Ctrl+f

Just one more great feature of the computer.

Hallmark should really be selling this on a card.

It's true. You are.

If Only…

Palin: “Can I call you Joe?”

Biden: “Can I call you MILF?”

The Pope Wears Fishnets

College parties are ridiculous. I can pretty much guarantee that that was the only house in the world last night that contained Waldo, people in sombreros, Little Bo Peep, men in full Russian garb, gangsters, devils, Catholic school girls bandits, b-boys, characters out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, hippies, Sandra Dee from Grease, a DJ, a human fly-swatter, and the Pope wearing fishnets. If someone else can claim the same thing, I will deliver to them the four empty handles of vodka, six empty bottles of rum, three empty bottles of tequila, three empty bottles of whisky, two empty bottles of gin, two empty bottle of schnapps, three empty juice bottles, 154 empty beer cans and 292 abused red Dixie cups. If they invited the neighbors but had the cops called regardless, I’ll throw in a soiled carpet. If a full-on mud-wrestling match or petting zoo was involved, I’ll wish I had been there instead.

I’m a Dirty Liar

I couldn’t do it.  The skull pants are still here. Let’s be honest -  I’ll wear them until they disintegrate on my body and I’m walking around with just a drawstring over my underwear.  Because I’m classy like that.

Failure… In My Pants

Oh, my glorious skull pants.  I got you for Halloween 5 years ago, and you have been a loving and fluffy friend through all of our travels.  You made frightened parents pull their children closer in grocery stores, you braved the windy inclemency that is Wellington, you gladly stayed in my presence for weeks at a time, never claiming to be dirty or neglected, though you were.  With your black background and skully foreground, complete with glowing red eyes, you brought joy into the hearts of many [people with mental disorders].  But now, you rip at the slightest touch.  Just the other day I accidentally stuck my big toe through your threads, so that one of your skulls burst open as if someone chose to detonate an M-80 inside of it.  And still your eyes follow me, some strange Mona Lisa-esque gaze that makes me want to shoot Leonardo Da Vinci… were he still alive.  But I can’t sew you back together any more.  You are starting to look like some emo high school child’s desperate plea for attention, in the form of bad stitching and holey knees.  That’s really not the image I want to portray.

And it’s cold.  I need pants that are in one piece, whole in body, mind, and spirit.  I can’t deal with the drafts.  I’ve worn you quite literally ragged – but now it’s time to say goodbye.   We had a good run, a good jog, a good walk, and an amazing sleep.  Tonight will be the last one.  You’re going in the trash tomorrow.   Make friends, play nice, decompose, and maybe I’ll see you again some day.  Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

I’ve Had the Time of My Life, and I Owe It All to Glue

Lauren Biron was born in a presumably sterile room in Mission Viejo Hospital, 16.6 miles from the place she would call home for 20 years. For the first few years, her primary interests were burping, sleeping, and eating pureed squash. She lived for the moment: she enjoyed the shininess of keys jingled over her head, and the sound of a bowl full of cheerios clattering to the floor as she gracefully upturned it. Her first word was “go” her second word “car,” her third “cart.” Ever a fan of compound words, Lauren quickly learned the word “gokart,” though she would retain an irrational fear of driving them, even after she got her license.

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Lauren got older, and some stuff happened. She can’t remember most of it – something she regrets to this day, and a reason why she loves writing things down. Now she measures her life in 10 week increments, marveling that 10 of them have come and gone since she entered college, 5.6 miles from the place she still calls home. Her new primary interests are not much changed: she still loves a good burp, a good sleep (which, as of yesterday, is apparently intended to occur from 4pm to midnight), the shininess of keys, and the sound of a cheerios cascading to the floor. She doesn’t like squash now though. The very smell of it makes her want to gag. Her favorite words now have more than one syllable in them, most of the time. Her only irrational fear now is one of bees, though she still isn’t that big a fan of gokarts.

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Lauren used to be really good at math. She never liked it, but by gum, she was good at it. Lauren still occasionally likes to do a few calculations. Lauren might even do some now:

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Lauren is 20 years old. This means, as of her last birthday, she had been alive for:

240 months, or

1,040 weeks, or

7,300 days (but if you factor in leap years from 1988, ‘92, ‘96, 2000, and ’04 it’s really 7305 days), or

175,320 hours, or

10,519,200 minutes, or

631,152,000 seconds.

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It is also equivalent to 104 UC quarter system Quarters, 10 of which have actually been spent in servitude at said college. She is 140 years old in dog years.

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Her life has been equivalent to 350,640 episodes of The Simpsons (plus commercials). This is equivalent to 175,320 episodes of House M.D. or American Idol, thus equating to 58,440 minutes of sarcastic British wit (if you assume that takes up 1/3 of each program, which I do). She could have listened to The Beatles’ White Album 112,665 and a half times by now. Alternatively, she could have listened to Bohemian Rhapsody 1,777,893 times, and would be thoroughly sick of Queen.

