Monthly Archives: April 2011

Apr 28 2011

The three meanest and most awesome things I’ve ever heard someone day about another person, in chronological order

One:

“She looks like she was hit in the face with a bag of hot nickels.”

This one’s particularly good at describing that sort of face that’s really tough to describe. It’s the inclusion of the word hot that does it for me. It brings it home in a way that its absence would miss. Plus I think using nickels is somehow funnier than quarters, probably since quarters would be the obvious choice what with the size and rigid edge.

Two:

“Who lit the fuse on her tampon?”

Because the distaff portion of my readership may not find this as humorous as I do, I’ll add that this was said by a woman. About her sister if I recall correctly. Part of why I find it funny is that I’ve always sort-of thought of the string on a tampon as a kind of fuse anyway since back when I first saw one.

Three:

“Does your asshole have a license to shit?”

Someone said this to someone on Facebook today and while it sounds like maybe a somewhat rote comeback to inane or purposefully mean statements, I’d never heard it before and I LOL’d IRL. I don’t really employ the previous two expressions in daily life(1) but I can see me getting a lot of mileage out of this last one.

  1. The first one is simply a bit too mean for me. My personal version of cruelty tends not towards commentary regarding physical appearances. I reserve my best wit in the fight against stupidity, which these days is a Sisyphian battle. The second one is simply just not an intelligent thing to say directly to someone if one is male and has even the remotest sense of self-preservation.
Apr 27 2011

a little of that human touch

One of my former classmates from the grad class I took last semester dropped off a card to me today. The reason she dropped off a card was that when I saw her yesterday morning I told her that Ashley and I are now engaged.

Now, I’ll admit that a card struck me as unnecessary. She said yesterday, “Aw! That’s great! I feel like a handshake or a hug would be appropriate here!” and we promptly hugged, which was the first time we’d had any real physical contact and so for me at least was a bit awkward, plus also the fact that she is very slight of physical build and I am pretty much the exact opposite of slight and in those situations I always feel like Kirby next to the Mario Babies. And like I said she was a classmate.  While she was one of the more polite of my classmates and while she always asked after Ashley, we aren’t what I might consider close friends. So, yeah, a card seemed a bit over-the-top.

But still: It’s just about the nicest thing ever when someone takes some of her own personal time to help you celebrate – something outside of just hitting that gods-cursed ‘Like’ button on Facebook.(1)

The smiley-faced flowers put it over-the-top over-the-top.

Anyway. She made a point of telling me that Ashley’s name should be on the envelope, since it’s for both of us, but she left it off since she was planning on leaving it in my mailbox at work and thought adding Ashley’s name might be odd somehow.(2)  I’d recently received an invitation in the mail from a friend who’d invited me and guest to an event, even though Ashley and I have been together long enough that everyone knows she’s my plus-one, if you will. So the contrast between that, from a long-time friend, and this, from someone who barely knows Ashley (and really me) at all…well, it’s as informative as it is nice.

And then inside the card was a handwritten note. So if the card was insanely nice, a handwritten note constitutes about the most human thing ever in my view. One-third of the note was addressed to both of us, 1/3rd addressed to me, and 1/3rd was addressed to Ashley. She and Ashley had met exactly once. Once. For maybe like three minutes at a protest rally on campus a few months ago. Not exactly a get-to-know-you situation. Yet she(3) was kind enough to appeal directly to Ash and to wish her well.

The point here is that, just like the time my professor clipped an article from the newspaper to send me, I am so astoundingly touched by this simple, human, interaction. I haven’t even kept up a solid email-relationship with this woman, but upon hearing some news she takes it upon herself to do something so extraordinarily other-directed that I wish I could surround myself with people like her. So I can learn from them.

At any rate, thank you, Christina, for being so amazingly kind.

  1. And don’t forget that you can ‘like’ this post at the bottom!
  2. I did wait until Ashley met me for lunch to open it.
  3. i.e. – the former classmate and writer-of-the-note.
Apr 25 2011

viral

Before the Star Wars Kid. Before Keyboard Kat. Before the Double Rainbow Guy.

Before 2 Girls 1 Cup. Before Angry Birds. Before Failbook.

Before Shake Weight commercials and Little Darth Vader and The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.

Before “This is Sparta!” and “I wish I knew how to quit you.” and “[explicative deleted] snakes on a [explicative deleted] plane!”

Before All Your Base Are Belong To Us and up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start and FINISH HIM!!!!

Before One Red Paperclip and Fark. Flashmobs and The Last Lecture. NinjaCat, ObamaGirl, RickRolling. What What in the Butt, Jizz in my Pants. Apparently millions of babies doing invariably cute things for the camera…

there was a wholly different meaning to the word viral. And it was as in like infection.

Today Ashley and I have gone viral. And it sucks more than anything Ben Huh ever made.

Apr 21 2011

bo v. bo

Today’s DailyPost prompt is:

If you had to debate a version of yourself that was ten years younger, who would win?

This one’s easy: ten-years-younger me would win by a long-shot.

That’s not a good thing though. The most fundamental difference between me now and -10y me is that that guy had absolutely no idea what the aphorism ‘choose your battles’ means.

Well, that’s not quite accurate. -10y me took that phrase and said, ‘I choose all battles.’ Because clearly he was brilliant that way.

But he would win. Because I would just walk away(1) and put my time and attention into something more worthwhile. And he would consider that a victory.

