Brooklyn (+ cheap bed!)

I just read an article I loved so much that I e-mailed it to basically everyone I know. It’s by Tao Lin, a guy who, I discovered after extensive Googling, is weird. BUT, more importantly, Tao Lin is from Brooklyn and doesn’t really know anything about Seattle. I am from Seattle, and have literally never been to Brooklyn. And yet I am moving there! Soon! So soon, and I have to get rid of my bed. Do you need a bed?

Anyway, here is what I know about Brooklyn, based on people I know who are from there. It’s like I’m plagiarizing Tao Lin… BUT BACKWARDS. And worse. And shorter.

1) People in Brooklyn make/listen to music that does not have a tune. It is just metal scraping against metal, and birds cheeping. The birds cheep during the chorus. The metal scraping is the verses. No one in Brooklyn listens to Justin Bieber, knows who Justin Bieber is, or will enjoy listening to me talk about Justin Bieber for hours. Sorry in advance, Brooklyn!

2) People in Brooklyn (my list is already contradicting itself) like Jay-Z. One of them IS Jay-Z. However, as a stat minor, I know you can’t take Jay-Z as a representative sample of a borough. He is too special!

3) People in Brooklyn eat a lot of bagels. Their bagels are better than the bagels in our campus Einstein Bros., my friend from Brooklyn always tells me while wearing a large plaid shirt.

4) There is a movie called Crooklyn. It is about Brooklyn. This is not based on my friends from Brooklyn–it is based on me trying to rent it like a year ago and then the video store not having it and then me not seeing it but wondering what it is about sometimes. It is directed by Spike Lee!

5) The train I am living closest to in Brooklyn–the G train–is the stupidest of all the trains. It comes like, every two hours. My friend says the only way the G train is fun is if you buy a 40 and drink it while you wait. I don’t know if I will do that, though, because I don’t want to get arrested for vagrancy.

6) You need a “thing” to survive in Brooklyn. My friend told me not to worry though– I have the “thing.” I asked some questions about it, but it remained unspecified. I think the thing might be that, because I used to be a bagger, I am used to strangers cussing me out and do not cry when it happens.

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.

Words I Hate

I have so much homework that the word “copious” definitely applies in some way, but after a lot of effort I have realized I don’t know how to use copious in a sentence. So I will let you imagine a nice correct sentence on your own time. My point is: I should do work. But instead I just gazed at my reading for several minutes while in my head, I wrote a list of words and phrases that I irrationally hate.

The List From My Head

• “Arguably the greatest _______ of our generation”–I might hate the word “arguably” all the time, actually. Unclear.
• “I am writing a short piece of ______.” Or even worse, “a short work of _______.”
• Delightful
• Nosegay
• “Rate of speed”–SPEED IS A RATE ALREADY MY FRIEND. It is like saying “length of distance,” or “distrust anything I happen to say about rates in the future.”
• “Principle component regression”–It is just so hard. See also: the prefix “eigen-”.
• “Imma let you finish, but…” ENOUGH. Kanye made a mistake. He has made many new mistakes since then. He’s putting out a song with Jay-Z called “Ham”! Let’s make fun of that! Let’s move forward into the future!
• Titties–REAL TALK: Why can’t you just say tits? Nobody calls dicks “dickies.”

Coming soon–words I irrationally love!  Also, coming as soon as I can think of it–list of reasons it’s okay that I am always in the effing library.

Things are happening to Kanye’s body!!!

Most people don’t do enough weird stuff to their body for me to write a blog post about what they have done, but Kanye West has outdone every single one of his fellow men. His body is all up in the news, for crazy reasons! And I need to talk about it! Right now!

1) Kanye West had his bottom teeth removed (REMOVED) and replaced (REPLACED) with diamonds (DIAMONDS). REMOVED REPLACED DIAMONDS. Think about how much that would hurt. Think about how much value those diamonds will lose if he does not floss (in the dental way) (this is the most profound example of non-dental flossing ever) (in fact it shows the intersectionality of the two kinds of flossing, as it were).

I hate college, it makes you talk like a dick.

2) SPEAKING OF DICK, I saw Kanye’s. You can too. Dear men: I don’t know if you’re up on this, but decontextualized dicks are not hot. You should not send  a picture of your dick to a nice girl you like. She will just think you don’t understand human sexuality and then maybe leak the picture on the internet. She might even post it on Dickipedia (a website I just accidentally found and left).

Also, there is literally nothing more self-absorbed than sitting at home, alone, taking pictures of your penis. It is almost unforgivably self-absorbed. Except not quite, in Kanye’s case, because think about it–if I married him, my name would be MAE WEST. It would be so fly!

Everything I believe in (almost)

I typically enjoy hearing views that are different from mine.  It is educational. But there are some things I just do not see as up for discussion, and one of those things is emoticons. Here is what I believe: Emoticons are supposed to look like human faces, making some kind of expression.