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In the time she has been alive, the Titanic could have sunk 65,745 times… assuming it just kind of bobbed to the surface and started sinking again.

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If she had been born with a fully functional camera with unlimited battery power, snapping photos at 6 frames per second continually, she could have taken 3,786,912,000 photos by now, and would have an amazing scrapbook complete with that fresh, just-out-the-womb feel.

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She has been around 5/422 as long as the Babylonian empire existed. And if, as scientists suspect, the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old, Lauren is 1/685,000,000 as old as the universe. But, on the plus side, she has lived 260 times longer than the average housefly. So, in one sense, Lauren is quite ancient.

From Apple Pie to Tangerine Zest: a Thanksgiving Week Report

 

Now, as I sit here overdosing on the remains of a pumpkin pie, I finally get a chance to reminisce on one of the most amazing weeks I have had in a long time.  

 

Sunday/Monday: It all began with an all-nighter, a 15 hour write-fest interrupted by showers, several cups of water, two huge mugs of black-tea, an infinite number of trips to the bathroom, and the undeniable urge to check my email every 16 seconds, because you never know who might email you at 4:37 in the morning. (Hey… I’ve got friends in France, New Zealand, Ghana, Germany, London, and Japan.  With the magic of time differences, it could happen.)  Now, for most people, churning out 5500 words in one night is not the best start to a week.  But I have found that the adrenaline rush from doing all that in one night is such a high.  I’ve never done drugs, but damn, when I climb into bed at 6:15 for a catnap before class, I feel out of this world.  Not to mention I think my body functions better without sleep, as I get ridiculously giddy, happy, and just plain silly the next day.  In my own little world, I dance to music no one else can hear.  Quite literally.

 

Tuesday: Truly one of the most glorious days I have had in a long while.  Four wondrous hours of class.  The first hour was painful, but the other three were spent discussing writing (why am I such a nerd) and helping others work out the kinks in their 5000 word pieces that they all had 15 hour write-fests for.  Theoretically involving as much caffeine as my own.  And, after preparing myself for a beat-down of epic proportions, I was told that not only was my 5500 word piece of crap an enthralling piece full of style and intrigue, but also that I would some day become a famous literary journalist.  I’d never had the experience before, but hearing that someone else read pieces of your writing to their friends is one of the most gratifying, flattering, amazing things you can ever experience.  It also inflates your ego a lot.  My head must be the size of an IMAX screen by now.  How I fit into my house, I have no idea.

 

Wednesday: nothing that exciting.  Hey, if every day was amazing, it would lose all of its amazingness, because you’d have nothing to compare it to.  Too much of a good thing is still too much.

 

Thursday: nothing says a good time like commemorating the days when we gave Indians diseased blankets, shot them, took their land and forced them onto reservations.   Especially when it comes with pie.  Everyone likes pie.

 

Friday:  After sleeping off all of the tryptophan, I spent the first 7 hours of a day with one of my current best friends, then spent the last 7 hours with my old best friends.  There’s something magical about being able to sit with someone and not have to say a word.  There’s also something magical about having people you can sprawl across on the couch, who will feed you Peppermint Patties without you asking them to, or who will laugh at a shared memory brought up by a single word.  It’s also nice to have friends as severely retarded as myself.

 

Saturday:  They’re going to pull me on a sled in the winter, sleep at the foot of my bed, chase small children up trees, and catch Frisbees (Matrix style).  I got two beautiful girl puppies today.  I think I love them more than I could ever love another human being, though I haven’t met every other human being, so it would be wrong of me to make such a judgment.  After almost two years of waiting, I have four little eyes, two wagging tails, and eight little paws (with a total of 32 sharp little nails) ready to love me, and I them.  

 

And to top it all off, I just squirted tangerine zest into my eyes.  Would weeks like this be as sweet without the pain?  Perhaps yes.  But they also wouldn’t be as delightfully scented.

Why can’t you be more like your brother, the yam?

Pachyrhizus erosus, xicamatl, the Mexican Potato.  Really, whatever you call it, it’s still worthless.  Whose idea was jicama, anyways?  You just know an all powerful being (let’s call it “god”) wouldn’t have bothered to make something so useless.  No protein, no calcium, no Vitamin A. No calories from fat, practically no calories at all, in fact, so it won’t save me if I’m lost and slowly starving to death in the wilderness.  No sodium or cholesterol, so essentially no flavor and no way to market it to the American public.  Did Mother Nature screw up, or what?  I can hear the other vegetables laughing at jicama.  (Even the celery. Yeah.)  Besides being – somehow – blander than water, jicama takes disappointment a step further.  It tries to kill you.  Oh that’s right.  Excluding the root, the jicama plant is extremely poisonous.  There’s rotenone in them thar leaves.  Jicama… what an utterly useless thing.  Like drunken frat boys (sorry to be repetitive), it adds absolutely nothing to society or the ecosystem yet somehow manages to reproduce itself.  Funny old world, isn’t it.