I can read!

I read Jane Eyre for a class freshman year over the course of one week (I had not yet figured out that sometimes you can just like, not do your reading).  Jane Eyre is a long-ass book, so I was kind of grumpy.  And then I wrote this, which I just found on my computer.  Miraculously, I still like it! Mainly because I just freaking love any and all jokes at the expense of Conor Oberst. Even like “Haha – Conor Oberst!”  I would laugh at that.

I might be laughing right now!

***

I have to read Jane Eyre for one of my classes, and christ!  The girl is such a WHINER!  Even Conor Oberst would be like, “Jane.  Here’s a picture of a rainbow.  Now perk the hell up.”

I haven’t finished it, but so far, the book is just a fatty list of complaints.  In case you haven’t read it, here’s her top five (in order of importance):

1) Her porridge is burnt (MAJOR source of narrative tension).

2) She is cold.

3) She is ugly.

4) Her friend is dead.

5) Her life is sad.  (Seriously, she refers to it as “my sad life.”)

At first, I thought this was just because it was winter, and she had seasonal affective disorder or whatever.  But then it became spring, and Jane got even more emo than before.  Check out her description of the garden at her school: “[I]t glowed with flowers… and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most of the inmates of Lowood [her boarding school], except to furnish now and then a handful of herbs and blossoms to put in a coffin.”

It’s beautiful!  The flowers are blooming!  But I still want to talk about coffins, and you are NAIVE if you think I will wait for a new sentence to do it.

Wake up in the morning feeling like writing a list…

Here is a list I wrote a long time ago that I just re-found (okay FINE, finaglers, the correct word is “found”) and was not hugely embarrassed by.  This is rare, and it makes me happy!  Maybe it will make you happy too!

(And even if you hate it, you can at least laugh at how un-timely it is.  So there is definitely something in it for you.)

Other Starkly Un-Autobiographical Names Diddy Could Have Given His Latest Fragrance, “I Am King”

I Am The Concept Of Gender Equality

I Am Purple

I Am Your Father

I Am Still An A-List Celebrity

VINTAGE: Ferrets/Merry Christmas?

This is the first blog post I ever wrote!  And it’s sort of Christmas-y so it seems appropriate.  Plus, talking about ferrets is always appropriate.  Duh.

*

I personally don’t want a pet ferret, but I can understand the attraction.  I mean,  if you ever feel like you have a long torso, a ferret will make you feel better.  And Wikipedia does make them sound pretty awesome:

“When ferrets are excited, they may perform a route commonly referred to as the weasel war dance, a frenzied series of sideways hops. This is often accompanied by a soft clucking noise, commonly referred to as dooking.”

I mean… dooking.

But you know what’s not awesome?  People who dress up their freaking ferrets for Christmas.

It does not take all types to make a world.  It takes all types except that one.  THINK ABOUT THESE PEOPLE!  They have some free time one day, and they are like “Hmmmm.  I could read the news, or style my hair, or go for a walk.  But you know what?  Instead I’m going to get a strangely shaped sweater and shove that sucker on my ferret.  Oh… and I’ll need a tiny Santa hat.  But not in red.  Oh no.  It’s MULTISTRIPE OR NOTHING.”

VINTAGE: What’s That Brown Stuff?

One of my New Year’s resolutions is going be, probably, to be a little cleaner.  For my roommates’ sake.  You will see why if you read this.

Keep in mind: THIS IS OLD. I am not this hugely grody anymore.  I’m just regular grody!

Keep in mind also: Hahahahahaha this still makes me laugh even though it’s like two years old.  It’s just.  So.  Dweeby.

*

So I have a problem.  With my bed.  I have this comforter that is dry clean only, and I haven’t had time to take it to the dry cleaners lately.  But it has this stain.  It’s brown and shady looking and when people see it, they make this really long noise that’s a combination of “urgh,” “ew,” and “Mae I’m not your friend anymore FIND A NEW FRIEND OH MY GOD.”  And then, when they’re done with the noise and they are able to tear their eyes away from the stain, they look at me questioningly with their eyes (and sometimes also their mouths) open very, very wide and wait for an explanation.

