Do I use the word random too much?

So last night I was brushing my teeth with my right hand* because I had to try to pull my left leg over my head at the same time because multitasking is important if you're going to get everything done in a day and I realized that I was doing better than usual (with the toothbrushing, not the stretching) and I decided that it was because of my heavily quantitative program right now, which has activated that left side of my brain.

I also had another great dream last night, and in this one I broke out of prison and went to visit one of my best friends in DC and showed up on her doorstep at 2 o'clock in the morning and she was all "Um, I have to work in the morning. Selfish, much?"

Thirdly, today I was trying to reach into my bag for something while continuing to walk and also avoid making eye contact with my economics professor (who I think might have Asperger's because eye contact seems to make him very uncomfortable (like, even more than me)) and something in my bag shoved itself up in between my fingernail and my finger and now it's all bloody under there and I narrowly avoided using a loud expletive in the presence of someone who holds my life in his hands, so to speak.

And lastly I hate Jim Rome and I hate Jim Rome Is Burning, and that's not new, it's just particularly salient to me right now for some reason maybe having to do with my throbbing fingernail.

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* It might assist you in understanding this story to know that I'm left handed.

P.S., did anyone get the tag humor from yesterday? Because I was pretty proud of that until I realized none of you heathens read this on the actual page and so it went completely unnoticed...

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Because I am old

Here are some things I no longer find cute or amusing:

1. When you pull up in your car and turn to your friend and say "I didn't want to say anything when I picked you up, but I think I'm still drunk from last night! Ha ha!"
2. When you wear pajamas as clothing, particularly when you have a hard time crossing the street quickly enough because your bunny slippers are sliding off the back of your feet.
3. When you're totally making out in the student center and start sliding over the back of the couch and into my head.

Things, on the other hand, that make me laugh out loud only not out loud, but in my head because I'm sitting here alone, and I am not crazy:

1. When you keep trying to sneak a peak of your hair in the window reflection whenever he isn't looking.
2. When you try to discuss the finer points of plagiarism, like whether it's really cheating if you don't, like, copy the whole thing.
3. That you sat rightnexttome even though there are 30,000 open seats in other places, including South Dakota.

Oh wait, that last one doesn't amuse me, it makes me murderous. Sometimes I get confused on account of all the laughing that is happening as I'm stabbing you to death.

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

No, no, no, no, no, I'm not even kidding, not even a little bit. Someone is taking Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," which, by the way, being a girl and a dorky one at that, I loved loved loved when I was about 13 and actually haven't outgrown, someone is taking that book and they are ADDING ZOMBIES! ZOMBIES. Click the link, damn you, it's ZOMBIES!!

When Houseboy told me about this I laughed out loud for forty minutes straight and then after he got the oxygen tank and cleaned me up, I realized that this is the best moment of my life, except for that moment in the future where I see that movie.

And also, it completely and totally undoes the moment I had earlier today where I loaned my ID/passkey to someone on my way to the bathroom, and she was like "You don't need it?" and I was like "No, I'm going to the bathroom," and she was like "Ha ha, you won't need it in the bathroom!" and I just laughed and didn't even say what I thought which was "Unless I get murdered in there and they cut off my face and fingers and then I don't have ID and they can't identify my body, hahaha, funny right? Why are you looking at me like that?"

And I thought maybe I was growing up because even though the thought came into my head, I realized that other people who don't know me that well might not find it funny, but disturbing and it's better if your coworkers don't find you disturbing, but then the JANE AUSTEN AND ZOMBIES happened and I realized that I will never ever grow up, because if I do, then awesome things like this might stop happening, because yes, the things in my head do sometimes end up as movies and if I stop thinking them they will stop happening.

You're welcome.

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Benjamin Bratt was overrated

So, sometimes when I walk to and fro and about town alone, I like to pretend that I got murdered and Detectives Green* and Briscoe are investigating it, maybe with the help of Booth and Bones, depending on how long I think it would be until someone found my body and/or if the person who killed me would think to sprinkle my body with lye and hide it in a vacant home. Let's not talk about how that whole track in my mind makes me insane. Instead, let's talk about how Bones would definitely notice the large amount of bird shit on the bottom of my boots and be able to determine that I walk past the corner of 21st avenue and West End regularly, where apparently an entire flock of birds has been having some kind of family reunion for the last week. Or Green would notice that I wasn't wearing any tights today, and say something about how cold it is out (because in this version of the show they live in Nashville, so they think that 45 degrees is cold) and Lenny would have one of those clever one liners that he always had right before the commercial break, like "Well, she's certainly cold enough now!"

