Questionable

Punctuation is usually my best friend. You know how English teachers always have that fire truck red pen that they use to cover the papers you spend hours on with criticisms and corrections? I love doing things like that. I get some sick pleasure out of the ability to look at another human being and say, truthfully, "Hey, dumbass, I speak words better than you!" Then, I get punched and I get a tooth knocked out, but at least I'll be able to tell the doctor what happened to me with a rich vocabulary, and my affidavit from the ensuing assault and battery case will have properly placed commas and semicolons.

Yesterday, however, punctuation turned on me for the first time. I know things between the question mark and I were growing distant and our relationship was strained and questionable (please forgive me), but I didn't know things were bad enough for it to invade my phone.

My Droid is my baby. People tell me that I don't need a phone that fancy, and it's a waste of money, but I'll never believe them. My Droid and I have something that the rest of the human world will never understand. It is my comfort. It doesn't judge me for staying up until 5 AM and waking up at 2 PM all flustered and wondering where the day went. It is always sitting undisturbed in its charging cradle, waiting for me to swipe my finger across its surface and bring it to life. (I'm inventing a new genre -- it's called phonoerotica)

When I drop it, I might as well have dropped a living baby. It does not cry, but I know it is in pain. Before today, it weathered the pain and remained healthy, After the fall onto the hardwood floor yesterday, though, it got infected with a question mark. The question mark manifested itself in the battery life indicator. The cute green bar letting me know when it was time to put my baby to rest was no longer apparent. I panicked. I was inconsolable. I rushed down the stairs to verbalize my grief with my mother, but it was to no avail; she did not understand the depth of my distress. The only answer was open-heart surgery.

I removed the battery cover and started shuffling around its insides. It kept turning itself off. You will probably visualize this scene differently than I did:

As you can tell, I have a bit of a flair for the dramatic.

The thought of replacing my baby with another baby was horrifying. It wouldn't have my apps yet and it wouldn't have my data, sure, but those things are fixable. It wouldn't have my baby's personality. It wouldn't do that cute thing where I'm trying to look something up and it's really important to know quickly and it pops up that adorable window saying "Process Browser is not responding" and plays with me.

After about thirty minutes of fumbling, I managed to make the uninvited punctuation mark go away, and the green bar I missed so passionately returned. The question mark has not made any more attempts since then, but I am still keeping a close eye. It is such an attention whore.

(Wahoo! I managed to write this entire post without a question mark.)

Free Parking

I went to a fabulous Goo Goo Dolls concert on Friday night. A crowd of drunk people jumping around and sloppily mouthing the words to the songs they know can add a strange exhilaration to a concert. This exhilaration turns to downright horror, however, once the concert is over and it's time to enter the parking vortex.

"Parking vortex" is a much more apt description than "parking lot" at night. In the daytime, the parking area outside the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center was a completely unthreatening half-grass, half-gravel expanse full of boomboxes and friendly-looking people. In the darkness, however, it was a foreign planet. It was a swirling vortex of cars and smashed beer bottles and more cars and people stumbling around muttering to themselves and more cars. I knew I was in for trouble when a head popped out of one of the first cars I saw, shouted "USA BABY!" and promptly disappeared. Part of me was thankful for his concern that I might have forgotten what country I was in, but the rest of me felt like a sheep in the middle of a herd of patriotic lions that smelled like beer and wanted to eat me.

If I was just trying to get through this place on my way from point A to a nondescript point B, I could have done it without a problem. Unfortunately, I also needed to complete the task of finding my car. In a situation like this, your only defense against the parking vortex is an electronic key fob. When I held it up to the sky, pressed the "lock" button over and over again, and prayed to the CEO of General Motors that my car's beep would be loud enough to guide my steps. In my head, it looked a little like this:

Sword in hand and cape flowing behind me, I fought on into the darkness, braving mud puddles, the sad remains of pre-concert beer parties, and drunk drivers that took sick pleasure in coming as close to running me over as possible.

Getting out of the parking lot after a populated concert is kind of like bumper cars, only with real cars and people won't giggle happily when you come close to bumping into them, they will get out of their car and cut you. Then again, I suppose I am making an assumption there that I can't make -- people may very well get emotional enough about bumper cars to get out and cut you there, too. But bumper car rides have attendants who can protect you from random acts of violence. Parking lots at concerts are supposed to have some form of traffic control, but the policemen on shift that night were far too amused by driving around aimlessly through the grass in a golf cart to actually do their job.

I kept my testosterone and road rage to a minimum and got out of there safely. One woman who was pushed off the trail by the flow of traffic and sat there in desperation as car after car refused to let her in didn't fare as well as I did, but she probably didn't have a key fob sword. That's what happens when you try to get out of a vortex unprepared -- your dignity doesn't make it out alive.

