I don't have any pictures of this one

So, once upon a time I was a Hamster Person. (Ever since I accidentally had two cats that find rodents delicious, the hamster thing has kind of gone by the wayside). But anyway, I got my first hamster when I was in first grade, and what I remember about him is that I named him Brian after my two boyfriends and that I stuck my finger in the little holes in the cardboard box on the way home and he bit me and I bled a lot, but I didn't want to tell my mom because I was afraid she'd take him back. As I recall, I was watching the blood drip down to my elbow when my mom was like "Um... what's up with that?" and I was like "Um.... I don't know...." After that I had a hamster named Sarah, named after my best friend, and this hamster was an Escape Artist. She lived to be about 1,058 in hamster years, which is to say more than three years, and she figured out how to take the top off her plastic cage and used to go galavanting around the house eating crackers out of the pantry cupboard and forcing us to un-trapify all the mousetraps for a few weeks until she'd suddenly decide she missed pooping in cedar chips and then she'd just come back. By the time she passed away, she was missing clumps of hair and one of her eyes had exploded. I also had a hamster I shared with my college roommate, who we named Xena and let run around in her ball up and down the dorm hallways until one time we kind of forgot to pay attention to her and she went bumping down the stairs and when we reached her she looked all dazed and accusatory. She was also probably responsible for the mouse that lived in our couch and chewed a hole in Xena's food bag and then one day just up and died inside something which led to a week of sleeping in the common room because our college's response to that was to just spray some air freshener and let him rot. Which also reminds me of another hamster I had during my Greek mythology phase, who I named Hercules, which was sadly inappropriate as he escaped just like Sarah, but got trapped in the air ducts in our house somewhere and never made it back, and we found him or at least where he was mostly by the smell. Speaking of the ways things die, I had a dwarf hamster that my dog stepped on, and she felt real bad about it, but she didn't know how to do spinal surgery and neither did I and thus we both learned a life lesson about letting dogs and hamsters play together. I also had two other hamsters, named Alf and Taffy, and they both lived regular hamster lives and died regular hamster deaths and then I had another one named Nicholas who had some kind of baby hamster disease so I guess that's a regular hamster death too.

Aren't you glad I cheered up your day with this story? Maybe this will help:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfqNXADl3kU&feature=player_embedded#

Now do you see why they're worth it in the end?

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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Introversion, extroversion, shyness and falling asleep

So the beginning of this week was taken up by a whirlwind trip to the lovely island of Louisville, Kentucky to do data collection at Jefferson County Public Schools and also to examine the natural limits of my stress tolerance to see whether it actually is possible to pop all the tendons in your neck and have them come flying outward kind of like when a hot air balloon drops all those tethers tying it down and then floats off, only in this case I guess my head wouldn't float away, it would probably sort of roll off my shoulders and make a sick thumping noise when it hit the ground.

As I mentioned in a previous blogentry (by which I mean an entry in my blog, not the Blog Gentry, of which I am not a part because I kept showing up to functions spitting drunk), I was concerned initially not even about the work I would have to do on this trip, but really about the sharing of a hotel room, but I overcame that by dragging Houseboy along with me under the pretense of him getting a nice look at lovely Louisville, which he did when he went to the zoo and terrorized the warthogs.

So, it was nice to have Houseboy along, but we still had to drive three and a half hours up and back with my advisor in the back seat, and he's a bit introverted and I'm a bit introverted and what this means is that conversation the whole way meant each of us coming up with an obviously forced topic like "Where did you live before you moved to Nashville?" that led to about 0.48 minutes of conversation and then a dead period and then someone else would ask something scintillating like "How big is Louisville, anyway?" and the process would repeat itself. I was practicing a bit of meditation I made up in which I stare out the window and remind myself that I don't want to talk anyway and I'm not being graded on my ability to make conversation, so staring at the trees is just fine and if he really wants to talk he can think of something clever to say, it's not all my job just because I'm in the front seat and besides it's sexist to assume that the woman will have to make everyone feel comfortable and keep up the hostess thing while men are allowed to be strong and silent and whatever, when my advisor fell asleep. Like, head lolling to the side drool coming down the chin asleep.

Thank.

God.

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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

I'm not broken, I'm just bent

So, I was googletalking with my friend Sweetbreads the other day, and we were talking about lying. She argued that she's good at it because she was a philosophy major, so she feels that if she can think it, it must be possible. This gives her good believability*.

I also fall victim to the "If I think it, it could be true" way of thinking, but it never seems to help me come up with believable lies. In fact I'm a really shitty liar and the only reason I ever get away with it is that I look like a shitty liar so people assume I don't even try. Score!

Anyway, the sort of things that pop into my head would never make good lies because they are usually bloody and kind of disturbing. For example, I was on the bus in Chicago once and saw a woman holding a baby and leaning out into the road, and I pictured her throwing the baby in front of the bus. That was gross. But not a good excuse for being late to work, because it would probably be on the news.

Also, in our new apartment some of our windows won't stay open, so I propped one up with a box and the Neurotic Cat decided to sit in the sill under this precariously hanging window. Of course I got a flash of him being squashed and blood squirting out everywhere. Instead of using that as an excuse for anything I started to think about how I would explain that to the vet. "Sorry new vet who just met us, I'm really not abusive to my animals, I just smash them with hammers sometimes when they're misbehaving. Can you fix him?"

Anyway, I think I could make one of those really shitty independent horror films about it, where I just walk and ride around and picture horrible things happening to people. It would be called "Lies." Or maybe "Existentialism," if I decide to get off the One Syllable Horror thing.



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*It's like drinkability, but with more believing and less drinking. Most of the time.


http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

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