Okay, so my Leadership professor decided she would give us a take-home midterm because she...was never there. Her solution to make up for the fact that she's obviously viewing teaching as her retirement and just not showing up when she feels like it is to give us a four-part twelve page essay due in four days. When she saw our faces she said, "Come on, this is supposed to be FUN. It's not like I gave you a ten-page paper," and one girl said, "...it's twelve pages." The logic fairy is not with this woman. I know where she can stick her Coke shares.
The perching animals are the BEST animals.

With regard to our recent meteorological afflictions...can anyone tell me exactly what a cubit is? First person to do so wins a spot on the deck with the long-eared and perching animals.
Also. Life is good, mostly. Mostly.

Hee. Puppy is going to be in a coffee-table book. There are no words.

Except for the even bigger 'heeeee,' brought on by the fact that you can now buy him in poster form.

Why Irony and Dinosaur Should Not Be Allowed Text Messaging, or Why Irony and Dinosaur Should Totally Write Every TV Show Ever

Irony: Is Vaughn still dead?

A Dinosaur: No, he clawed his way out of his grave. Because he's Buffy.

Irony: Dude. They could put him in pigtails and he could carry around a stick called Mr. Pointy.

A Dinosaur: That's the only thing that could redeem the show at this point.

Irony: I know. It has to turn into camp farce. They should make Jack and Sloane into felt puppets.

A Dinosaur: No, Jack has to be a giant, snarky disembodied head.

Irony: Hee! He could be that sadistic disembodied head we saw that one time!

A Dinosaur: But that head wasn't disembodied. It had a body, it was just really small.

Irony: Even better! A giant Jack head in a vat with a little midget body attached. He could make pronouncements.

A Dinosaur: And Marshall should be a dog

Irony: A little yappy talking dog like from Mars Attacks. This show would rock.

A Dinosaur: Vaughn could be the Ghost of Christmas Forehead.

Irony: You complete me...Tranny Ramirez has the eyes of a dead shark and I hate him.

A Dinosaur: Hee. Now you complete me.

Irony: ...So together we are like, three people?

A Dinosaur: More like six. You have to factor in ego.

Irony: Once again you have completed me. We are getting into multiplication here. I am the baby Jesus and I am crying.

Hee. So apt. Mostly because I just got off the phone with Faaaa-thaaa and he told me to tell you you're a commie.
After we worked out my 'vision' and 'mission' for my Leadership paper.
I left out the part about the five husbands and smitin' all them that wronged me.
Commie.

An amusing interlude, via email:



Irony: [self-righteous vitriolic pompous ranting about various issues, beginning with tom delay and somehow ending up with hannah arendt]

Father of Irony: Settle down there, fellow traveler.

Irony: I don't need to set- hey! Fellow tra-HEY!

Father of Irony: Well that's what we called you people back in the 30's

Irony: I am not a dirty Commie.

Father of Irony: Are too. Are too too too.

Irony: Look, the only possible way in which I could be considered a Commie is that I believe in the redistribution of wealth. But I believe that it should all be redistributed to ME. So I don't think they'll ever be able to lay that particular label on me

Father of Irony: So you are, in fact, a megalomaniac?

Irony: ....have I ever denied that?

Father of Irony: Touche.

Irony: I win!

Look, Lydia. It's your own fault. After 27 years you should know not to question Dad when he's doing one of his rants. It's like taking a bone out of a dog's mouth. Unless that dog is Libby, then she'll just look at you pathetically and develop another phobia.
On a completely different note, why do schools even have health centers? I had an allergic reaction to...something in my room and I went to the health center to help determine what it was. After informing me they didn't do walk-ins, because, you know, a school health center doing walk-ins would be insaaaane, the receptionist told me there was an opening in the middle of the only class I like. So I went there and after two seconds the nurse went 'It's fleas' and I said 'But they don't itch.' 'It's fleas' 'Why would fleas just bite one arm?' 'It's fleas' 'But. We don't HAVE fleas. The cats don't have fleas. We'd...see fleas. When they had fleas, we saw fleas.' 'It's fleas. Here's some Zyrtec.'
So I went home.
And then I went back to the health center because I left my notebook.
And then I went back home. And looked at the tree outside my window and went 'Hm,' and took a leaf and rubbed it on my arm. And, there you go, instant irritation.
I'm really glad the health center is there to be wrong so I can diagnose myself.
Stupid health center.