Okay, you know what, you were right the first time. This is just making me seem crazy. Today I walked to school and went to class and ate my lunch and at no point did I fantasize about Jerry Orbach standing over my dead body.

How was your day?

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* Yes it has to be Green. He's a vegetarian!

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I'm creeping myself out

On my walk between class and my office this afternoon I was being followed by a whistler. Not a happy-go-lucky whistler or a "here doggie" whistler, but a creepy Omar whistler, by which I mean that the song he was whistling was that creepy one that has like four notes and reminds you of every brain-sucking or soul-stealing movie you ever accidentally watched too late at night and then couldn't sleep for four days straight until you came up with the idea to put pillows in your bed and sleep in the closet to fool the demons.

That totally works by the way. All of my pillows are possessed by the devil, but at least I'm not.

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Is it November already?

For all you living in normal climates with "seasons" and everything, this may come as no surprise, but it seems as though fall/winter has snuck up on me, probably owing to the fact that it's still 70 degrees outside and I think I saw tulips on my way in this morning, but we went ahead and ended Daylight Savings Time anyway, so on the first of November we can wear shorts and t-shirts as we sit out on the back porch in the dark at 5 o'clock.

Not that either the warmth or the darkness affected me much this weekend, since I had my first multi-day migraine in a while, so I was mostly hiding out under the covers with a heating pad, which is also warm and dark I guess so come to think of it there's a theme here of some kind. The theme is actually that just because you think the migraine is gone and you're so very proud of your drug regimen and all doesn't mean you can sit around eating Snickers for dinner because it turns out that WILL catch up with you. This time last year I was in the middle of that elimination diet to find any food triggers and had to track down candy without high fructose corn syrup or dairy or nuts or wheat, which I assure you was delicious in a really boring fruit-flavored kind of way.

Anyway, what that means is that I'm now in that post-migraine fugue state where I sometimes can't remember my fingers and if you are harsh with me I might burst into tears or just stare at you with that dead-eyed Paris Hilton look until you question the very foundation of reality.

Paris Hilton is still the hot gossip right?

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I had a social life for a minnit

It's been awhile since I've done a Movie of the Week, probably because it's been awhile since I've seen a movie that I don't already own and even then I usually fall asleep in the first twenty minutes and then replay it over and over during the night. That's normal, right?

Anyway, that's beside the point, which is that you should all go see Zombieland, and I don't even care if you hate horror movies or comedy or that kid from Rodger Dodger, and who hates him anyway, he's so adorably awkward and lovable, what kind of person are you, do you hate Michael Cera too? You shouldn't.

From the opening credit sequence, which builds a feeling of despair and destruction that you are sure you'll never shake, which you do though because it's a comedy after all and so there are hilarious broken ankle bones and vomiting of blood and your good friend Jesse Eisenberg running around and around and around a gas station parking lot, all the way to the almost completely zombie-less third act with a very special guest star and then on to the end that I can't tell you about, but I promise it completely follows zombie movie tradition right up until it doesn't and then it does again and then doesn't, and it's really awesome.

So go watch it, or I'll give you a much longer treatise on why I think that zombie movies are really "in" post-9/11 because we are afraid we've destroyed our civilization from the inside and we can trust no one and we spent so long just trying to survive through alienating everyone around us that we are starting to realize that if survival means cutting off our humanity that it's almost not even worth it any more so we're reaching out for human connection, even if it puts our very lives at risk because we've finally decided that the risk is worth it.

Also, Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin are all really good too, and you can't possibly hate ALL of them because you're just not that awful of a person.


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McMinnville? REALLY??

It's possible I have mentioned before how I grew up in a Small Town. One thing growing up in a Small Town does for you is make you completely aware of your insignificance, particularly in the scope of the local, regional and National news, and growing up in a Small Town in Minnesota helps this issue, because your small town probably doesn't have a per capita income of a million and a half dollars like some New England "small towns" and probably doesn't have lots of pro football players come out of it, like small towns in Texas or have a really pretty beach like small towns in California. So, unless you live in International Falls, Minnesota, where you make the news once a year for "Being Really Cold Right Now," you get used to the idea that things that happen around you are really more gossip than news, and weather and war and other Big News might hit you, but they'll tell you about how it's going to hit "This area about-ish" and then reassure their Real Public that it's not heading for any "populated areas" and be a little sorry when the robot changes direction and takes out a suburban mall full of teenagers.

