Biscuit: Tasty Doesn't Get You A Date To The Prom

It is not that I have been ignoring you. I have not gone blithely about my day, unaware that you exist and hunger for a new entry. In the past week, I have de-spammed my comments twice, and I have changed my title-bar tagline...well, thrice, really, despite feeling a little poncy for using the word "thrice." So, see. I have been around. I just have not been...saying much, I suppose.

Instead of saying things, I have been busy doing things: taking my second physics test, which, while not quite as rocktastic as the first still leaves me firmly in the camp of I-Have-A-Fucking-A-In-Physics-Land; staying up until five at a party on Saturday; staying up until four putting together a jigsaw puzzle on Sunday; being a subway iPod whore with as many as three guys at once; losing an hour; eating slabs of raw tuna; carrying four full bags to the laundromat; trying to get out of the world's most dreadful freelance gig; looking for apartments; sitting on someone I did not know was there; watching Alias and Iron Chef America and Robot Chicken and Best Little Whorehouse In Texas; drinking; working; trying to find time for working out. In the words of Prince Humperdinck, I'm swamped. At least my horoscope seems to think that all will turn out right in the end.

I love my mom. I love my mom to tiny tiny pieces and then I scoop up all the pieces and I love those pieces into even tinier pieces. She looks fifteen years younger than her actual age, she smells like Chanel No. 5, she is heart-stoppingly successful at everything she has ever done, we listened to the audiobook of Wuthering Heights together on a road trip, and my freshman year of high school, the day before Star Trek VI came out, she went to Blockbuster and rented Star Treks I through V as a special surprise and let me watch ten hours of sci-fi in a row.

She is also one of the funniest people I know -- albeit unwittingly. I offer below two more real conversations. As is convention 'round these parts, things that I say are in bold, and things that other people say are not.

The Legend of Bratty Mom:

"OH, Also I wanted to tell you! I just signed up for the AIDS Walk!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. So at some point soon I'm probably going to be hitting you up for a donation."
"(sighhhhhh) I'm completely tapped out. I can't donate anything."
"Sure you can!"
"(sighhhhhhhhh) Like how MUCH? I'm serious, I'm tapped OUT."
"Come on, mom. Like twenty bucks."
"Okay, so twenty bucks might not seem like a lot to YOU, but it's a lot to ME."
"Mom."
"Well, it IS."
"MOM."
"FINE, FINE, I'll give you twenty bucks and then I just won't EAT for a few DAYS."

and

The Legend of Neurotic Mom:

"I got an email from Deborah [the woman who runs the house we are renting in Jamaica] and she says that the seas were rough last week and brought back all the sandy beach that washed out during Hurricane Ivan! Isn't that great?"
"What? There's no beach?? They never told us there wasn't a beach. And a hurricane?? They had a HURRICANE? Does that mean everything's like, broken?? Can we even GET there? I mean, how can they have, like, an AIRPORT and ROADS if there was a hurricane?? Is the house all broken? Isn't that false advertising? They never told us the HOUSE was all broken!! That's totally false advertising!!"
"Okay, mom, FIRST of all the hurricane was last year. SECOND, hurricanes are somewhat less destructive than a NUCLEAR BOMB, for heaven's sake."

and then I swear to god my mom replied with

"Oh YEAH? Well if it's NOT DESTRUCTIVE, then WHY do they call it a HURRICANE??"

Krissa was kind enough to explain the etymology of the word "hurricane" for me: HURRICANE, (n), FROM THE ROMAN "HURR", meaning EVIL, and the swahili, "ICANE", meaning DESTROYS EVERYTHING.

I gave up at this point, and said, "You know what? You're absolutely right. When we get there, we're going to be put up in a tin shack with a cardboard sign over the door reading 'Luxury Suite,' and when we say we want to go swimming, one of the staff just gets up and throws a glass of water in your face."
And then as if I actually were validating her concerns instead of mocking them, she says, "Well. I certainly hope it'll be better than THAT."
"Oh. Right. Would it be better if they threw a glass full of Evian?"
"(pause) Well. Yes."

Sometimes I look at these conversations and wonder to myself, "WHERE THE FUCK DID I COME FROM?!?!?" But really, I am just as much a bundle of neuroses as she is; I just happen to have a different set. We are a lot more alike than she likes to pretend. Neither of us has a problem saying "I'd like to speak to your supervisor," until we get someone on the phone who can fix whatever we need dealt with. If anyone messes with either of us, the other automatically leaps into a frothing vengeful rage on their behalf. We are both very particular about how things should be -- if there is a space for spoons in the drawer, then by god, spoons should be nowhere else! I may be more optimistic and she may be more realistic, but both of us understand that, eventually, no matter what happens, things are going to turn out okay. And also, both of us really like Julie Andrews. That is why when she gets neurotic, I just fall down laughing, instead of wanting to poke her with a sharp stick. And when you think about it, is that not the true meaning of family?