But I don't waaaannna. And he only enlisted me to do it because I was stupid enough to question the "they couldn't perambulate...it was more of a sidle" thing. And also that other incredibly funny thing that I said, right before you started recording.
And for pity's sake, for the last time, I'm not an attention whore. Things don't revolve around the sun because it seeks them out, now do they? No. They are drawn to it because it is huge and shiny and pretty and important. And that is a perfect analogy. Except that I'm not huge. And, unless I have been dangerously misinformed for many, many years, I am not comprised predominantly of helium and argon.
Argon! Hee. Will Shortz, you clever little minx.
And nobody got that reference.
I am alone. I am utterly alone. By the time you read this, I will be gone. Having jumped....having plummetted off the Winter River Br....oh forget it.
Nobody appreciates me. But they will. When the revolution comes.
Sidebar- last night on Rome, there was a bit where Octavian, who is 15, sort of quietly ordered his pet legionnaire to cut this guys' thumbs off, and it was...kind of hot. You see? It's now at the point where the lack of sex is actually exacerbating my naturally occuring sociopathic tendencies. Therefore, I need to get laid for the good of society. Copulare pro bono congregatio!

Okay, first off, the idea that I'm the attention whore of the family is a bit laughable. Irony should just cut out the middleman and wear a sign that says 'Look At Me! Look At Me!'
Secondly, Benadryl and a two-hour Powerpoint given by the founder of the DLC in our teeny little oven of a classroom made me sleepy.
Thirdly, Faaaah-thah enlisted Irony to forever immortalize the story of the Wooly Mollusks on these, the internets.
Fourth..ly...I have to go see Margaret Cho. I bet she'll talk about sex. And being Asian. But before I do that I have to find my umbrella.
Therefore, Irony must begin the dark, dark tale of the Wooly Mollusks who got a whole helluvalot done for creatures with no feet or volition.

One more bitching for the evening. I painted my new room a couple of weeks ago, but it has 12-foot ceilings so I couldn't reach around the top. Today I got a stepladder from the landlady and figured I'd finish the job. See now, I thought I was being a genius when I painted this room, because I didn't feel like spending another squillion dollars on paint, so I mixed together three of the colors we had left over from other rooms. This isn't quite as insane as it sounds since two of them were shades of cream. It actually made a very nice color.
But no. Because, as I may have mentioned before, god hates me. I just checked, and the new paint has dried, and it is THREE SHADES DARKER than the rest of the paint. And yes, I mixed it. Apparently, some of the cream went away. Just...away. I'm sure it is now living happily in the Land of A Million Odd Socks And The Bolts That Were Supposed to Come with My Fucking Tromso, and I wish it the best of luck. See that? I am that magnanimous, motherfucker. Even though I have no idea what I'm going to do now, other than go out, try to figure out exactly what that cream color was...Putty? New England Dead Salmon? no clue... and mix it with what's left of the original color and see if I can even begin to approximate what is on the walls. Because otherwise I'll have to tell people that I'm going for some sort of avant-garde high-concept two-tone idea, the kind of idea that needs so many hyphens to describe that nobody on an intellectual level below me, ie everybody, will be able to grasp it. And just try to parse THAT sentence, bitch.
And in that sentence, by 'people', I meant, you know, men. The men who apparently do not exist and so will not be seeing the inside of my bedroom in any case. So why am I even worrying about this? I suppose it's just for my own edification, and I'm pretty short, so I never have to look up there anyway, so I guess there isn't really a problem here after all. But will I delete this post? No. For my irrelevancies are more important than most people's revelations.
I seem to be particularly vitriolic this evening. Let's hope there's some more Full Frontal Mark Antony on Rome. Otherwise I might smash something. Probably something expensive that I just bought and spent several hours lugging home in the sweltering heat, for such is, apparently, my lot in life.

