|
|
||
|
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
|
MY BRAIN IS A SLIDESHOW RUN BY A SPEED FREAK An Open Letter To The People In Charge At My Work: I can take my lunch hour whenever I want. It says so right in the employee handbook. So when you send me an e-mail at 11:52, requesting an "urgent" meeting in your office at noon, and I do not get the e-mail or make the meeting because I am at lunch, please do not barge into my office right as I return, before I have even taken my coat off, and snarkily say, "Well, we met without you" and proceed to detail the non-emergency. Yes, you did meet without me because I WAS NOT HERE. Please put a radio collar or ear tag on me if it is that crucial that I be 100% reachable at all times, or better yet why don't you just ban lunch altogether and let me shrivel up like a Dickens waif. Also, in my office there has been a major crackdown on illegal teakettles, in the form of a sternly worded memo that emphasized how "very dangerous" these puny-wattage water-boilers are, and how they pose a "substantial threat" (I really am quoting---it is all like ORANGE ALERT SOMEONE IS MAKING TEA!) to the entire building, and how if anyone is found making tea at his or her desk instead of trekking downstairs to the cafeteria and paying high prices for inferior tea and icky coffee-residue hot water, that person's electric teakettle will be "immediately confiscated." Your freedom fighter correspondent, Mimi Smartypants, casts a heroic shadow in the romantic manner of the French Resistance as she crouches behind her closed office door and clandestinely boils water for her afternoon Earl Grey. Hooray pour le th�! They'll never take me alive! I joke, but the weary pettiness/petty weariness of this modern lockstep existence, the monstrous foolishness, the way human potential and cultural fuel are incessantly fed into the idiocy-manufacturing machine, are seriously getting me down today. I want to make some dramatic gesture, like stand in Daley Plaza all day holding a sign that says STOP IT YOU ARE KILLING ME. Or perhaps rise incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz, in the goldhorn shadow of the band, eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry, etc etc etc you know the poem and the drill. However, I simultaneously want to refuse, to get in bed and remain there for days, to curl up, to turn away, and to present the world with nothing more than my warm pajama'd backside, and I guess these impulses are more or less the same thing, and they both mostly boil down to some sort of bitter punk rock howl of disappointment with the way things are. So yeah, go put on the last 30 seconds of Smells Like Teen Spirit or whatever does it for you, and forget I said anything. I am no good to anyone right now---more like a crow shrieking doom on the telephone wire than any sort of online whatever-ist. (Diarist? Journalist? What is this thing? Did you know that, privately, to myself, I call this webpage the Thing? It works in the John Carpenter sense, the Fantastic Four sense, and the [virtual] tourist trap sense. For me, I must stress. It works for me.) A LITTLE INTERVIEW WITH MYSELF BASED ON THE FIVE CLASSIC JOURNALISM WORDS Q: WHO did you speak out loud to today? A: In chronological order: LT, The Cat, the lady at the bakery, between six and eight coworkers, a guy at the security desk, a lost tourist in the subway. That's it. Everything else was e-mail. Q: WHAT is the most wonderful name wasted on a somewhat-uninteresting musical performer? A: That would be MC 900ft Jesus. Q: WHY are you doing this dumb thing? A: Did you ever see that movie Speed? Where if the bus slows down it blows up? I always thought that was such a wonderfully transparent convenient device for a movie to be one giant car chase---you really have to hand it to the people who made that for really not even bothering to make a movie. Anyway, that sort of is like what goes on here: If I stop typing the bus blows up. Or something. Q: WHERE did you put all those "important tax forms" that you so carefully saved when they arrived in the mail? A: I wish I knew. I am always out-clevering myself with stuff like this, carefully putting something in a "safe" location and then being totally unable to remember where that oh-so-clever location was. Once I found my house keys in the freezer. Also, for travel, I tend to pack things for certain specific reasons, which make sense at the time, and then, when I get to my destination, I cannot recall exactly why I thought I would need three rolls of masking tape or two identical black cardigan sweaters or a German dictionary. The absolute worst example of this, however, was when I packed to go home for spring break during the death throes of an acid trip (I honestly thought I would be done by then). I took lots of weird little toys, a blue kitchen sponge, every piece of striped or otherwise-patterned clothing I owned (not that many), brightly colored socks, and no underwear whatsoever. Q: WHEN did a Congressional act (12 Stat. 346) require engraved signatures and imprinted Treasury seal on all notes? A: Today, in 1862. It is LT's Chinese-class night but I am a big girl and I am allowed to use the stove, so I just cooked up a box of macaroni and cheese and fucking inhaled it. And it was not really all that good, it was just mindlessly bland and gooey and seemed to fill some void somewhere inside me, and I had not really planned to eat the whole box but oh well. The other embarrassing part is that it was a box of organic macaroni-and-powdered cheese. I always seem to get suckered into buying these fake-healthy comfort foods, as if I am 2 Cool 4 Kraft, when we all know it is basically the same thing. I mean, I ate the same number of fat grams and starch overload as any other cheese maniac, I just ingested fewer chemicals while doing it. And paid more for the box, which was probably all focus-grouped to look "clean" and "fresh" and "natural." So now I am on a lactose high and I will post this Jim Harrison quotation: There is an inordinate capacity in institutions, whether governments, universities, publishers, or studios, to turn pretty good wine, vintage or not, into distilled water that they hope everyone will want to drink. You have to hold out for the wine, even blood, nights that are actually dark, bears that aren't teddy, gritty women like you actually know, children who die contorted into question marks, the sun on people who never bought lotion, the human voice not reduced to prattle, animals who have never been watched, the man who cuts all the ropes so he won't hang himself. And that is probably enough of my Mysterious Melancholy for one day. I had dreams about drinking bleach and about a scam LT was running wherein he stole lamps from hotel rooms and sold them on eBay, and then on a morning whim I decided to wear my contacts instead of glasses and my face felt naked all day, and these things, plus my macaroni-and-cheese intoxication, plus my obvious chemical imbalance, could all be contributing to the frowny-mouthness of this entry. There should be some sort of emergency happy drug that you could just jab into your thigh in times of ickiness. Maybe it could be called "Heroine" or "Harrow-In" and be made from flowers or something. (Note to self: work on this.) GOOD THINGS 1. This is a neat, sound-controlled robot game. You can click on "media" to see a little movie of it. 2. You know what is a really good way to eat toothpaste? Suck it out of the cap. You squirt a little toothpaste into the cap, then stick the cap onto the tip of your tongue with suction (similar to how little kids suck plastic juice glasses onto their faces) and you have a hands-free way to suck that little glob of toothpaste up. Repeat as necessary. 3. Hotvintage.com is indeed hot but also makes me a little sad that not too many people wear top hats and tuxedos during their blowjobs, as in days of yore. And a little sad that apparently my body type used to be all the rage. In like 1920. 4. The fact that someone had drawn a rather skillful, soulful, and detailed Chicago skyline in the dirt and grime of the bus window. I wonder if it was a (hellaciously talented) kid, because most adults would probably think twice about touching the bus-filth. Whoever it was, thank you. ---mimi smartypants placed a jar in Tennessee. back/forward |
