The Cat in the Apt

I just moved into a new apartment, and my roommate has a cat. Which is cool! I like animals. The problem is, animals do not like me. Even my childhood gerbils thought I was a douche. Animals can just somehow smell my fear, weakness, and total unsneakiness.  I am unsneaky in that, for example, if I want to go through a door, I will look at the door and then walk toward it. When I am sad, I look sad. When I am happy, I look exactly like this:

So animals do not see me as an authority figure. (Neither do children. Neither do adults.) And yet, just by being a human and being bigger than her and paying rent, I have some authority over my roommate’s cat. I can do things like pick her up and move her out of the bathroom when I’m showering, or close doors so she can’t go into/out of rooms. . This drives her nuts. The first night I slept in the apartment, I closed my door and the cat sat outside ALL NIGHT, not sleeping, not eating, and not liking me. Sometimes she would stick her paw under the door and hold it cat-palm up, like a little begging orphan. She would also flex her claws, like a little begging DRAGON orphan. Badum chhhh. Badum fire. I should delete that because it’s so unfunny but I can’t because it’s also suuuch an honest look inside my brain. That is all there is in there. “Badum fire” floating around in like, Comic Sans.

Anyway, I wish there was a way I could talk to the cat and just be like, “Hey, I know I don’t inspire a ton of respect. I know you saw me break my own mirror by sitting on it. But I respect you, and what you do, which is lounge around all day smelling the walls of the apartment. I know sometimes I pick you up and move you out of the bathroom, but I think if you had really comprehensive information about what goes on in there, you wouldn’t mind. Please don’t be mad at me. I think you are special!”

Cats don’t talk though, so my plan is mad foiled right now. I need a new plan. My backup plan so far is “become likeable” but I feel like it needs to be fleshed out more.

Nice and hefty

This is kinda old news, but luckily it is also not real news (in the sense of like, no newspaper would run this, and even the Onion would be like “This is not very satirical Mae, we’re going to go with ‘Guy Drools All Over His Burger Because Life Has No Meaning’” instead). So it is not a real problem. I really fucked up the logical flow of this paragraph so I’m going to start another paragraph now, and it will be my actual story instead of this little windup thing.

One time I was sitting outside a restaurant with my friend, pretty bored and also (as I will reveal again in this same sentence) kind of sexually frustrated, and I was like, “Man, friend, I just want to make out with someone. It doesn’t really matter who. I would make out with that horse.”

Because right then one of there was one of those horse and carriages going by. Also, I call all my friends “friend.” It’s like how Quakers call each other “Oats.”

So my friend looks up (GRAVELY) at this horse clopping down the street and then she looks at me and she goes, “Yeah, that makes sense. You both have big teeth.”

She was not wrong. But the horse was kind of gone by that point and if the horse had approached me, maybe I would have gone for it, but I wasn’t going to really pursue the horse. I hear the horse was kind of a douche anyway. A good horse does not kiss and neigh. Or kiss and hoove. Or kiss and ponytail. (What is the horse equivalent of kiss and tell? Why can’t I stop talking? THE END. THE END.)

It’s funny how hot you are…

Sometimes, when people laugh, it is not because something is funny. I am currently observing this in one of my classes, where we are talking about serious issues and this one kid just CANNOT NOT CHORTLE. He chortles throughout class. You say “chicken dinner” to this guy and he cracks up. Like an egg. Laid by the chicken that is for dinner. WHABAM full circle. Or full oval. Like an egg… Okay, I’m stopping. I don’t know what what I just did is called but it won’t happen again.

This kid makes me think, though, about reasons people laugh besides because something is actually funny. I made a list.

REASON 1: To suck up. This is called “being a sycophant.” You laugh at anything someone with power over you says that could be construed, or even MISconstrued, as a joke, because you know it will help you not get fired. I used to do this with an old boss who made a lot of jokes that involved comedy dancing. He really put his ass into his comedy dancing. He was bald. Let’s never speak of this again.

REASON 2: Because the person talking is hot. Nice abs can turn (and HAVE TURNED) an earnest comment about cats into insightful satire about the human condition.

REASON 3: To seem worldly. This is why teenagers will laugh at every possible blowjob joke, even jokes that are like, “Guess what I found in my backpack today? A blowjob!” At a certain point, you get old enough that blowjobs no longer seem like a “worldly” thing to talk about. Then it is jokes about like, current events you should be up on but aren’t, or jokes about doing your taxes because your parents still do yours… but shhhh!