Right. While not having Irony's problem, because Beacon Hill is close enough to Emerson that everyone walking around is queertastic, I do have two couple-related issues. One. The couples who insist on sitting next to eachother in restaurants. So they can feed eachother. And I'm not talking like, a romantic dinner. I'm talking Herrera's. It's basically a taco stand with benches. No one needs to see that. If any other couples come in and make all cuddly on one side of the booth I'm squirting hot sauce in their eyes. Herrera's delightful tacos are supposed to be my reward for being stuck in a windowless classroom with broken air conditioning for four hours. I don't need ugly people showing affection while eating.
Issue two:college couples living together. Seriously. Are you just trying to crash and burn? Puppy and...ex-Puppy dater (She doesn't have a nickname, obviously) went down in flames. Weird dating-others-while-still-living-in-a-one-bedroom flames. Now two other friends are living with their boyfriends. This does not bode well. Especially because one of them only has a loft. What are you going to do if you have an argument? Stomp dramatically into the galley kitchen and slam a cabinet? Rummage angrily through your tupperware?
Lastly, and unrelated to couples, the apartment building next door has been having fires everynight since the temperature dipped below 70. They're giving New Englanders a bad name. And making me sneeze.

Cruelty, Thy Name Is Tromso

I recently moved to a new apartment in Park Slope, and in the main I’m quite happy with it. Its one failing is that my bedroom is roughly the size of an oubliette. An oubliette for DWARFS.
So to maximize the space I decided to get a loft bed. Got it off Craigslist, all went well, got it back to the apartment without trouble. I should’ve been suspicious when everything was going smoothly.
My first clue should perhaps have come when I opened up the instructions and the first thing that they said was “this product requires two people to help in assembly.” But no! I am independent! I am pathologically stubborn! I have a required duration of at most three seconds between ‘want’ and ‘get’! So no, I’m not going to wait until my roommate comes home so he can help me. No! How hard can it be?
Well. It turns out that screwing in one end of a seven foot long, thirty pound metal bar is in fact rather difficult when there’s nobody to hold up the other end. Eventually I jury-rigged an impressive contraption wherein various ropes were hung from my ceiling, from which to suspend the aforementioned ginormous metal rods. So the first 3/4ths of the assembly was difficult, painful and took about 6 hours, but no physical impossibilities were encountered.
Then it came time to screw in more metal poly thingies to other metal thingies, and everything stopped fitting, because apparently, there are 30 bolts of one size and 6 bolts of an infinitesimally different size, and this difference is in fact not pointed out in the ‘instruction manual’, if I may use that exalted term to refer to a teeny booklet with stick drawings and brief phrases in Swedish. So I had used those 6 bolts where I shouldn’t have and so didn’t have them left over to go where they should go. So I had to go through the whole bed, testing all the bolts I’d already put in. Eventually I tracked down all 6 of them- that took 2 hours.
So. By this time, bear in mind, it’s 2 am Friday night. Yes, this is what I did with my Friday. So now I’m three quarters of the way done and I come to the crosspiece thingie that goes across the mattress supporting thing, and is essentially the main weight-taker of the whole construct. So, a slightly important piece. And guess what? The little round…things, that you need to hold that piece in place? Not there. Even though I watched as the girl I bought it from disassembled the thing, and saw her put all the pieces in a ziplock bag. Somewhere between 5th and 7th avenue, they jumped ship, and are presumably having a party in a gutter somewhere along with all the little overlooked yet eminently necessary doohickies from everything you’ve ever tried to build.
I tried every possible permutation of other things, went through my roommate’s toolbox in a vain search for some sort of replacements, but all for nought. So after 6 hours I could go no further. I slept on the couch and was very sad. The next morning I went to the hardware store and got an ingenious combination of nuts and bolts and washers, because I just wanted to get this thing DONE. You know that mode you get into, where you have a project that needs doing and it looms over you so it’s the only thing you can think of, and you know you can’t rest until it’s finished? Yeah, that. In relevant terms... Møby DÝjck.
So anyway. I get the bolts in, they hold well, I am proud. I proceed to lay down the wire panels that are supposed to hold the mattress in place. Surprise! The bolt, being non-Ikea approved, sticks out too far and the panels are no longer flush with the sides. So they don’t interlock. So I remove the bolts, put them in the other way, and they still don’t quite work, but who gives a shit, because by this time we’re on Hour 9 and my frustration is reaching dangerous levels. So that’s done, and fuck it.
The bed is done! But. The room is so small that when I lean the ladder against the bed, there isn’t enough of an angle to do it properly so the ladder sticks up about six inches from the sides of the bed. This makes it far too precarious to climb. So I go out and buy two cabinets, which in my infinite wisdom I have decided I will stack upon each other and climb like stairs. Yes, I know. I really do have a degree.
So. It is now Hour 11. Everything is in place. I climb up my cabinets. I think this isn’t really such a hot idea, because the cabinets are sturdy but the floor of the apartment is warped and so the cabinets rattle. And guess what? The bed rattles too. I was up there for about five minutes and I loathed it with every fiber of my being. It swayed back and forth. It shook. And all because, while the BED was perfectly assembled goddamnit, the floor was crooked so the legs weren’t resting on a flat surface. So I’m sitting there being me, which is to say that I knew I hated it and sleeping in it would make me miserable but I was bloody well going to do it because I’d put too much effort into it to quit. And then there was a twang. And another twang. A nasty metallic twang the likes of which one does not want to hear whilst one is perched atop what is essentially a large heavy metal cage 7 feet off the ground. And then the thing buckled.
All the screws were in, none of the pieces bent, and yet.
So after eleven hours of work, all I had to show for it were some interesting bruises and the experience of almost having been impaled.