And then I say: “Don’t worry.  It’s not what it looks like.”

“What is it?”

“Well, see, I fell asleep with a candy bar.”

This is legitimately what happened.  I was eating a Snickers bar in my bed, and I was very tired BUT, I thought, not so tired that I would be unable to finish eating.  Except then I was a little more tired than I expected, and then I sort of snuggled down and oops!  I fell asleep.  It melted all over my bed.  And my leg.

Little-known fact: There is nothing scarier than waking up to find chocolate all over your leg.  When I woke up the next morning, I looked at my calf and thought groggily but also very fearfully “I AM BLEEDING AND MY BLOOD IS CHOCOLATE THESE THINGS CAN’T BE GOOD” and then I hopped around my room helplessly for a couple of minutes before thinking that oh, hey, maybe this isn’t a real health emergency.  Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.  My leg is delicious!

Not that I ate the chocolate off my leg.  I am actually a kind of hygienic person.  With my body, at least.  My ROOM is a different story.  The other day, for example, I was looking for something on my desk, and I found something very wet.

It was a pool of standing water.

On my desk.

It’s really sad how I started out this post planning to explain how I am not gross, and then ended up proving conclusively that I am very gross anyway. Or just a clean, innocent mini-swamp collector! That’s what I am! STOP JUDGING ME!

Oh dear.

VINTAGE AND REALLY LONG: The Disability Special

I am about to go wander around India for ten days with no internet, so I figure I should leave something long here for you to chew on (not figuratively LITERALLY CHEW IT) until I get back.  So  here is something that I posted before on my ghetto blog that doesn’t exist anymore.  I have edited it since then.  It is better now.  But still REALLY LONG.  And also BATSHIT CRAZY.  Enjoy it if you have the patience.

The Disability Special

I am about to tell you the sort of story you don’t hear often – a story of screaming, disabilites, and bagging at a professional level. But first, some background.

Back when I was a bagger at The Store, I worked under a supervisor named Rob.  Despite the fact that he was a low-level manager of a grocery store, Rob was one of the few Store employees who harbored the illusion that his job was extremely difficult and taxing.  He was constantly stressed and borderline overwhelmed by his duties, which were watching other people work and, occasionally, counting money. Truly, if he had had business cards, they would have said “Rob: Doer of Difficult and Taxing Things.”  And then there would have been a little picture of a man fighting a dragon.  Or, more likely, a little picture of Jesus getting crucified.

An interesting fact about Rob is that, instead of saying things like “time for your break,” he would increase efficiency – at least in his mind – by pointing at you, pointing towards the break room, and then marching stalwartly away.  His unwillingness to speak was so great that he really could have been thought of as a mime enthusiast.  However, I’m pretty sure that he was actually a minimizing-interaction-with-other-people enthusiast.  The man was not a fan of others.  Especially when they touched him.  If The Store was crowded and people accidentally brushed past him to get where they were going, he would visibly flinch.

On an entirely different (but equally important) note, part of my job as a bagger was to help disabled customers with their shopping.  This typically meant blind customers, or customers in wheelchairs who couldn’t reach the higher shelves.  Disabled customers were defined broadly, though – once, I helped a woman who thought that she was being followed by an all-male choir.

I said, “So like… do they want to sing to you?”

“Oh no. They want something even worse than that.”

In cases like that, the man-to-man customer service got a little taxing – especially when, on her way out, that woman peed in the store’s entryway – but it was usually fine.

Except one day.

VINTAGE: The Toothless Transvestite

Another old thing.

The Toothless Transvestite

Transvestites are relatively common in the neighborhood where I work.  I figured out how to spot them from Anna, who told me to check the Adam’s apple and the hands (men’s are larger and hairier).  I also discovered on my own that strangely positioned breasts (too high, too low, or the worst – too far left) are usually found on men with rambunctious falsies, rather than women with rambunctious genetics.  And yet what the neighborhood transvestites share, more than hairy hands or prominent Adam’s apples, is teeth.  They all have them.  EXCEPT ONE.