That apparently isn't how it works here. Here, they interrupt the end of Friends and the first half of an episode of How I Met Your Mother that I haven't even seen yet to give me a half an hour of a red and orange blotchy map of a part of the state that I'm not even currently in, and when I google it, it turns out to be the county seat of Warren county and have 12,749 people in it and be the Nursery Capital of the World and not even meaning babies, but meaning flowers. Where I come from that place is called Northfield, and they have rich college students and they don't even get to be on the news for a tornado that hasn't happened yet and isn't heading toward the cities. I mean, if it turns their pretty town square into rubble, sure...

Not that I want that to happen.

Unless, you know, they don't get back to my program soon.


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Bananarama

So, I'm not really super great at meeting new people because I usually assume that they're just looking for an excuse to hang me from a meat hook in their basement or make me come to out to dinner with them or something, which makes me feel a little nervous about impressing them just the right amount so that they will like me but not want to make me their zombie bride or whatever. I'm better than I used to be, in that I have discovered that being silent and hanging in the back will goad a certain type of person into poking you with sharp sticks until you participate in whatever it is they're gabbing about.

Anyway, as a result of this, things like orientation weekends cause me anxiety and make me sleepy and drain important juices out of my brain, so that when I come home after skipping only half of all the required activities on Friday I sit in front of the computer and apparently narrate everything I'm doing in what can only be described as a Pee Wee Herman voice. And when Houseboy points it out to me, I have to just stare at him with a blank look because I have no idea what he's talking about.

It is also possible that when one of the professors introduced herself and said she was from Minnesota and didn't even know what the sports teams were, I shot my hand in the air like we were participating in some kind of quiz that would win me chocolate.



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In which I bitch about others' driving habits even though I've only driven three times in the last year

So, Tennessee readers, what the hell is up with people down here and the four way stop? Did they just introduce this concept? Is taking turns really such a difficult thing for southerners to understand? Every morning that we've gone for a run we've encountered the same damn problem at least once, and more often at every one of the twelveteen intersections we cross. We come jogging up at approximately four miles an hour all sweaty and huffing and puffing and really regretting ever taking up this idiotic sport just because our husband would disappear for hours at a time without us if we didn't and then we'd be sad and get fat on ice cream and whole blocks of cheese, and at the same time a car pulls up next to us and another car pulls up to the right of us, not at the same exact time, you understand, but one after another. And then they just sit there, and stare at each other. Or stare into space. Or take a long nap. And I'm happy for the break and all, but at some point someone has to go and it's completely unpredictable who it will be, and I expect that soon we're both going to get hit by multiple cars and die. Sometimes, we come up to an intersection, and there's a car going the same direction as us, with no turn signal on, and it will just sit there until another car comes from the other direction, and then they'll both sit at the stop sign and watch us jog by. I assume that after we're gone they have a barbecue or something.

Also, lady drivers, am I right?


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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.


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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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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.


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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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Haven't you ever heard the word jinx?

Did I say "Worst Road Trip Ever?" Right before leaving for a road trip? Did I really do that? How stupid am I?

Let's start last Friday night. When, as I may have mentioned, there was a storm in Chicago that knocked down a tree, which landed on my car. Or, to be more accurate, landed on a light pole, which landed on a power line, all of which then landed on my car. The city of Chicago decided that a live wire warranted a traffic cone and a grumpy police officer, who, when we asked if we could go look at the damage said "Sure. If you want to die." So, about 24 hours later, they finally shut off the power and rolled up the live wire. 24 hours after that they cut up the tree and the light pole and got it off our car. We looked at it, and seeing as how it wasn't smashed into little bits we were like "Eh. Could be worse." We took it to a mechanic who said "Shit, dudes. This really sucks. Like, a lot." Anyway, we have to have two doors, a side panel, a roof panel and the windshield replaced. Guess we're not driving that car to Maine.

Luckily, the insurance pays for a rental, and it's unlimited mileage in the United States. Go us. So, we load all our shit into a rental, including the first load of stuff for our new apartment in Nashville, since last stop on this trip is to be picking up keys to the new apartment and setting up bookshelves and then leaving.

Anyway, we're all loaded up, only running about an hour behind schedule on Wednesday morning, when we get a call from the president of our condo board. They're doing work on our air conditioning. We need to be around to sign something saying that the work went all right. This will be between 7am and 10am on Tuesday morning. If we're not there, we need to get a friend or neighbor to do it. If we can't do that, here's a piece of paper to sign saying that the work went fine. That's right, the work they haven't done yet. All right, whatever. We need to leave right now because we have a 10 hour drive ahead of us and there is no way we're getting a hold of any friends or neighbors at this moment, so we just have to hope that this doesn't mondo screw us. Bye now.