Loft beds: one of god’s horrible, horrible mistakes. Also, Sweden? Fuck you.

If I have to watch Triumph of the Will in one more freaking class...

Not that this hasn't been true for a loooooong time now, but the Washington Post is officially full of fucking retards.
I mean, Jesus tapdancing Christ.
This country needs a plague. That will somehow target only idiots. If only we could find the gene that controls the Stupid and then get a muon or a tachyon or a prion or a, I don't know, Prius to virus-ize and attach to it...

Fine. I'm posting before Irony has a spaz. She doesn't seem to remember that I'm home, and at home the traffic lights start blinking yellow at 10:00 and nothing ever happens. Anyway, last night I went out to a bar with Twiggy. I say a bar, but I really mean the only bar if you're young and not looking to buy cocaine (I'm looking at you, Black Seal). We usually have fun there, but last night was Ladies' Night so it was completely packed. Mostly full of guys wearing shirts with the collars up, 'cause they're super cool. It was also like some wretched high school reunion where everyone was exactly the same except larger and drunk. Now, there were only 115 students in my class, and 35 of them were there last night. That's 35 people who feel the need to have painfully tedious conversations with you because you went to school with them and you're holding a glass of booze, so now you have something in common.
Also, what's up with guys you meet at bars actually calling you? The last time I was at said reunion bar I had a nice, albeit completely drunken conversation with this guy about jazz, and I gave him my number, and he called me. He remembered about 10% of the conversation and he still called. Now, he was nice, but I mostly just gave him my number because what the hell else am I going to do with 500 hundred cards that have my name, my number and 'The Law' printed on them? He was at Reunion Hell Bar last night, and was still nice, but he's got that whole alternahair going on where it's shaggy and in his face and I just want to go at it with a butter knife.
Then I came back home and settled in with a lovely bowl of sorbet that Biff promptly stuck her face into. She didn't like it, and she didn't eat it, but she stuck her face in it. I knew she was an asshole from day one, but come on. That's like...Irony level of asshole. Like when she seasons my hair, or shoves an ice cream sandwich in my face or pushes me into the file cabinet or says 'hey, what'll happen if I smash this tomato onto the ground by your feet?'
Hee. Irony completes me.

