'My Defective Life' Brings You the Following Public Service Announcement

So yesterday, I had to engage in the usual “digging my car out of its plowed-in parking space”-routine that is fairly standard during Cleveland winters.

What I usually do is dig my car out the night before work, that way I don’t have to spend 30 minutes shoveling at 6am. I then hop in the car and make sure I can pull it out. Once I’m able, I just pull it back in and park it.

Well, yesterday, in the process of doing this, I ran over the shovel.

When I got out, I looked around for the shovel, and my first thought was (ridiculously): My god! Someone actually snuck up and stole my shovel while I was trying to get my car out! What a fucking motherfucker!

My second thought was: Nobody stole your shovel, you dumb-ass—it’s UNDER the car.

I had run it over with such force that it was firmly wedged and I actually had to turn the car back on and pull up in order to get it back out. Somehow it was completely unscathed (which was even MORE impressive given that it had been sticking straight up out of the snow before I ran it over).

But what REALLY freaked me out about the whole thing was the incident leading UP to me running over the shovel.

After digging out the front of my car, I hopped in to do my usual “pull out and then pull back in” routine. I kept managing to get my car to a certain point and then my tires would start spinning. So I’d back up and try again. The third or fourth time, I gunned the accelerator, muttering cuss words under my breath, and I glided out like butter. It was such a smooth release that I think I actually blurted out a sound of surprise. I then stopped the car and began to back it back into the spot.

This was when, in my rearview mirror, I noticed a younger guy walking away from my where my car had been and pausing to look back over his shoulder at me.

At which point, it dawned on me why I glided out so easily that last time: he had snuck up behind me and given my car a push.

It was unexpected and kind. And I rolled down the window and shouted him a thank you.

But what freaked me out about it was this: I never knew he was behind my car, pushing. And given that my temper was flaring by that third or fourth try, and that I was gunning it back and forth with increasing frustration, it was only sheer luck that this altruistic fellow didn’t get slammed into and run over by my car in the same way I managed to flatten the shovel a few minutes later.

And had that happened, it’s very possible I wouldn’t have even noticed what had taken place and instead just assumed that the thud was yet another snowy obstruction giving way to my tires. And even SADDER was the fact that he would’ve gotten run over helping me WHEN I WASN’T REALLY EVEN TRYING TO GET OUT TO GO ANYWHERE.

These facts have been giving me little freak-outs ever since last night.

So: please, people. It is a lovely lovely thing to be altruistic and helpful, but jesus CHRIST, don’t risk your life to do so. Let the person know that you’re helping them. Especially when you’re doing it in the dark.

And thank you, dude who helped me out last night.

You are a nice boy.

May you never get run over by a car.

/End public service announcement

-------

Why It is Sometimes Good to Avoid Getting Keyed Up and Liquored Before Bed

Because when I don't, I have dreams about Jason Segel in which we are friends in some sort of apocalyptic, Dhalgren-esque commune, and he will be in charge of the IV that I have trailing out of the crook of my arm. Under uncomfortable circumstances of some sort, it will fall out, leaving a gaping and hollowed out vein that keeps painfully bleeding and oozing, and he will be the only one who can replace it, but he will get shit-faced and silly and, thus, unable to reinsert it for me, so it will keep seeping all over my clothing.

I will leap into a pile of jackets as though they are crisp autumnal leaves.

He will laugh hard while drunk on the ratty couch.

My best friend from high school will jump from a low cement wall and land on her hands and knees, scraping the shit out of them.

Something will loom in the streets of the city with a deep foreboding, but I will not remember what it is when I wake up.

Too much Apatow lately methinks.

-------

Your Deformed Penis Says WHAT?!?

Ah, pandora radio. You house such a plethora of bad folk music and horrifying emo. More case in point:



Lyrics:

Break my face in was the kindest touch you
Ever gave
Wrap my dreams around your thighs and
Drape my hopes upon the chance to touch your arm

Fabulous Muscles
Cremate me after you cum on my lips
Honey boy place my ashes in a vase beneath your workout bench

No romance, no sexiness but
A star filled night
Kneeling down before now familiar flesh of your deformed penis
Wigging out before the unfamiliar flesh of my broken neck

Fabulous Muscles
Cremate me after you cum on my lips
Honey boy place my ashes in a vase beneath your workout bench

Fabulous Muscles
Cremate me after you cum on my lips
Honey boy place my ashes in a vase beneath your workout bench

-------

Blue Piano

-------

I Know It's Well-Intentioned, But I CAN'T STOP FUCKING LAUGHING HA HA HA HA

I like folk music.

