few examples I never had the guts to tweet:
I am so very, very disappointed. Please consider this post a cry for help, and also for cash. Just joking. But not really. Fuck, internet. You get worse every day.
This morning I woke up to “Disintegration” by The Cure. When I got dressed, I donned my former teenage uniform: A black t-shirt with a denim skirt and black sneakers. And then I proceeded to put on some crazy eyeliner and bright red, Robert Smith colored lipstick (unsmeared).
Also, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to go home and watch some “Twin Peaks.”
So apparently it’s 1990 today. What the hell? Is this what a mid-life crisis feels like?
Or rather, assisted in the breaking of a Guinness World Record. I was number 213 of 349 haircuts — and it was actually a really nice cut. And fun, too.
A while ago I tweeted about the TWO SERVERS on my desk, right? I’m not sure I ever posted a follow-up, but it took two months to remove them. TWO MONTHS. One month for each server. (Apparently.) Now the lights are burnt out in my windowless, cell-like office…and no one is fixing them. And I’ve let people know. Repeatedly. But the glow from my monitor has been deemed light enough for working, at least for me.
And yet I still go to work. It’s boggling, isn’t it?
I recently saw a commercial for a personal back hoe. (Really.)
At first I thought it was absurd. But I gave it a little thought — the commercial was very convincing — and I was soon persuaded that everyone needs one…even apartment dwellers.
Because how else are you going to discreetly bury the bodies of people you kill in the middle of the night? I mean, you don’t want to borrow a neighbor’s backhoe for that, not at 3:00 a.m.
I forgot my book the other day, so I spent my lunch break flipping through an old “Parade” magazine I found in the break room. It had a little blurb about how Christian Slater was working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on an initiative to reduce the high school drop out rate, because he had been a high school drop out himself and felt very strongly about the whole thing.
All I could think of was this: Do you think a celebrity who dropped out of high school and became famous and successful anyway is really the role model for kids who might drop out of school?
Okay, his “success” is debatable by Hollywood standards, but he looks pretty damned successful compared to unemployed roofers and people working at Taco Bell. I might get behind this thing if he was working on an initiative to encourage adult drop outs to get a G.E.D. (like Slater recently did). That makes sense. But I don’t get just standing up and saying, “Hey, kids, I’m a high school drop out who went on to make such films as ‘Broken Arrow’ and ‘Hollow Man II’ — don’t be like me! Stay in school!”
Wait, maybe that is persuasive. Nobody’s too proud of “Hollow Man II.”
Never mind.
P.S.
I have a G.E.D. I am not dissing that at all, though I should add — in the spirit of full disclosure — that I didn’t drop out. I was homeschooled and went to college early.
I have to make up a story for everything, it seems.
For instance, my partner and I drove by the house on Woodhead with the dancing bear topiaries the other night. The bears are usually decorated for whatever holiday is current: Bunny ears for Easter, flags for July 4th, masks and pumpkins for Halloween, and so on. But the bears are currently bare, and I remarked to Lennox that I hoped the kids weren’t getting too old for it. I said I would miss the decorations — and that I really looked forward to them each holiday.
Lennox agreed, but just shook his head as I went on to re-enact an imagined conversation between the mom and the two kids (who appear to be gradeschool aged, as I have seen them in the yard). My performance included the phrases “Seriously lame” and “Do you know how hard it is to be the kid from the ‘Bear House,’ Mom? The ‘Bear House’? This is Montrose, Mom, do you know what a ‘bear’ is?”
So, you know. I require narrative. And where it is absent, I create it — from shrubberies, when necessary.