REASON 4: Because you don’t know what else to do. This is why when someone says something to you like, “When I was a kid, I killed my gerbil,” you will probably laugh. You don’t want to yell at them or anything, you guys are just making small talk at a party, this isn’t like The Time, but at the same time you have to do something because WTF ARE YOU VOLDEMORT?!?!?!  Gerbils are innocent creatures. They just want to eat yogurt treats. In this way, they are not so different from humans.

Consider the GF

I just read “Consider the Lobster,” this article thing David Foster Wallace wrote about the Maine Lobster Festival. It basically starts with him and his parents and girlfriend at this festival, eating their lobster, and it ends with these really intense ethical questions about whether it’s moral to boil lobsters alive. Maybe they can feel pain! They try to climb out of the pot when you boil them! But then, what does “pain” really mean? What does “pot” really mean? What is the True Nature of Suffering?

It’s sort of not supposed to be funny–I mean, maybe sporadically, but I doubt he’d be thrilled if you texted him like, “Hey man, read your lobster thang. LOL!”–but I couldn’t stop laughing because I kept thinking about how weird it probably was for his girlfriend to read. Or maybe how weird it would be for me if I went on a date with a dude to a lobster festival and then he wrote “Consider the Lobster” (because DFDub’s GF was probably used to him).

Think about it! You go to a lobster festival with your boo. He’s writing an article about it, but for you it’s just a vacation. So you eat a bunch of lobster. You stroll around. The sun is shining. The birds are chirping. The lobsters are dying in droves, but that’s probably not your main focus. You hang out on the beach. You’re with his parents, which maybe is a big deal. You leave thinking you all had a nice, relaxing time.

Then a couple weeks later, you read the article he wrote about your vacay, which includes the sentence “There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider.”

And you’re like, my god! I thought me and Dave had a good time at the lobster festival!

My Review of Deathly Hallows I

Dear Bathilda Bagshot,

YOU ARE A SNAKE!!!

xoxo,

Mae

If you like beet pulp you are in LUCK

Fun fact about me: Sometimes when I’m bored, I dink around on the internet and look for advice for recent college grads who have moved to a new city and don’t have any friends. In case in the future I move to a new city. And I don’t have any friends. And then I will be like, “Ah, I have read many articles about this!” and in my mind that is good? WHATEVER everyone has a weird thing and this is mine and I would just like to point out that I am not a serial killer.

Anyway, I tried to Google this yesterday, but my search term was too vague–it was “moving to a new place advice.” I could tell it was too vague because the first thing Google turned out was a thread called “Moving horse to a new place–advice please?”

From Horsetopia’s Horse Forum.

You can read it if you want–there’s a nice little anecdote about beet pulp. So if you were ever like, “I hate the modern era, everyone talks about Twitter and no one talks about good old-fashioned topics like beet pulp!!!” then you are in luck. You are also Dwight. From the Office. Hi Dwight, I always knew you were real!

TAKEN

I saw Takers yesterday with some friends. Have you heard of this movie? It doesn’t matter. It is just a bunch of hot men (and Chris Brown, who is not hot) running around stealing. When there are action sequences, it is really fun!  Somebody SLIDES DOWN A BUILDING (is that even an activity?) and somebody else DRIVES INTO A HOLE (a really big hole!). The thing is that when there is not action and they are just talking, every single line confirmed my suspicion that the script was written by a hamster. Not even an elaborately trained hamster. Just a regular hamster.

Quotes As I Remember Them That Are Probably Mildly Inaccurate

[Two guys arguing]

Guy 1: It’s in the shed!

Guy 2: It’s in the shed?

Guy 1: It’s in the shed!

Guy 2: IT’S IN THE SHED!!!!

[You never actually find out if "it" is in the shed. No shed even appears onscreen.]

*

Guy, looking into the distance holding drink: We’re takers. We take. It’s what we do.

*

T.I., very upset: You took my bitch! You think I’m gonna forget that?

*

[Scene opens.]

Guy 1: Sup.

Guy 2: Sup.

[End scene.]

I feel like even if a hamster read this script, it would be get bored. It would be like, “There are no wheels! When are these guys going to run on their wheels?” Maybe this is more a script that was written by something inanimate. Like a drainpipe?

Sorry dad!

My dad is a pretty chill dude, but one of the few things that stresses him out is my texting habits.  I don’t have unlimited texting (because apparently I have a cell phone plan from 1412 BC – I only have enough texts to like, let my immediate family know I found a mastodon for dinner).  So I am constantly going over my limit, and then my dad complains about my cell phone bill and says, “What are you even texting people about?”

This is a great question that I wonder about sometimes too.  What AM I texting people about? And recently I had a moment of epiphany where I was like, THIS.

