How to be a responsible underage drunk

So, because in high school I was not "cool" and didn't like to "drink and drive" and didn't have parents who "let me drink in the basement" and lived in a small town where the bartenders knew I "wasn't 21," I didn't have a lot of opportunities to drink and those I had I didn't take advantage of.

Anyway, so I got to college, which was in the Big City, by Minnesota standards anyway, and I lived in a dorm, so I didn't have to drive anywhere to get liquor, and I knew people with fake IDs and siblings who were over 21 and bartenders who didn't know me from anyone and might have believed I was 21 if I wanted to get a fake ID, which I didn't, but anyway, the point is that I made the very carefully considered decision that drinking was cool and I was cool too and as long as we all went about it in a responsible manner, all things would end well for all involved parties.

This decision was made on a dorm room floor while surrounded by half filled bottles of various liquors dropped off by my friend's sister, who was just tickled that her little brother was taking the plunge into alcohol experimentation, and so gave us many many options to choose from. My roommate and this friend* and I chose vodka as our drink of choice with peach schnapps as our chaser. My friend's sister had neglected to drop off any shot glasses, so my roommate and friend were using small plastic cups, while I chose a measuring cup, which as the night wore on seemed more and more brilliant, as I became more and more convinced of my ability to exert absolute control over my own levels of drunkenness.

This might have been before I decided that I was dizzy sitting on the floor and the chair would be safer. It might have been before we decided that being in the hallway would solve all our problems. It was definitely before everyone on the floor decided that they would join us, including the RA, who was definitely on things besides vodka and peach schnapps.

This obviously set up weeks and months of all levels very controlled and responsible partying, which included:

• Establishing and codifying a ladder of intoxication that began with "buzzed" and ended with "blasted" and had a bunch of other levels in between that I no longer remember,
• Drawing an intricate Drunken Makeout Map with lines connecting all the people on the floor who had made out with each other while drunk,
• Some girl who might not even have gone to our school wandering into my friend's room and trying to steal the liquor, but first trying to cut the screen off the top of the Bacardi 151 bottle and slicing her hand open and then running out into the street before we could even try to help her,
• Wandering into a local band's practice session in the dorm's basement and narrowly saving one of the band member's daughters from drinking a rather large glass of "juice" that was actually about 14 kinds of liquor mixed with just a little Sunny D (that we had brought in with us),

And lots of other stuff, I'm sure. Those were just the most responsible things we did. And I have REMAINED a responsible drinker. Yesterday, one of my very best friends in the world, who we call Sweetbreads**, was in town for a wedding, and we started drinking at three in the afternoon because we're badasses like that. And we passed out at 10:30pm, because we're 30 years old like that.

Wooooooo.




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* Incidentally, I had known this friend since I was eight and he just happened to choose to go to the same college as me, which I didn't find out until a week before orientation. Just a random sidenote.

** In-joke alert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetbread

Horror Movies, Part II

Continuing the thread of the one syllable Horror Movie Titles, today we have "TaB" for Hedgehog/Pretty Nice Little Saturday, and "Awkward" for Marnie, otherwise known as the cheater who somehow pronounces awkward in one syllable. But I did it anyway, because I really like the word awkward. Here you go:



TaB

We open on an elderly woman in a flowered dress and shawl, straightening up around her grandmotherly home: overstuffed couches and armchairs draped with doilies. She dusts off an 8 by 10 photo of a man dressed in a lab coat, holding a dentist's drill and smiling toothily at the camera. The door bell rings.

Shuffling over to the door, the woman opens it, and is greeted by a gaggle of costumed children. "Trick or Treat!!" They yell.

[Ok, basically, she gives them TaB soda because it doesn't have sugar, and you think they're going to egg her house and stuff but turns out the pop is also poisoned and they all die these horrible melting deaths in her back yard and then she shovels their slimy remains into her koi pond. I got unexpectedly bored of the buildup on that one, sorry].