This Facebook Meme Will Never Take Me Alive

Humans are social creatures. In the "days of old," from what I've been told, people spoke over wired telephones with those pain-in-the-ass "stretchy" coils to organize actual things to do to scratch this social itch. In the 21st century, we'd be embarrassed to be this primitive. We prefer to communicate in small, grammatically dismal, and ultimately pointless blurbs over sites called Facebook and Twitter that politely ask us what's "on our mind" and make us feel wanted. That doesn't mean we take the time to respond to other people's thoughts with actual words -- we have advanced to "Like" and "Retweet" buttons that give us the kind of lazy gratification we always fantasized about as children -- but we damn well hope that someone will Like our words, or else we might just defriend them.

This has produced a lot of noxious consequences -- no one can spell anymore, for one -- but there is one monster that the Facebook juggernaut has given rise to that is easily the most hideous threat the world has seen since nuclear proliferation. I hope you all have seen this before, or else the soulless beast that is this Facebook meme might just make you fall out of your chair and give you nightmares. I don't want to be responsible for your nightmares.

It looks something like this:

Like my status and I'll tell you my first impression of you, what I like and dislike about you, and my confession to you

Just copying and pasting it gives me shivers.

Now, granted, to protect you from neurological damage, I'm prettying it up a little bit. That's the best grammar with which I've seen this meme represented. Most of the time, it looks more like

[LiKe] this n ill tell u my 1st impression of u, what I LiKe and DiSlIkE about u, n a confession!!!!! lol!

That's a sight to be mourned.

Now, granted, before the answers actually come in, this meme has appreciable potential. The idea of millions of hormonal, pubescent Facebook teenagers making huge amounts of drama by daring to say that they dislike someone else's outfits or (gasp!) disapprove of someone's boyfriend or girlfriend is a gratifying concept and a very pleasant mental image. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way. It's bad enough that we're exposed to this on a regular basis; it becomes even worse when we're deprived of any potential entertainment value it had to begin with.

Instead, we are provided with hundreds of asinine, formulaic answers in our news feed, burying everything else and multiplying daily. Apparently, at some point, "we don't talk to each other much :(" became the only thing that anyone dislikes about any other human being -- if that were actually true, no one would fight wars and MTV would not have enough trashy drama in the world to fill a 24-hour schedule. Clearly, someone is lying.

Is a little debauchery and depravity too much to ask for? I'd pay just to see a couple responses where the first impression is "damn, hope that guy doesn't try to talk to me... oh crap," the dislike is something entertaining like "you look like a deer and you always smell like Wheatabix," and the confession is something like, "I saw you running on the side of the road once while I was driving. I was gonna run you over but my mom was in the passenger seat and I knew she wouldn't vouch for me in court so I didn't."

This Facebook meme is the pinnacle of all that is wrong with the world. It's brainless and it isn't even entertaining. I want a new Facebook meme. I want "Like this and I'll post a video of myself pissing on your house" or "Comment on this and I'll tell you how many times your girlfriend has cheated on you." Now that's what I call social networking.

Traffic Circles of Death

Elton John once famously sang about a "circle of life" in a Disney movie about lions. To protect the innocent children that watch Disney movies from the ugly realities of their world, Elton forgot to mention the "circle of death." This is known in modern society as traffic circle.

Yesterday afternoon, I set out onto the endearingly familiar I-90 thruway on a mission. I was going to head straight into the depths of it, where angry drivers go 30 miles an hour over the speed limit and use their middle fingers as turn signals, on a summer Saturday afternoon. And I was going to make sure that I came out of it in, at most, three pieces. (You can't get too optimistic around western New York. Being in one piece with the way people drive around here is a luxury.)

When I drive in places that are difficult to drive in, I start naturally leaving some of my driving up to instinct. This is exactly the opposite of what driving instructors told me to do in driver's education, but it just happens. When my instinct starts to exert some influence over the steering wheel and the gas pedal, I no longer drive like a timid and feeble 17 year old -- I begin driving like I'm Sebulba in Star Wars Episode I Racer. For those of you who lived less fortunate lives and did not get the blessing of having this unbelievably addictive game as a child, here is a picture:

(If you are also wondering if I look that sexy while I drive, I unfortunately don't think I measure up. That's the kind of good looks that you have to be born with.)

In other words, that means that I drive like my car is a giant podracer with turbo jets and my main objective is to either make you get out of my way or make you explode.

While I was in this state of elevated testosterone and adrenaline, I tried to keep enough of my wits about me to find my thruway exit in a timely enough manner to make it without cutting off everyone on the road simultaneously. The exit I sought was #50, so, naturally, when I came to its antecedent -- #51 -- my tension level rose.

Then I came to exit 50A. Only it didn't look like 50A out of the corner of my eye. It looked like 50. It didn't help that I had a bigass truck with a full size trailer following it. People should not do that. Bringing a full size trailer on the expressway is like trailing an elephant behind you on a bicycle path. You get in everyone's way and it makes no one like you.

