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...