*****

Awkward: An Independent Film

Omma is an unusual-looking child, and not in that Hollywood unusual-looking child kind of way. Her adult teeth have started to grow in already, and they are bending in a crooked second row around her infant teeth. Her face is wide and flat, her eyes have the look of a Jersey milking cow, and her skinny legs bow together at the knees. Because of her disgusting teeth (she also practices poor dental hygiene, so they're dirty as well as numerous), she talks with a crowded lisp when she talks at all, and has a tendency to insert herself into conversation at disorienting and cringe-inducing moments. She finds it difficult to relate to others as she has an undiagnosed form of synesthesia in which she perceives certain words as violent acts upon both other words and actual objects around her.

One tragic "Take Your Daughter to Work Day," Omma accompanies her father to his job at the local chemical plant and is exposed to high levels of a new form of heavy water radiation which transforms her synesthesia into an uncontrollable superpower. When she comes back from a bathroom break and overhears her father and his coworker discussing how awkward she is, she watches the word slip from her father's lips, turn into slashing swords and hack both men into thousands of gory pieces right in front of her eyes.

*****

Ok, I was also going to have a poll on which movie idea you liked best, but I can't figure out how to do a poll and I don't feel like spending more than 15 seconds on it. Maybe that will be Monday's project. Enjoy your weekend!


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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Horror Movies, Part I

As promised, here is Part One of my horror movie ideas for your one syllable English word challenges. For Jeff, we have Boobs, Starring Tara Reid, and for Shine, we have "Umm..."

Without further ado:


Boobs, Starring Tara Reid

We open on a young woman dressing, we see her from behind, and she is beautiful. Shapely and tan with luxurious blonde hair that she flips over the collar of a dress as she pulls it on with no bra underneath. Yeah, we're turned on already. This is going to be a great movie.

We follow the woman's legs as she pulls on stiletto heels and heads out on the town. At a bar, she twirls an olive in a martini and talks to an average-looking stranger. (Hey, we're average-looking! Isn't that nice for us!) They leave the restaurant together.

Back at what is obviously his apartment, she slowly turns her back on him and removes a large knife from her purse and holds it behind her, but right up to us, the camera. He comes in close and begins to unbutton her dress slowly as she arches against him. As he reaches his hand inside her dress he looks down, and his eyes grow wide, and he begins to back away. The camera pans around, and we see her beautiful face for the first time as she smiles maliciously and brings the knife around to the front. Tracing it down her cheek and neck, she then presses it harder against her as she reaches her chest until it draws blood.

"Do you like my boobs?" She hisses.

*****

Umm... (Marketed in Europe alternately as "Ehh..." "Errr..." and "Uhhh....")

In an office, just like any other office. The fluorescent lights flicker in that way they always do. People in ill-fitting collared shirts and khaki pants slightly stained with salad dressing carry file folders from offices to cubicles and back. The loudest noise is the copy machines and the clickety clackety clickety clackety of keyboards.

Isla picks up her styrofoam cup of coffee, sighs heavily and trudges over to Ellen's desk, where Ellen is staring at a Post-It note that says "The fourth one."

"The fourth what?" Isla asks.

"Fuck if I know," says Ellen. "Meeting time?" Isla nods, and Ellen grabs her mug, the Post-It and a notebook, and they head back to the conference room with a distinct lack of hurry. Settling into the uncomfortable chairs, they avoid eye contact and doodle on their notebooks until a paunchy, balding man calls the meeting to order.

"Ellen and Isla," he says, "I have your presentation here, and this is a nice little piece of work, but I think for the maximization of our profit bandwidth it's time to move beyond our B.A.U."

"Umm..."

"What I'm trying to communicate is that our action items will continue to be branded as deliverables only inasmuch as we can drink from the fire hose here and become a part of the paradigm shift."

"Umm..."

"Somehow I'm getting the impression that you are not key enablers of our integrated solution at this juncture and I have done all I can to incent you to avoid restructuring..."

"UMMM..."