Tonight was the playoffs in the Random Publishers League. I thought we were playing Time but actually it was the NY Times. Which is a lot more fun, because everytime one of them gets up to bat you can yell shit like "must be hard to field a team with all your employees in jail" and "you swing like an anonymous source!" (nonsensical but oh so apropos) and "don't you people have a front page to fake?" and so forth. Unfortunately they still handed us our asses. We smelled a rat, though. They had ringers. We've played them a few times before and none of us recognized half those guys. I think they had Roger Maris. There was one wizened weatherbeaten old man who Dh'd and they'd obviously brought him in just because he had some sort of superduper stringy old-man muscles. He just clocked the ball and stood there and watched it sail into the crowds of people having sex in the middle of the great lawn. He didn't even bother to run. Once it became apparent that the ball was on its way to Newark he sort of jogged around the bases, clutching his pacemaker. A team of EMTs with a defibrillator followed him. He definitely never played before. I call shenanigans.
Sadly we played like shit. It really was pathetic. I would be embarrassed, but I'm a Yankee fan. And considering the way they've been playing lately, I feel justified in believing that it doesn't actually matter how shittily you play as long as people keep believing you're going to win and I am talking to YOU, Mike Fucking Messina. Jesus, Moose! Hah. Jesus Moose. But seriously, Jesus, Moose! Put some shoe polish behind your ear if that's what you need. Or try breathing through the other goddamn eyelid.
Oh well. I could analyze what went wrong, but...don't think. It'll only hurt the ball club.
This is incoherent and not at all clever. But I have had many beers and several shots and I'm tired in that "holy shit, I got exercise" kind of good way. I'll rewrite this tomorrow.

Dearest Exalted Five Readers,
How many of you were esquivalient today?
I LOVE this. Words should run free! They should roam in the wilds. My favorites are always the free-range words. Egregious and truculent words! Then you've got your farm-bred words: calico and turtle and butter and squash and muddle. Then at the bottom of the barrel you've got the poor, opressed denizens of the cruel word-mills. Dog, and spit, and..."Mets". They are force-fed like geese without even the dubious honor of the opportunity to become foie gras.
We should all make up words for concepts that should exist but don't. And I don't care how long they are. Because, people....the Germans are beating us at this. Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizateatenhauptbet- riebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft! The FUCK! Are we going to let them get away with this? Alls we've got is that pneumomono....whatever it is, the volcano allergy thing, and THAT word was originally made up, too. The Welsh have Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and I'm sorry, but that just takes the piss.
I mean, we shouldn't be doing it just to get long words- that's just a perk. Words are such cool little beasts. You take them for granted, bad people. Older languages like Hebrew have very few words compared to English, and that makes it a lot more difficult to express certain concepts. The Japanese use neutral verbs like "give" or "get" in subtle ways to express disapproval but have nothing that we'd consider swears. English is like, wicked good.
All of which is to say that we should all be esquivalient as often as possible. I admit to a certain hypocrisy here, because I'm a stickler for proper grammar. And yeah yeah yeah, I know it's an ever-fluctuating, organic, blah blah blah blah. But still. Learn how to use a fucking semi-colon, you illiterate grunt. But for some reason I'm all for the coining of new words, whether it be out of whole cloth or misuse of linguistic rules or just by sticking a bunch of pre-existing words together. The difference? People use the "wrong" grammar because they're lazy, or sloppy, or don't think it matters. This angers me. Using words that previously didn't exist, on the other hand, is just creative. This makes me kvell. Which is a perfectly cromulent word.