A lot of my favorite musicians are considered "folk."

I will stand up heatedly for folk music in a drunken argument.

But I've gotta say, it's songs like this one--"Land of the Free" by Brad Yoder--that make me understand people's hatred for folk.

CLICK TO GO LISTEN

I think it may actually possess THE worst sappy, "socially-aware" lyrics and most melodramatically lame-ass music I've EVER HEARD.

Do you doubt me?

Well, let's just say this:

First off, go listen.

Secondly, if you still have your doubts, let me ask: How can you possibly take a song with the following line in it seriously?

"...and the Klansman in his snow suit doesn't frighten me by half"

Now, I think the "snow suit" that Yoder is describing is supposed to refer to the white ("snow") robes ("suit") of the Klan.

But my first thought was "Wait WHAT?!?! Hooded Klansmen bundled up like the younger brother in A Christmas Story??"



Which is really fucking funny, but I really really REALLY don't think it's supposed to be.

Thus, I just needed to say:

Yoder: please!

Is it really necessary to reinforce the negative stereotypes surrounding folk music? Maybe you should sing a song about that instead?

-------

Newest Addition to My Harem List

James Franco:




Because he'd be way too much fun to skip work and lay around in bed with, wearing nothing but boxers and knee-socks, eating cheerios and laughing really hard about that one song that inexplicably talks about midgets briefly in it.

And because his voice is weird but sexy but weird.

And also: dude, that smile.

-------

Seriously: I don't know WHAT it is, but something in Mike Doughty's voice just makes my skin tingle. He could be singing a list of items on a menu, and I'd still want to curl up inside his mouth.

I wish I knew why that was. Some things are all the more beautiful for the mystery, I suppose.

-------

-------

Two Things

I walked into the restroom yesterday with a spoon. And I thought to myself retrospectively: That must've been kind of a disturbing sight to anyone wondering why a person might need a spoon in the bathroom.


* * *

More searches that retrieved this blog:

• Lotion in assholes


• you use a knife to slice my head and wee beside me when I am dead


• colorblind gag gifts


• two little toy sheep

-------

A mix of songs for fucking...
Click to listen.

-------

Further Proof that Cats are the Weirdest

So I've decided to start doing a little bit of weight lifting/exercises to build my musculature back up and tone my winter mushiness just a little. (Once spring rolls around, I'm also gonna start riding my bike as much as possible.) I've started lifting my little weights again (which weirdly seems to be helping with my neck/shoulder problems as well) and also doing reverse-crunches. And apparently both activities FREAK MY CATS OUT.

As I lifted weights yesterday--mind you, they're like 5 or 10-lb. tiny weights--every time I lifted the weights up, my cat Franny would lurch one foot closer to the door and then freeze in place, staring at me in horror.

Later, when I was doing some reverse crunches, Zooey came booking into the room, looking crazed and confused, circling around my legs and staring at my face for reassurance that my movements weren't the preface to some strange cat-torturing series of events.

This should no doubt make for an entertaining follow-through on my New Year's Resolution.

-------

Twilight, Female Agency, and GODDAMN SIGHING

So I started reading Twilight yesterday after it came in at the library, and I'm already 300 pages in. (I'm one of those people who will read a book just to find out what all the hype is about.)

And yes: it reads quickly. And I'm enjoying it in a vague sort of way. But it's also quite horrifying. And I'm not speaking of the parts that are SUPPOSED to be horrifying.

I'm sure this book has already had the SHIT whipped out of it by feminists, but if not, it's really quite deserving of a SCATHING feminist critique.

Why?

Well, for a plethora of obvious reasons. But here are a few examples.

1. For how many times Bella goes on and on a) about how she--an average normal girl--can't believe that someone like Edward--an "Adonis" as she refers to him once or twice--could like her, and b) about how amazing Edward's chiseled chest/rippling muscles/unbelievable eyes/perfect face/perfect mouth/perfect nose/perfect body is. And not to any normal degree. The plot is DROWNED in her constant musings about his physical beauty and how she is so plain and boring in comparison. I suspect this has probably already been written about. A lot. Unless this world is an unjust place.