Drive drive drivey drive. Some 8 hours later, we get a call from the woman checking in on our cats. "Hey," she says, "I checked in on the cats, and they seem good and all, but the electricity was off and the air conditioning seemed to be off. Any idea what's up with that?" Turns out, they blew our electricity while working on the air conditioning. So now, we have to drive this 20 hour drive to Maine, spend two days there for a wedding, and drive 20 hours back in order to be there at 7 am on Tuesday so that we won't have signed off on saying they didn't screw anything up. Oh, but they did fix the electicity, so the cats are not currently boiling in the 95 degree heat.

Ok, so we spent the night in a hotel somewhere random, and drive drive drivey drive the next day. Get a call from our soon-to-be landlord in Nashville. Before he can say anything, I have to tell him that we won't be out there to pick up the keys on July 1st after all, because the whole road trip has been cut short. To keep things simple I just tell him it's because a tree fell on my car. "Oh, well that's all right," he says, "Because there have been storms here too, and the electricity has been in and out, plus there was a flood and the pipes burst in your building, so we had to replace all the pipes, which were lead anyway." At this point, I'm not really even taking in new levels of information. I just kind of say "Uh huh. Well that's good."

But, literally, while I'm talking to him the tarp on the truck in front of us comes loose, flies up, and a load of rocks flies off of it and all over the front of our rental car. So, right after "That's good," I yell "OH MY GOD!!!" and he's saying something about fixing up the apartment and I have to say "Uh huh. Uh huh. Sounds good. I have to go because a bunch of gravel just fell on me. Bye now."

We pull over, check out the damage, and it's just scratches, but we are fucking glad we're the anal people who bought that rental insurance crap because I'm pretty sure that God hates me at this point. We're in Vermont, about 2 hours from our destination, and all I wanted to do was turn around and go home. So, I call my dad, tell him that we're arriving at the hotel early, but I will not be speaking to anyone.

Arrive at this rural Maine ski chalet, which has hot showers, down mattresses and a really nice creamy pasta thingy for dinner and this morning I felt like a human being again.

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I was the smartest little white kid ever

Your book of the week this week is any collection you so choose of Edgar Allan Poe stories. The one I happen to be reading is called "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" and is leather bound and has one of those paper covers that started falling off right away and it doesn't even have a copyright date in it, but it has a pencilled in inscription with the price of 25 cents, so I'm guessing it's kind of old. Anyway, I don't know where this particular collection came from in our bookshelf, but I chose it because it's the one I haven't read, even though there are four others in our shelf I have read, and about half of the stories in this one I had already read, because I was a really really morbid child, as you probably figured out from this Way Back Tuesday installment. Anyway, in addition to reading all about real-life serial killers, I also liked reading about imaginary serial killers and other things that go bump in the night, so some of my favorite authors between the ages of about ten and fifteen were Stephen King, Bram Stoker, and Edgar Allan Poe. Re-reading Stephen King and Bram Stoker in adulthood I've realized that they were pretty gorey and I was a pretty sick kid. Re-reading Edgar Allan Poe I've realized that he's a fucking damn good writer and I was a legitimate genius.

Case in point, The Pit and the Pendulum, which was a personal favorite of mine, and which I had in a smaller collection along with The Gold Bug and The Raven and I liked to re-read on rainy, stormy days:

I was sick--sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence--the dread sentence of death--was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution--perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel.

And, yeah. I was twelve. I wish I had continued along the same trajectory of smartness growth. Judging from that sentence I'd guess I actually went along some sort of parabola, and I'm on the downward part now.

But maybe there's still hope for you guys, and if you read some Poe you could get smarter. And more murderous. Let's build a band of murderous geniuses!

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I'm not even fucking joking right now

Is this for real?

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4262751

What in the hell? 30 days in jail? For KILLING a PERSON? A pedestrian??

He got drunk. At a hotel bar. He LEFT the hotel bar. IN A CAR. He somehow hit A PEDESTRIAN. And KILLED that person.

How is that not life in prison? How is that not life in prison plus a billion dollars? Plus the hotel valet service pays a billion dollars? Plus the hotel bar pays a billion dollars? Plus every person who ever knew him and let him own a car or take a drink and didn't come pick him up pays a billion dollars?

Not only does he not have to spend the rest of his life in prison and pay the family every dime he ever made or ever will make, he never even had that on the table. He "faced 15 years in prison." That's just ridiculous. You went and got drunk in a situation where you had full and easy opportunity to have absolutely no one get hurt and yet you chose the other option.

Oh, and p.s., I heard about this on Shysterball, where Craig Calcaterra points out that this means that Donte Stallworth may serve less time than two guys who ran onto the field during a rain delay in a Cincinnati Reds game. Fan Fucking Tastic.

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Imaginate!