The fact that people are actually reading this thing fills me with something akin to terror. Not Irony-Watching-Labyrinth-and-the-Fieries-Come-On terror, but Seeing-Someone-Wearing-Slouch-Boots-in-August terror.
Anyway, the other night Puppy gave me a call on one of the legs of his cross-country trip, because he was entirely too drunk to work the keypad on his phone to respond to my text message. He was in Chicago about to play Rolly Ball.
Do y'all know what Rolly Ball is?
It's Jai Alai, but in bumper cars. And there's a bar on the premises.
Is that not the most beautiful thing you've ever heard of? There should be a Rolly Ball center in every city. Imagine stupid Red Sox fans imbued with a false sense of invincibility because their team won once, liquored up and flinging balls at eachother! What could be more wonderful?
Besides the pool. Where I am going now.

We've gone beyond irony into something I don't even know what it is but it's sublime.
Also, just randomly found another Ministry. We were here first. They look kinda cool- slightly righty but in an "I want to dominate the planet" sort of way, not in a, you know, Michelle Malkin kind of way. I will contact them so as to determine whether they should be brought into the fold, or righteously scourged. I'll keep you posted.

I want Vicodin. And an uzi. I shall not post anything witty as I am still in hate-everything mode from my apartment being broken into and my laptop being stolen. It was just a baby, not even a year old. Also, the twit stole my knife but not my jewelry. So now there's a moron walking around with a weapon and a wireless card. Bastard.
On the plus side, I'm moving from Sketchyville to Snobbyville and that's going to make it a helluvalot easier to marry rich. Mayhap I'll meet a Cabot-Lowell at the laundromat. 'Cause...they don't have washing machines. Or people to wash their clothes for them.
Nuts to this, I'm having waffles.

Quick note. Just saw the Almighty Father pop on messenger as I was sitting here in the state of Hideous Unsleep which vicodin withdrawal has imposed, and I started bitching at him about how far behind I was in my moving schedule, and how I'd never get all this stuff to Brooklyn, and he said, quote, "so what the hell's your problem? Find some gay guys and give them ecstasy or whatever."
Ladies and gentlemen, that small creature which you see dying on the pavement is, in fact, my childhood.
For further glimpses into Father's psyche please scroll down this Interminable Page to about a year ago and check out the discussion about the piscatorial eschatology and the portcullis. Really it's a fucking miracle we're as well-adjusted as we are.
Also, I've figured out how we're going to differentiate ourselves from all the other navel-gazing ranters out there. Scouts honor. Starting as soon as we can be bothered, look sort of over that way ------------->.
Fun will be had by all.

Two things. Thing the first; something weird is happening blogwise. The entire damn thing is on one page. I mean....we've got archives, I can see them right over there right under where it says archives. So why is the entire damn thing, going all the way back to April of 2003, all on this one page? The hell? I mean, it's not a major big deal but it's weird and vexes me. I mean- we started this thing so long ago that we were both Republicans, for god's sake. Although, and I mean this honestly, we were the "quit taxing me and don't make any laws" type of Republican, not the bugfuck frothing C.H.U.D. rejects who've recently appropriated the name. But still.
Thing the next- when I'm drunk, this blog is fucking hilarious. I mean it. We are a genius. Genuflection should occur. And scraping of temples and throwing of non-sequential unmarked bills. Just you wait, people of the earth. Your names, addresses and lack of obsequiousness have been duly noted.

Fuck vicodin. Fucking douchebag vicodin. Two weeks, I tell you- two weeks was all it was! And I had surgery! So when I say I needed it, I mean it in the honest sense and not in the pleading junkie sense. But now...well this damn well better wear off soon because last night I got approximately 45 minutes of sleep. At one point I apparently twitched so bad I rolled right off the bed, because I came to at around 4 am lying with my face in the pile of books that's next to the nightstand. I can see this happening if I were Doctor fucking House or something, but two weeks? Not fair! What I need is a teeny little whip and a wee little man to wield said whip. He could crawl into my ear and bitchslap my endorphins until they start working again. Fucko.

Ok, we're back. Or rather, in the process of coming back. Erm.....ok, so it might've been a year since we last posted, but what we were really doing was storing up the ire and the pith, so that we could smack bang back into your little lives with the sort of impact that can do us justice.
Seriously, it's going to be good. Watch this space.