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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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Never go grocery shopping at night. When you're hungry. And tired. And you've had a crummy day. You will get very strange cravings and you will buy strange things. All your odd cravings will come out, and you will be all crazy, thinking "I need goat cheese, and lots of bread-related items, and grapes, and two kinds of fancy beer, and some strange meat analog that I never eat, like a tofu hot dog for instance, because I am really craving mustard and I can't think of a creative way to eat mustard, since it's pretty d�class� to squirt mustard directly in my mouth, and I used to put mustard on carrot sticks in college but that reminds me of a particularly bad obsessive-compulsive winter term, when there were only certain color combinations of food and food that started with certain letters of the alphabet that I was "allowed" to eat, and thus I would like a more normal-person food to put mustard on, and tofu hot dogs are more and more looking like the solution to this problem the longer I stand here." Yes, that is what will happen when you go grocery shopping late in the evening, tired and hungry, after a crummy day. Precisely. IT'S ALL ABOUT ME RIGHT NOW BUT PLEASE STICK AROUND UNTIL I BECOME MORE INTERESTING As long as I'm babbling about food I will stay with the embodiment theme for a while. On the internet no one knows you have a body that you drag around all day, like a massive dictionary shackled to each ankle. For all you guys know I'm just a brain in a jar. Let's take a body status report. I am somewhat tipsy on French wine. (Mmmm, red Sancerre. There is no such thing as a wine that is too metallic and sour for me.) My left wrist is particularly bad today, all crunchy and clicky and painful. I am barefoot and braless and actually exposing exponentially more limbs than normal, since I am sitting here in tank top and shorts. There is a purply-green bruise on my left shoulder. Although my mp3s are on shuffle, I have just heard three Jesus and Mary Chain (Psychocandy, their best album goddammit...I am a Feedback Slut) songs in a row and it's making me have kind of a gothy-feline sexy feeling, and I am this [] close to shutting off the lights in here and computering by candlelight. I want to have a cigarette, and in fact there are cigarettes in this house, but I have a feeling that I don't really want a cigarette, it's just that my wine-juicy brain (now there's a pleasant image) likes the idea of smoking one right now. What I need is a special little sensor on the inside of my wrist. The sensor could have two LCD lights, and when I press a button either one would light up that says "yes, your drug receptors would very much appreciate an infusion of nicotine right now" or "no, you are mostly in love with some teenage nostalgia of when you used to smoke for real, and this is merely a psychological craving that can be appeased with some pen-chewing or another glass of wine." Is that too much text for an inside-of-the-wrist sensor? I think it is. And then (more having a body stuff) there's this sci-fi story from Salon that I enjoyed, and you might too (27 pages, so hopefully there's a printer near you somewhere). It's kind of a cyberpunkish snack-sized thing, and it's not going to change your life but it will improve your bus ride. As an extra, "it's a small Web after all" bonus, the author is a force behind Boing Boing. FROM THE TOO MUCH INFORMATION FILES So I'm in the bathroom, making a stop before I head out to lunch and to a meeting, and I'm fumbling around with my bag and sunglasses and a bunch of other things, and I end up putting a tampon (still in its wrapper, so don't have a cow, you squinkster) in my mouth temporarily to free up my hands, and then when I retrieve it I notice there's lipstick blottage on the paper wrapper, and I think: I have inadvertently created some lazy, clich�d, feminist conceptual "art." (More tampon art, of the craftier, happier, less-menstrual kind.) Oh fuck you. Why has no one ever marketed dick spray? "Neutralize feminine odor." How about you "neutralize" my knee in your metaphorical groin, you stupid woman-hating drugstore industry. Did you know there's a whole e-commerce site devoted to "embarrassing" personal hygiene products? I find that kind of sad. A sudden realization from flipping through Vanity Fair in the checkout line---many of our pop-culture-makers are terribly young. Lots of famous athletes, actors, and R&B caterwaulers are barely in their 20s. This bothers some people who are "my age" (in quotes because I think of my age as a fluid thing) who maybe feel that they haven't achieved a whole lot. What does that mean anyway? What is being successful? I have never really set any concrete age-specific goals for myself, I hate it when people say arbitrary, preconceived things like "I will publish a novel before I'm 30" or "I will be a millionaire at 40" or "I will be married with perfect lovely children before I'm 35." Life is not that neat and tidy, and, more importantly, life is more INTERESTING than that. There is a lot to do and see and be, and the sort of single-minded determination it takes to be an Olympic ice skater or 21-year-old literary-phenom novelist ultimately makes you kind of a boring person. Maybe that's my very modest goal: to not ever be a boring person. To keep cracking the little shell that the world tries to put around people (which can be a full-time job in and of itself). So that when you see me going to work in a grown-up suit, or strenuously and drunkenly disagreeing with your crazy theories about ego psychology in Moby Dick (jesus, where did you GET that?), or eating a tofu hot dog as I yell at the television on an NFL sunday, or standing around in my black turtleneck sweater at Empty Bottle, rocking out in that patented and very small and circumscribed indie-scenester way, you can't think: Aha. Done. Now I know that girl. Because you don't. No one does and no one ever truly will. And instead of making me feel lonely and desperate and suicidal, like it would have in high school, that thought is now quite comforting to me. BREAKER BREAKER CIRCUIT BREAKER It is impossible to make tea and toast at the same time in my kitchen without the power going out. Apparently my kitchen's wiring can only tolerate one electrical appliance at a time. I often forget this, which means that breakfast in the wintertime can, and probably will, often become a harrowing and very dark adventure. IN OTHER NEWS The Michigan Avenue street crazy who wants you to know that Al Gore is really a Chinese Robot is sporting a brand-new hat. It is one of those French Foreign Legion desert hats with the neck protector thing in the back, and although I seem to be unable (at least at this hour) to find an image of such a hat online, I did find this helpful guide to joining the French Foreign Legion, which I have bookmarked for future reference. You never know. ---mimi smartypants is switching over to Plan B. back/forward |