Here’s what happened.  I was walking to Starbucks (not that I ever buy coffee there – I just like to walk there, for my health) and I saw this bunny. And it was rubbing its nose, and it was just so cute.  So I sent my friend a text message that said, “I JUST SAW A BUNNY RUBBING IT’S NOSE!!!!!”

And then she sent me back a text that said, “In real life?!”

And then I sent her a text that said, “In real life!”

And then I think she might have even texted me back and said, “Wow!!”

So that was four text messages right there (I get charged when I receive text messages on my plan, as well as when I send them.  My plan was invented by like, Stalin). (But it is also from 1412 BC.)  (I am like a walking PSA about what happens when you don’t have a good grasp on world history.)

Anyway, it explains a lot. It’s not even my fault I text so much!  It’s the bunnies.  My dad should make THEM pay my phone bill. By rubbing their noses. For money. That could totally be a business… or maybe like a pay-per-view webcam… I don’t know when this became incredibly creepy but I wish I could go back to that time and change the course of events.

What happens in Vegas? (Part 2)

I hadn’t been 21 in Vegas before this last visit, so this was the first time I really got to scope out the REAL Vegas, by which I mean the slot machines.  I tried to scope them out when I was there and I was like, seven, but I almost got bounced out of there by a three hundred pound man because kids have to “keep moving.”  (I had a very idyllic childhood.)

So anyway, I scoped them out this time, and slot machines are potentially THE LOVES OF MY LIFE.  Not playing them, just viewing them.  Especially the themed ones.  I kept a list of their names, because they uniformly cracked me up.  Popular ones included:

• Lucky Lemmings
• Maltese Fortune
• Kitty Glitter (people go crazy for puns about kitty litter!  I’ve never met these people, but THEY’RE OUT THERE apparently)
• Super Jackpot Party
• Lucky Luigi’s Pizzeria (it takes a lot of balls to call a slot machine a pizzeria.  Really… your confidence just has to be through the roof, or people will notice you’re lying.)
• Twin Win (a potentially excellent theme, where you could like, win money by getting two sets of hot twins in a row, but the machine was actually dolphin themed.  It was unclear if any of the dolphins were twins. I know it’s not PC to say, but all dolphins look the same to me…)
• The Munsters (???)

And, my favorite

• Wolf Run

I don’t know why I liked Wolf Run so much more than the others.  I think it was because the actual icons you had to line up to win had like, nothing to do with wolves – they were just colored squares, with maybe three wolves thrown in haphazardly, like it had been called Color Square Run until the last minute when someone was like crap, these colored squares have NOT turned out as majestic as we planned.  Time to half-heartedly include wolves…

What Happens in Vegas? (Part 1)

So I got back from Vegas!  And while I was there, I went indoor skydiving!  I “achieved the dream of human flight” or whatever their motto is!  It was surprisingly undignified.  Like, in my dream of human flight, I am not wearing a unisuit that is awkwardly inflated by a high-powered fan.  And in my dream of human flight, I am able to keep my mouth closed.  Something about high powered fans just automatically opens my mouth. Is that oversharing?  I can’t tell…

ANYWAY, skydiving aside, the really interesting thing about Vegas is the kiosks.  We were staying in downtown Vegas, and right by our hotel there was a covered walkway chock full of specialty kiosks that were far superior to like, the dancing fountains at the Bellagio.  Or whatever is on the Strip.  Especially in terms of making me inexplicably (just kidding TOTALLY EXPLICABLY) depressed.  These kiosks included:

1. Pet Fashionista. It sounds like it would sell clothes for pets, but it actually sells human clothes with pictures of pets on them.  A lot of the pets are sitting in wicker baskets (score!).
2. Express Ur Cell.  It sells plastic cell phone accessories.  Two thirds of them are orange.  I would respect it more if they just went all the way and called it Express Ur Cellf.  Actually, on second thought, that isn’t true.
3. Rock Legands.  I would respect it more if they just went all the way and called it Rack Lagands.  Wow – still not true!
4. Sock and Socks.  They sold socks.  What they were playing at with that extra “sock” at the beginning is beyond me.  Maybe it was a pun on companies called like, Bernstein and Sons?  And then it just went too far?  Or maybe it’s a pun on… Rock and Rocks?  Except that isn’t a thing in the first place.
5. Let’s Party.  This is my favorite.  You would think this kiosk would sell party supplies, right?  WRONG.  They sold straw hats with brims.  Exclusively.  The brims were a little too conservative for them to be sombreros, so they were just semi-dignified sun hats.  It was like the kiosk owners knew nobody would like their hats, so they just named their kiosk after something unrelated that people actually do like: parties!  Probably if I went to the dentist in Vegas, it would also be called “Let’s Party.”  Maybe with an underkicker, like “A Dentistry Spectacle!”