The outlier is the man I call “The Toothless Transvestite.”  (I just call him that because it’s alliterative, though – he actually has about five teeth.)  I have seen this man regularly for almost two years now, and I always feel bad for him.  It’s not just because eating solid food must be hard for him (that challenge is completely compensated for by the ease with which he can use straws.  No jaw movement necessary for him!  Homie probably gets the words for “lockjaw” and “picnic” confused).  It’s because nothing else is quite working for him either.  His boobs look weird, possibly because they are repurposed shoulder pads.  His clothes are all sort of mildew colored, and don’t fit him properly.  His shoes are kind of clunky heels, and they make his ankles look thick (even though they are not!  He has totally fine ankles.  I don’t know why I know this).  And his makeup is totally sale makeup – it doesn’t work with his coloring at all.  Whenever I see him, I think that there should be a fund for impoverished transvestites, to help them impersonate women more accurately.  But then I think about whether I would donate money to this fund, and the answer is always no.

Anyway… yesterday, I saw the toothless transvestite for the first time since summer started, and HE GOT A MAKEOVER!  He looks FABULOUS now.  He got some new breasts that look entirely like breasts, with no connotations of shoulder.  He got a new dress, with real colors and some flattering diagonal stripes.  He also got some new makeup that brightens his face right up and also – most importantly – HE REGREW HIS TEETH.  Or he got dentures.  But I like to think that he chugged some calcium and grew a new set, like a shark.  In fact, I like to think that he is actually part shark, just because the news headline “Transvestite Goes Swimming, Consumes Entire School of Fish” would be… well.  Pretty compelling.

Anyway, the toothless transvestite’s transformation (OMG ALLITERATION RED ALERT! REMAIN IN YOUR HOMES!) made me really, really happy.  When I saw him, I actually teared up.  You go, homegirl. You GO!

VINTAGE: Wingdings? More like WEIRDdings.

I am frantically packing BUT I have also decided to sporadically post (maybe once or twice a week?) some vintage (read: old)  stuff that I posted on a blog that I have since deleted because the blog provider was so annoying and bad.  (I know that was a run-on sentence.  But the thing is that I just don’t care.)  I will start with my favorite old stuff. Eventually, I will get into the old-stuff-that-I-kind-of-hate arena.

Not yet though.  This is one of my favorites of all time, although it is weird as all freaking get out.

Wingdings?  More like WEIRDdings.

What the hell is up with Wingdings?

It is by far the weirdest font. I can’t write in it on my blog, but I can still break it down for you. Basically, instead of inconveniencing you with “letters” that form “words” that you can “read,” Wingdings gives you the handy option of writing in RANDOM AND MEANINGLESS SYMBOLS. So instead of the letter “a,” Wingdings offers you… a tiny picture of an owl! And instead of the letter “b,” there’s… a little frowny face! Neither of these statements is actually true, but it still gives you a strong sense of how useful Wingdings is. I don’t understand why it is uniformly offered by all word-processing programs.

To add to the confusion, Wingdings is also NOT ALONE. It has FRIENDS! This sounds like a figment of my paranoid imagination but I am actually deathly serious. Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 are other, similarly useful fonts, that are also included in all word processing software. Why? It is like having a backup decorative ashtray! OH WAIT it is actually like having TWO backup decorative ashtrays.

I imagine the three of them (the Wingdings fonts) hanging out and having conversations like this:

Wingdings (the original): HA! I can’t believe we exist!

Wingdings 2: It is objectively ridiculous.

Wingdings 3: Hee hee hee.

Wingdings (the original) (looking directly into the camera): We represent the end of civilization.

Wingdings 2 (also looking directly into the camera): We don’t know why we are called “Wingdings.”

Wingdings 3 (still not looking at the camera at all): Hee hee hee.

I hate them (although I definitely hate Wingdings 3 the least. As you have probably observed, it would totally be the funnest one to hang out with). And maybe you think it is lame that I have thought about which of the three Wingdings font I would most like to hang out with, but before you judge, look at the “Controversies” section of the Wingdings Wikipedia page. Some people think even more seriously about Wingdings than I do!