So, this is me on my last days of work:

Why do I get to sit here all day every day for the last three years basically minding my own business except for when other people want to mind my business and sometimes when there was a datamergency and I had to stay at the office until all hours of the night, but the point is mostly I got to read the Internet cover to cover every day as long as I got my work done, but now all of a sudden when I'm going to be leaving for good people are all up in my face every two seconds with the stupidest of all dumb questions that ever existed and also they hire someone who thinks it's totally ok to ask me if he can have my Argo card when I go with all the money still on it, since I won't be using it anymore, seeing as how I'm moving away from the universe.

/Deep Breath

I ate a Dove chocolate thingy and it told me to take a deep breath.

Also, this morning there was a crazy man who came into our office yelling about his GED transcript and smoking something that was not a cigarette, and we work on the 11th floor and we're supposed to have security, but apparently he told them he was GOING TO TALK TO THE BOARD and so that's the magic words to get to go wherever you want.

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http://irregulargiggling.blogspot.com

Titles are for blogdorks

So, I thought about looking into how often I start a blog with the word "So," but that seemed like a lot of work, so I didn't.  Fascinating.

I also start a lot of sentences with "Anyway," which probably indicates that I get sidetracked a lot.

What was I saying?  Oh right, you of course have read both of the books I recommended yesterday, so you get a movie treat.  Houseboy had libarry business to take care of in downtown yesterday afternoon, so when he was done he met me after work and we went up to the River East theater, wandered around looking for one particular Irish bar among the clumps of Irish bars in downtown and somehow circling it about twenty times before it appeared out of nowhere like that one town [insert literary reference here]*, and then offered us hummus.  

After the hummus, we saw the movie showing closest to when we arrived at the theater, which was Drag Me To Hell.  Even though I like horror movies, I was skeptical about this one at first, expecting it to be in the vein of recent horror movies, which are really just torture porn**.  But then I read that it was written and directed by Sam Raimi, of Evil Dead, et al. fame, and that it was going to be funny.  Well, ok, I was still skeptical even then, because I liked the Evil Dead movies and found them funny and all, but I've seen plenty enough 80s horror/comedy failures to know that that formula is not always successful.  

Anyway, to cut this rambling nonsense to shorterness, I will avoid any in-depth discussion of the distinction between "death" and "hell" or the slippery slope of sin that leads us from denying old ladies bank loans to condemning people to torture for eternity because we can't take responsibility for our own actions, or why an Indian dude can translate Spanish, and just say: FUNNY.  It was FUNNY.  And jump-scare and gross-out scary.  If you liked Shaun of the Dead, you'll like it.  If you didn't like Shaun of the Dead, you should read this post, and then never come back here because you have deep-seated mental and emotional problems that I can't help you with.  

Oh, and if you go see it, be on the lookout for a great scene between the main character, her boyfriend and her boyfriend's parents, in which he says "HAVE.  You HAVE a cat... unless something happened to it?" and she gives the funniest, creepiest damn look I've seen in a movie in a long time.  

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* I know it's Brigadoon, and it's not a book, it's a musical.  Shutup you face.

** Obviously, I didn't make up that awesome turn of phrase:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatter_film

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Murder is hot

It's been awhile since I've done a "Book of the Week," and not because I haven't been reading books every week but because I have lost faith that you, Internet Readers, give a shit about the downfall of our society, and reading the comments on The Onion AV Club articles that invariably include eight misspellings, four grammatical errors and at least twenty words stripped of their vowels to "save space," is not helping.  

But you know what?  Fuck you.  I'm going to tell you about books anyway.  Cause why?  Cause Fuck You, that's why.

So, go read a collection of short stories by Flannery O'Connor.  It will make you depressed and hate humanity for reasons completely separate from their low educational attainment.  You will meet all kinds of lovely characters who come from the southern marshes and know the difference between white trash and good folk and have Christ on their side.  I just recommend that you don't open your book to the story entitled "The Artificial N-Word*" while on the bus because all of a sudden your self-important white ass will find it necessary to flip very quickly to another page to prove you're not a racist to the completely oblivious person next to you.

When you're done with that, you should read "I Am No One You Know," by Joyce Carol Oates, and see another side of depressing, from a more Northern point of view.  Then, you'll be caught up with me just in time to buy Oates' fictionalized biography of Jeffrey Dahmer, which I am looking forward to in what is probably an unhealthy way. 

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* Surprise, surprise, the actual N-word appears in that story title, as well as peppered throughout many of her stories, but I am absolutely constitutionally incapable of even typing it, which does not in any way make me less racist, just more paranoid, and tending toward imbuing words with their own magical powers.

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