You wouldn’t think that would come up against a lot of opposition, but that is because you haven’t met my phone. My phone has an emoticon button. You push the button, and it takes you to a menu of 27 (I just want to point out–a perfect cube! FUN WITH MATH) emoticons. And almost none of them look like faces making recognizable expressions. Instead they just look like CRAZY NOTHING.

EXHIBIT A: :-9 (What is this feeling? “My mouth has a tail”?)

EXHIBIT B: :-Q (“I’m about to perform fellatio!” Don’t even pretend you don’t see it.)

EXHIBIT C: :< (“I feel like I have no nose!” “I feel like I have no mouth!” “I feel like a mountain, and also an umlaut!” THESE ARE NOT FEELINGS PEOPLE HAVE.)

EXHIBIT D: _@/ (No facial resemblance. “I feel like a rose with two walls meeting at an obtuse angle behind it!”)

EXHIBIT E: (_)3 (Inexplicable on all fronts.)

EXHIBIT F: \\_/ (Also inexplicable. “I feel like I have three arms and no head and I am being viewed from above”?)

I do not even know anymore. I feel like this: :-sdjflsdfsfjd. And that looks more like a face than most of these! Maybe I should start a business – “Bad Stuff That Is At Least Better Than Terrible Stuff.” I think I will. It’s going to be huge. My business cards will say “I’m CEO, Bitch.”

Good music

So I’ve been noticing lately that some people get really excited about “bands.” Like, this band is good, or this band is bad, or Justin Bieber is a demon from hell/Canada, or whatever. But the thing is, whether or not a song is good has nothing to do with the band making it. Or maybe it has something to do with it, but the defining features of good songs (I believe) are:

1. Songs where the beat doesn’t drop for a while and then IT DOES (see also the lesser known friend: songs where the beat stops in the middle, like for emphasis… and then IT STARTS UP AGAIN. I could actually talk about this forever…).

2. Songs with choirs singing on the chorus/in the background (weirdly though, straight up choral music sucks).

3. Songs with children’s choirs singing on the chorus/in the background. (See also: Songs involving children in any way, including weird ways, a la the Chicken ‘N’ Beer intro where at the end that child says “We’re gonna to let our nuts hang!” I find it cute but dude, Ludacris, is that even legal?)

4. Songs with clapping (or snapping).

5. Songs with whistling.

6. Songs with melodic inarticulate groaning (this is my favorite – sounds super creepy written down, but listen to my three-song Convincing You About Inarticulate Groaning Playlist and the creep factor will decrease:  Transatlanticism, Death Cab; Wake Up, Arcade Fire; West Coast, Coconut Records. Yeah - I’m right!)

7. Songs with Pharrell. I’m like six years behind the times but it’s great because I don’t care!

Sometimes I get really excited

Some people want to go see Eclipse.  These people are a) losers because it’s been out for like, two weeks – what are you waiting for bitches, an actual solar eclipse?!?! – and b) just biding their time until the real movie of the summer comes out:

I could make fun of this trailer, but why? Why would I ever do that?  This movie is going to be as engaging as Step Up and Step Up 2: The Streets COMBINED and then SQUARED and then SHOWN AT AN ENGAGEMENT PARTY. Major factors include:

1) That guy’s body.

2) 3D.

3) THE BIGGEST BATTLE EVER. Could this premise be more epic? The Iliad is dropping off curriculums as we speak and being replaced by the Step Up 3D script. In fact, school in general is becoming obsolete because people are just SCHOOLING EACH OTHER ON THE DANCE FLOOR ALL OVER THIS MOVIE.

4) The quote “Think of the house as like, a supercrew.” No human being is immune to this command. It is a fun thought experiment to try on pretty much any house, and also, everyone wants to be part of a supercrew. Everyone! Even your grandparents!

5) There are lasers coming out of their clothes!  Who does not love the combination of dance and groundbreaking science?

Bottom line: do not expect a post from me on August 6. I will be busy getting ready to step up. And then stepping up. And then reminiscing about how hard I stepped up.  The process is going to involve A LOT of emphatic shouting.

Advertising

I know that the ads on most people’s Facebook pages are very accurately targeted. I hear that Facebook can figure out your religion (even if it’s unlisted), what birth control you are on, and what languages you speak.  But Facebook has no freaking clue what is up with me.  I get a lot of advertisements for:

• Day drinking – Facebook thinks I want to look through online directories of bars that open early in the morning.  Is there anyone in the world that Type A about day drinking?  If there is, that person is day drinking ALONE.
• J.P. Morgan China – There are job openings there, and Facebook thinks I am qualified for them!  I am like DESPERATELY not though.
• Art schools.  But Facebook, seriously, I suck at art. When I was a kid, I drew a picture of a suitcase, and my mom told me it was a really great drawing of a TV. I draw suitcase handles so they look like TV ANTENNAS.
• Sociology swag.  The caption says “Fun and unique t-shirts, mugs and more that tell the world you are proud to be a Sociology major.”  I’m really rarely like “God, this mug is prohibitively uncool,” but that is how I feel about sociology mugs.  I would rather drink out of a bucket. Of fire.

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!”