I have a very...tentative...relationship with music. I wish I could keep up with the conversation when people start talking about bands with names like The Hives or The Strokes or The Vines or The Peas or the Bees or The Goats or The Random Plural Nouns, but none of that stuff has ever registered with me. Some very well-intentioned friends have tried to teach me, have made mixes for me, have told me what songs mean, what the songwriter was going through at the time and why that makes their song more poignant.

I have no idea why this sloughs off my brain like pudding off a freshly-preened duck, but almost nothing seems to stick. I barely even listened to music at all until I got to college, aside from my extensive collection of They Might Be Giants and Garth Brooks cassette tapes. Seriously. That was it. Thankfully, my roommate and his padded boxful of CDs at least opened my eyes to the fact that other music existed at all, and even though one of the things I learned is that I fucking despise Korn with the fiery, burning passion of a thousand million suns, and also who someone was referencing if they told me they wanted to fuck me like an animal, I did discover one band I liked that managed to lodge itself in my consciousness.

A new game for the Macintosh came out my freshman year of college: Marathon. A basic, but still very good, first-person shooter, Marathon and its sequels feature a lot of aliens, and the shooting to pieces thereof. And I played that game. A lot. Like, a lot lot. At the same time, there was a debut album put out by a new band: Garbage. My roommate played that CD. A lot. And eventually, Garbage became my internal soundtrack that played while firing a plasma gun. To this day, I cannot think of one without the other running through my head. It certainly helps that a lot of the songs sounded like they were written specifically to kill aliens to: "I came to cut you up / I came to knock you down / I came around to tear your little world apart / I came to shut you up / I came to drag you down / I came around to tear your little world apart / And break your soul apart." If you can think of a better soundtrack for hunting aliens on a foreign planet, I would certainly like to hear it.

Garbage became my first real music crush. I would go to music stores and flip through all of their imports and singles, buying all the remixes and B-sides I could find. I would dutifully file them away in my very own, newly-acquired CD Book. I would read about special edition LPs that came in feather-covered jackets, and I would covet them. And of course, I went to see them in concert and thought I was very clever when I said that I was channeling my repressed heterosexual desires through hot-as-fuck Shirley Manson. Also seeing them in concert fucking rocked my fucking face right the fuck OFF.

I am pleased to report that in the years since, I have bought many more CDs, several of which I actually found on my own. Most of what I listen to is pretty dreadful, I admit -- a lot of Happy Hardcore and bouncy overdone fast-and-loud dance junk sung by self-described divas and anything else that is likely to be played at a gay dance club full of shirtless hotties writhing around on E (hmm, maybe I have discovered why I find the music so appealing?) -- but I do not care. If it makes me bop around in my chair at work, it is a good thing. Garbage is still my first love, though -- which is why when I saw a commercial during adult swim last night for a brand new Garbage album I had no fucking idea was even coming out, my heart did a little skippy hop, I decided that Josh was in serious trouble for totally not keeping me up to date, and I started looking for my shoes to run out to the store. Which was when I realized that 11:45 pm on a Tuesday night is far too late to go out and buy music. About five minutes later of looking up stuff about the album online, it totally hit me, I smacked myself in my stupid head, and I downloaded the FUCK out of that bitch, thank you very much iTunes. I have been listening to it nonstop since, and I am very pleased to report that thus far, it reminds me of their first album more than the intervening two: "Stick it to them like a phoenix risin' / There's nothing grander than the big surprise / They can't hurt you with their sticks and stones / About time, take them right between the eyes." I realize that suitability for shooting bug-eyed monsters to is not the most reliable bellwether for music, but nevertheless, it has served me well thus far. Now I just need to find more alien uprisings to quell. Seen any lately?

In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that also last weekend I downloaded the Little Mermaid soundtrack. iTunes can be a sickness sometimes.

So when I woke up this morning, my stomach was killing me. I got up three times, and each time I laid back down and made a kind of feeble "eurrrgggh" noise. At precisely the point where if I got up exactly then, I would only be stupidly late for work, instead of obcenely late, I finally got up and hurried through my morning routine -- albeit a sort of shuffled, hunched-over kind of hurry. The only clean shirt I own with a collar that does not require an iron is this sort of stretchy patterned shiny short-sleeve dark blue shirt that actually looks much nicer than my really bad description of it might lead one to believe. Usually I like the stretchiness of it, but today, the shirt was distending awkwardly over my big fat puffy tender belly -- but I had no time to de-wrinkle anything else, so awkward stretchy shirt it was.