{Cut to outside the office building, which explodes. Ellen and Isla walk away unscathed and with small, calm smiles}

*****

[Alternatively]:

UMM (The Cheating Version)

On the small, close-knit campus of the University of Minnesota in Morris (UMM), no one expected the violence that erupted on the Multicultural Student Leadership Retreat, and mystery has always surrounded the events that transpired around the bonding campfire that night. This movie will finally bring to light what really happened and why the students swore they would never tell another living soul...

*****

Coming tomorrow: "TaB" and "Awkward." There is still time for more submissions, though, since what I'll actually be doing today is stuffing my face at the Taste of Chicago, since the basic outlines for those two stories are already in place.

I told you that you could not defeat me!

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P.S.-- I should note that I have nothing against Tara Reid or her boobs. Actually, I feel kind of sorry for her, and if she wants to make my horror thriller and can find funding I'd be flattered. I think we'd make a great team.


http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

You think your Wu Tang Sword can defeat ME?!

So, based in part on a Google talk conversation in which Hedgehog and I outlined an entire horror movie plot based on how I'd kill Houseboy because he wouldn't let me watch the documentary on Jeffrey Dahmer while we were on vacation, and in part on a conversation I had with Houseboy in which I claimed any single syllable English would could be scary if you thought about it long enough, here is your challenge:

Name a word. One syllable. English language. I'll give you a horror movie outline. Here's your example, word supplied by Houseboy, two short outlines supplied by me.


GUM: A Sci Fi/Horror Thriller

A non-sentient alien lifeforce comes to the planet attached to one of our cell phone satellites when it comes in to be serviced. A technician thinks it's just a bit of gunk and scrapes it away with a fingernail, but it gets under his nail and into his skin without him realizing it. It proceeds to fill every open space in his body, every pore, every orifice, all those little sacs of air in his lungs with...... that's right, gum.



Example Two, for the more traditional horror-minded:

GUM: A Slasher Film

Sally seems like your typical American teen. She wears short skirts and mid-riffy shirts and she loves to flirt with the boys, and when she moves to West Ridgedale High, man is the football team happy to see her. She's got a date every night and parties every weekend and it's not long before she's the most popular girl in school. But it's not long after that that people start to notice that Sally's dates have a way of disappearing, and when they ask her about it, all she does is twirl her hair and pop her gum and give them that little smile that all the boys love so much.


All right, your turn. You think there's a one syllable word in the English language that just can't be scary? I dare you.


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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Two Weddings and a Funeral

Highlights of my cousin's wedding in rural Maine:

• Before anything began, before even my first drink, I bent down to get something out of my purse and smashed my head into the back of a chair, so now I have a bruise on my forehead implying raucous drunkenness that never really came to fruition.
• My uncle leaning across the table to ask my sister "What's that between your BOOBS?" in reference to her tattoo.
• The early no-show for karaoke which resulted in my deaf cousin (the bride) stumbling through "Summer of '69" by herself until she was bailed out by the everyone present in a terrible cacophony of off-key singing
• All the cousins from my side of the family collaborating on Monster Mash (my choice)

So, in the spirit of Way Back Tuesday, I was going to tell the story of the first wedding I ever went to or something, but then all I could remember was something about some organza and champagne and being really really bored, so I decided to tell about the first funeral of someone I knew.

I was about 10 or 11, and the husband of the organist in our church passed away. It being a congregation of about twelve people, and my mom being the priest, this was one of the Adults In My Life, so I went to the memorial service, and my parents even let me go right up to the open casket in that whole "check out the body" time. I was interested to find out that dead people look a lot like alive people, but sleeping and with darker eyelashes, and I was leaning in to see what they smelled like, when I was also interested to discover that they talked like alive people too. Except that they talked about themselves in the third person.

Then, his wife answered him, and I realized that the voices were actually coming from behind me. Turning around, I discovered the organist and her husband standing behind me. I figured then that the thing in the casket must be one of those wax sculptures like we had seen in Ripley's Believe it or Not and the organist's husband had faked his death and then been so ballsy as to show up at his own funeral and talk about himself in the third person, and everyone was playing along.

My mom told me that he had an identical twin, and that was the man I met at the funeral, but I still think my explanation was better.



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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com