2. For the fact that this book is geared towards teenage girls, and yet, the whole thing is about a girl's obsession with a boy and how her whole life revolves around it. NOT to say that this isn't ever the case with teenage girls (we could easily bust out my old dusty diary and laugh our asses off over how many times I swooned over different boys in the course of just a few months). But good god: if you're GOING to have this be the fuel for the story, at LEAST give your female narrator some AGENCY and some general bad-assedness to balance it out. (See next bullet for more on agency.) And don't make her a female stereotype: instead of littering the book with comments made by your female narrator about "I, of course, didn't have a clue about what this car-part could POSSIBLY be" or "I, of course, had no idea what was going on with the basketball games my father was watching" give her at least a LITTLE bit of ability to break the mold. Bella is depicted as a stereotypical teenage girl (which, yes, I don't deny actually exist, but still) and has really no depth of character, and the only force that really gives her agency is her love for Edward.
   
   Interestingly, I just read an article about author Lois Duncan (who was one of my favorite authors as a teenager) in Bitch Magazine which discussed her female main characters as empowering role models for teenage girls--her characters may get smitten with boys but they also come to realize that boys aren't the end-all and be-all of existence and instead choose their own agency over this vague obsession. Twilight is like the anti-Lois Duncan novel, offering young girls up a role model who really has not much more going for her than the attention of a boy.



3. And finally--and this is the most fascinating part of the book so far, in my opinion--something really REALLY needs to be written about the activeness/passivity of the verbs used to describe the actions of Bella vs. Edward. It's EXTREMELY disturbing to me that almost EVERY verb used to depict an action of Bella's is passive and weak, lacking any agency. Whereas, Edwards are always very active to the point of being aggressive. Everything he does has an edge and force to it ("snickering," "glaring," etc.). Whereas everything Bella does is soft or quiet or acquiescent ("whispering," "giggling," etc.). And when she's not being/doing any of these, she's not so much aggressive as she is kind of the naggy housewife, "groaning," "moaning," "sighing," and acting put out. It's really kind of disturbing and I really wish that I had a copy of the book in digital form so we could run a search for various verbs and see how many times they pop up and in relation to whom. But suffice it to say, the word choices for Bella DEFINITELY are not infused with any sort of agency.

And all feminism aside, let me focus, for just a moment, on the technical side of this book:

GOOD GOD, STEPHENIE MEYER: How 'bout a bit more variety in the verb-department?!?! If I have to read about Edward "snickering" or Bella "sighing" one more time, I may scream.

Case in point:

I'm on page 285 of the book, and so far (and this is a low estimation, as I went back over the first 150 pages looking for instances of this before I started keeping track, and surely overlooked some) Bellas has sighed 29 times.

That's a 29:285 ratio. Which means Bella sighs at LEAST one sigh every 9-10 pages. Which is what I feel like doing every time I stumble across her doing so.

(I'll probably ramble on a bit more about this in the next week or so since I've yet to finish the book, and since I have some stuff jotted down at home, particularly some phrases chosen. So stay tuned.)

-------

I think my relationship with N-A may be the first relationship where the LESS time we spend together, the more we get on each other's nerves (instead of the other way around).

I've just made this sound kind of negative even though it's a very very heartening thing to realize, so let me put the positive spin on it:

The more time we spend together, the more squishily goofily awesomely amazingly weirdly warmly deeply we come to enjoy each other.

I've always been the kind of person who can only deal with being in a person's company for so long before I went to throw myself on a pyre of flaming doo. I get bored with them. And they start to get on my nerves. So I've always tried to keep my hang-out time to a minimum, indulging the notion that "absence makes the heart grow fonder."

But apparently the times, they are a-changing.

The times, they are a-changing.

-------

Inexplicable Habits of a Co-Worker

Types on his/her keyboard as though each finger is a 50-lb. weight.
Mimics other people's laughter when other people make the mistake of laughing.
Yawns at the top of his/her lungs.
Stretches at the top of his/her lungs.
Blurts out random things.
Exaggerates his/her sneezes.
Makes trumpet noises with his/her mouth.

-------

Things I Hope to Do Did While Off from Work

Sleep in.
Go to the art museum.
Write a short story. [Wrote a poem--close enough.]
Take some photos at Bank News.
Spend frequent late nights out drinking and/or rowdifying it.
Visit with friends in town for the holiday.
Cook cook cook and bake.
Get an oil change and my (non-existent) blinkers finally fixed.
Snuggle with my cats.
Drink lots of coffee and eat a bagel every morning while dipping into a book.
Thrift shop.
Have some folks over for dinner.
Make some mixes.
Get laid often.
See Let the Right One In.
Stay up with N-A far past my usual weekday bed-time.
Spend way too much money hanging out with friends.
Crack.

-------

Cigarette Love

-------