I hobbled my way down the street to the subway, somehow forced my gut through the turnstile, and got on the train. I kept trying to stand up straight, stop hunching, but it just was not happening. And of course -- right in front of me, sitting down, eyes on a level with my midsection -- there was this super hot blonde guy, lazily looking up and down the subway car.

What do we do when we are standing next to someone hot? We try to look hot. So I ignored the shooting pains, stood up straight, sucked myself in, and tried not to let my eyes water. Ow, I thought to myself. This fucking hurts but it is totally worth it because he is really very cute.

And then I saw he was wearing headphones. My eyes followed the cord down to his lap...and saw that he was fiddling with some big boxy clunky Nomad MP3 player, at which point I sighed with relief and hunched myself over again in comfort. Because honestly: if you own one of those bad boys instead of an iPod and display it in full view on the subway? That is a minimum -50 cute points right there, dropping him straight into "not worth exacerbating a stomachache over" territory.

(snort) Nomad. Whatever.

I just totally flirted with disaster.

On this intensely gorgeous day, I decided to eat lunch outside. Lunch was a nice salad of frisee, toasted walnuts, Stilton, orange segments, and...roasted beets.

Yes, you heard me. I said beets, people. I ate beets OUTSIDE from a flimsy plastic dish. Holding them, precariously, over my own lap as I sat crosslegged on a bench. Beet juice could have poured all over me if the wind kicked up just wrong. I was but a single solitary mis-step away from looking like a murder scene. A murder scene flecked with brainsy-looking chunks of blue cheese.

But that is just how I am. Brave. Bold. I never flinch in the face of danger. A man on the edge. Of beets.

A lot has happened to me in the past three years, since I started this little diary/journal/blog thing. For example, the week that I started writing, I was all sad and mopey and stupid and I let this dreadful stilted mournful voice have free rein over what I was writing. Do not get me wrong, on occasion I still come off as stilted and depressing, but I try to keep these tendencies to a minimum, and also strive to ensure a certain joke-per-paragraph ratio, so that in later months I can look back and say, "Damn, I was funny then."

There is one remaining vestige of that initial foray: apostrophes. Or rather, the lack of them. I do not use contractions. At the beginning, saying "I do not" instead of the contracted version, seemed to lend my words a little extra gravity, and then I just kept on with what I liked to call my "stylistic choice." I have used contractions in quotes only, and in perhaps one or two entries where I got a little emotional and felt it was more important to be clear than stylized.

This is the thing. I am over it. I do not need this particular affectation any more, this extra gravity, this additional worry.

So I am going to do it.

I am going to reclaim my punctuation.

And you

can't

stop me.

You can't shan't won't shouldn't wouldn't couldn't stop me! EEEEEE hee hee heee!! I'm going to use apostrophes with wild abandon! Foot-loose and fancy-free, I don't have to edit each entry, scanning for unauthorized contractions! And I had no idea this was going to be quite so...liberating...until I actually started writing it! I've thrown off a three-year long straitjacket! No self-imposed restrictions!

I'm at liberty to elide as I damn well please, and I'm feeling pretty damn good about it!

Seen yesterday: an eight-year-old boy running around the park, chasing pigeons with a handheld electric drill and screaming, "Are you bitches messing with me??"

Also seen yesterday: A freaking huge one-bedroom apartment. Check it. The last three pictures are from the version with a terrace and an abysmally old stove, and all the rest are from the one on the 19th floor and a view of Manhattan. I should probably be more enthusiastic about this place, but it's really hard to be excited about moving somewhere when it means I have to leave behind the place I live in now. I fucking love the place I live in now. Cue sad violins.

Will be seen today: A nice long line outside the Apple Store in Soho. I'll be in that line, waiting to buy my freshly-minted copy of Tiger! Tigertigertigertiger GRRR!! And hopefully they'll have some secret Mystery Bags I can buy. I like Mystery Bags.

Also will be seen today: Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6!! In preparation, I'm spending my day listening to the original BBC Radio series (while, of course, also being quite productive and efficient in my work). I have 18 years of anticipation to reward, 16 tickets to pick up at the Ziegfeld Theater, 15 friends to meet up with, 2 hours of movie to see, and I'm so excited I can scarcely blink, eeee eeeee eeeeeeeeeeeee!!

Additionally, check out some random snaps from the past few months. I particularly like the pictures where I'm cleaning up after the dead body.