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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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I am hungry. So who here is up on all the latest Chicago Transit Authority news? What the fuck happened on the Blue Line last night? I went up to the platform at Damen and just missed one train. Then there was not another train. For a long time. (Here is where you say to me: Oh Mimi. Quit exaggerating. What is a long time? Time is subjective. And then I say to you: Point taken. More wine? Oh come on, have a little more. Yes, but thirty minutes spent on the stupid Damen Avenue platform, with your workday weariness settling in your bones and your grown-up clothes beginning to chafe you, goes beyond the tolerance of even the most seasoned public-transit user.) Out of pure loneliness I called LT on the cell phone, who had also quit work for the day and was busy watching 1930s screwball comedies on the TiVo with a glass of rye* on the rocks. (How in the world did I end up with this useful and masculine man? He changes the tire, he cooks the complicated dinners, he lifts the weights, he drinks the brown drinks!) LT does not have the weird Puritan attitude toward taxis before dark that I have somehow ended up with, so he suggested I say a big Fuck You to the fucked-up Blue Line and hail one. I took his advice, and it turned out to be the best decision I could have made, not least because my cabbie, instead of listening to the typical cabdriver music (which tends to be one of three things: whiny Punjabi pop music, painful R & B booty-bass, or that awful AM "news radio" where they blare the SUPERFICIAL HEADLINES! and WEATHER! and TRAFFIC! and SPORTS! at you EVERY TWENTY SECONDS OR SO!) had on Chicago's classical station, and although I briefly suffered through a Vivaldi Concerto Grosso thing (so sue me: I don't like the harpsichord), by the time we hit Addison we were deep into Arvo Part and that was followed by the Takemitsu percussion thing "From Me Flows What You Call Time," so that was all very cool and relaxing. *Speaking of rye, here are possibly the most poetic alcohol reviews on the web. Also, learn about kosher whiskey rules, why don't you? MY SIXTH SENSE I cracked up a coworker today by clutching her arm in a large meeting, looking wildly around the room in pantomime terror, and hoarsely whispering "I see dumb people." (Oh! Smugly superior bitch-humor rules the day!) A GARBLED RANT (alternate title: I HAVE HAD TOO MUCH GREEN TEA) After things like Ghost World and Daria and other rebel-nerd media became a sort of canon to rebel-nerd hipster indie kids, it has become a knee-jerk mantra to constantly reiterate how unpopular, miserable, lonely, and rejected one was in high school. You'll never hear one of these cookie-cutter alternapunks admit that they actually enjoyed high school, and if they admit to having had a social network they are quick to add that it was a social network of OUTSIDERS, goddammit, and none of the INSIDERS liked them. This is disturbing because (a) it validates the myth that there even are such distinctions in large, loosely defined, mini-societies such as high school; (b) it validates the totally retarded idea that, even if you accept the insider/outsider paradigm, that one is more authentic than the other (misery is always more authentic than enjoyment, right? Woe is me wrist-to-forehead you can't see me because I'm wearing black!); (c) statistically speaking, if this many navel-gazing, makeoutclub, my-music-is-more-obscure-than-yours people were rejects in high school then in some sense they must have formed a clique of their own, whether they want to acknowledge it or not; and (d) IT WAS HIGH SCHOOL WHO CARES. For the record, I went to a huge public high school that had more social groups than you could shake a stick at, if you were the stick-shaking kind. I had friends. Perhaps, if you want to look at it this way, my friends were more musical, strangely clothed, artistic, gay, bookish, and uninterested in running the little high-school hamster maze than the average student council president. And I was, just by virtue of my own pubertal cocktail of neurotransmitters, often miserable in high school. (Hell, I'm often miserable now.) The point is, IT DIDN'T MATTER and I knew it then and I know it now: high school was just something you had to get through so you could move on with the rest of your life. And thus, the next time I hear somebody proclaim their astonishing similarity to one of these movie-hero geeks or whine/brag about how isolated and picked-on they were in high school, I will poke their eyes out with the sharp little stick that I have taken to concealing about my person. Thank you. ---mimi smartypants buys beer for minors. back/forward |