  1. Probably. +10y me still has some issues w/r/t picking important battles.
Apr 20 2011

of the preceding silence

Yeah so after about four solid months of daily posts from yours truly, I haven’t posted anything in over a week. I do feel at least marginally guilty about this. Not quite a guilty as I feel about having eaten pretty much an entire box of Little Debbie Zebra Cakes in less than a week, but at least the blog-guilt can be assuaged by eating more Little Debbie Zebra Cakes. The L.D.Z.C.-guilt, obviously, will live on.

But here’s the thing: it’s not like I haven’t been writing. In fact, I’ve been writing a lot. I have a shortish first draft pretty much done and maybe even ready for external input from a few choice friends. I have another, probably longish story, in the works – as in like a solid ten pages already done – and it has happily come alive on the page. This is the magic of fiction-writing; when something you create sort-of starts to breathe it really honestly becomes like a whole world to you. This story’s become my weekend story. I work on it in the A.M. whilst Ashley is still sleeping and after I’ve successfully narcotized the kitten with food.

During the week, during breaks at work and in the evening, I’ve been touching up the little story and also prepping and researching the longer story. This way I’m all set to go on Saturday morning.

The past couple of days I’ve also been working on a blog post, something to help me work through something I’ve been having a hard time with. I more-or-less finished it yesterday and went here to post it over the next three days(1) but it occurred to me this morning it could re-work into fiction. I’m not sure how, yet, but I’m sure it can be done. So I’m keeping that one for myself, at least unless the fiction-attempt falls apart.

Instead you get this lame apology and admission of L.D.Z.C. consumption and a heartfelt promise that I’ll work on getting back to posting every day. I enjoyed it, really. I only stopped because I found myself writing other things and didn’t want the distraction. But I’ll work on it. Right after I get back from the grocery store with a box of cheap, high-sucrose confectionary delight.

  1.  It’d be a ridiculously long blog post, but can’t really be trimmed.
Apr 13 2011

to protect and berate

Around 11 last night, just as I’d lied down on the sofa to go to sleep,(1) from outside there came the sound of…well, it was hard to qualify. It sort of sounded like a car hitting another car, but without that cataclysmic component of metal working against metal and glass losing its composure right there in front of everyone.

I sat up and looked out the living room window but didn’t see anything right away. This turned out to be because I hadn’t put my glasses back on.

After I put my glasses on I saw one of the neighbors walk out to the street and pick up a loose hubcap.

Someone, it seems, drove down our street and veered into a couple of parked cars. The damage was relatively minimal to both cars: some scratches, busted tail-lights, a partially mangled bumper. In fact, from the debris I found, I think the offending vehicle took more damage: busted glass, pieces of body-metal, and I think part of a headlight bezel.

It’s such a shitty thing to do, the hit-and-run. It’s selfish and just a mean thing to do to someone.(2) But worse in my opinion was the attitude of responding officer.

He took about ten minutes to show up. Obviously by that time whoever did it would have been long gone.(3) He got out of his car and just surveyed the damage, talking to one of the car-owners with some basic questions. He didn’t even bother to look at any of the scattered debris until I showed some of it to him to point out that it wasn’t a black car but a maroon one with a fair amount of rust. He did nothing that could be in the least bit construed at investigative.

Even worse, he got a little pissy at one point. The general assumption was that the offending driver’d been heading south, since the parked cars he’d hit were on the west side of the road. The officer said, “Well if he was going that way the damage would be on his passenger side. I was told it’d be on his driver’s side.”

One of the car-owners responded that the damage was on the driver’s side. The officer said, “No. His passenger side.” Apparently when the woman had initially called the po-po she’d not understood the question properly, which I feel was understandable given the circumstances. But the officer was very snippy about it: “That means we’ve been looking for the wrong vehicle.” His tone was derisive and sardonic as he called this new info in to the dispatcher.

When it was all over, someone tried to give the office a bag filled with the debris that we’d picked up. He didn’t even pretend to care. “That’s not going to do me any good. If we find the car, we’ll let you know.” Which we all knew basically meant that they were never going to find the car. Not that it matters greatly because insurance would cover the damages of both the parked cars, but it would have been nice of the officer to pretend he cared. After all, he’s there to protect and serve, right? Part of service is at affecting that you care, even when you don’t.

I hope they find the guy and I hope someone busts him for his hit-and-run.(4) More than that, though, I hope the officer finds a bit of compassion somewhere and stops treating the people he serves as though we’re all wasting his time.

  1. Ashley had some work to do yet before she could get to bed, and, as always, I used this time to indulge my love of sleeping on sofas.
  2. Or in this case multiple someones.
  3. Since it was so late at night, most of us were in various stages of preparing for sleep so no one got a really good look at the sideswiper.
  4. Thanks to an incident my brother got himself into as a teenager, I’m aware that a person has 24 hours to report a hit-and-run. So maybe the offender plans to report it today. Maybe.
Apr 10 2011

well and there went that

I forgot to blog yesterday. So my goal of posting every single day in 2011 will forever be unattained. Well damn.

But I also sort of didn’t forget.I talked here on Friday about feeling like a failure re: not-writing. I’d drafted a paragraph but later omitted it about how when I spend some time writing in the morning I feel totally okay and way less pressured and guilty about however else I spend the rest of my day. After I spent a fair amount of AM time writing yesterday I had no problem with doing everything else I did yesterday.

So when at some point in the evening, as we were hanging out with Ashley’s family, I realized I hadn’t blogged yet, I also realized I didn’t care too much. I didn’t feel the need to write here because I’d already written for myself.

Not that I plan to stop blogging,(1) but it was nice yesterday to say hey I’ve already written something today. And it’s nice to say that today but still to choose to blog. And it’s nice to know that whatever I do today I’ll do it writing-guilt-free.

  1. I’ve just spent about two hours writing this morning and here I am blogging, so there’s some proof.