Panicking and strongly disliking the guy driving the truck with the trailer, I whipped over into what I thought was my exit and found out just seconds too late that it, very tragically, was not. I was lost somewhere in suburbia between Amherst and Buffalo. I wasn't ready to panic yet, though; I pulled into a gas station parking lot and pulled out my trusty phone with GPS and navigated to my sister's apartment. It showed me a pretty short route. That doesn't look too difficult, I thought. I was, in hindsight, blissfully unaware of the demons I was about to encounter.

It didn't take me long to end up at something that looked remotely like this:

When you are from a city or a suburb, this looks entirely normal to you. In fact, this is probably how you are used to getting around. When you come from a village with one stoplight, though, this looks a lot more like weird concrete crop circles and thus is likely a symbol of the apocalypse.

The sign, which I remember a bit like this, didn't do much to quell my fear and uncertainty.

My phone GPS was my only defense in this strange circular world. Without it, I might have ended up in Fairytopia.

Traffic circles, I soon discovered, are kind of like revolving doors. Only these revolving doors can kill you and have like 5 possible exits. "Missing your exit" on a revolving door is a little embarrassing, but some may find it cute and it is largely harmless unless you manage, somehow, to crush yourself, which is unlikely and would probably require you to be drunk. Missing your exit on a traffic circle is not cute. It's horrifying.

Did I make it out alive? I'd love to leave you in suspense, but considering that I'm writing this, I don't think you're stupid enough to fall for that. Was it beyond terrifying? Yes.

Moral of the story? No one should drive on the expressway with a full size trailer behind their truck. It is an act of cruelty that results in unfair tribulations like this.

Invasion of the Modemsnatchers

I had an art overload yesterday and spent like 7 hours drawing things and I can't even think of anything to draw for this post so there. No intense face for you today. Don't be sad. I'll draw you more horrifying pictures soon enough.

This is the second day in a row that I have woken up in a bad place. Yesterday, as I wrote about in yesterday's post, it was because of the violent way in which I was awakened. Today, it was because of the invasion of the modemsnatchers.

My mother recently decided to switch our landline over from Verizon to Time Warner. She sees this as a life-altering decision. It's about as important to me as if she replaced all of the boxes of Chex in the house with cheaper boxes of Chex. I don't eat Chex, so I don't give a shit. (This is the second blog post in a row in which I have mentioned cereal boxes and tried in some way to relate them to something. I swear, I'm not paid by General Mills or Kellogg's, although I am completely open to the idea. I'll change my whole page design to a giant cereal box and draw pictures of cereal boxes doing cancer research and donating mosquito nets to poor families in Africa if it means more money to fuel my voracious spending habits.)

However, there was a part I did give a shit about, and that was the fact that that meant big, burly men with toolkits and brightly-colored work uniforms would be stomping enthusiastically up and down the stairs of my house and yelling about "phone jacks" and "modems" while I sat trapped in my dark room, half-awake, disheveled, and wide-eyed for hours. This is not a situation I would wish upon anyone for anything longer than 15 minutes.
I am perfectly capable of moving while the workers are here. I would need to put some clothes on to avoid being offensive, but I'm pretty sure tolerating people living their everyday lives in the houses they work on is part of their job. I just don't want to. I get this tremendous anxiety any time someone is working in the house and I become afraid that I am going to get in their way somehow and accidentally knock them down the stairs and then they are going to sue me and take away my internet connection and my house and then I will die on the street, never again to watch videos of cats jumping off of tables onto carpeted floors or have late-night conversations about swear words in Farsi ever again. The idea of that is too much for me to bear, so I'd rather stay in my room with all the lights off and pretend I don't exist.

There was only one problem with staying in my room: The only thing I can do in my room that doesn't make noise is be on the internet, and when they are working on something that compromises the internet, using it becomes unreliable.

I swear, the evil corporate lobbyists would prevent it from happening with their fancy wines and endless sums of money, but the internet should be classified as a habit-forming substance. I don't necessarily need it. I don't do anything tremendously important on it. I mostly look up Wikipedia articles of obscure diseases, participate in immature group conversations chock full of lewd humor, and, as previously mentioned, watch YouTube videos of cats jumping off of tables. These are all entertaining, but I manage to pull myself away from them for long enough to sleep, eat dinner, and do most of the other things that need to get done during the day.

That doesn't change the fact that, when it's off, I usually enter some sort of fetal position (as close to fetal position as you can get in a computer chair) and begin sweating, squirming, and questioning the worth of my entire existence. I get sudden urges to look up things like "calories in a pomegranate" and "what happens when you put a Beanie Baby on top of a ceiling fan and then turn it on" and I can't because I don't have an internet connection. Then I look to my phone, naturally, which has 3G and all of that new-fangled mobile technology. When that's not working, I go through the five stages of grief, lay down, and pray that sleep will take me out of this misery. Then I end up having dreams about my friends becoming amputees and going fishing with Ellen DeGeneres in an ocean of cherry jello, in turn giving me more things to look up. When I wake up, I am usually in a panic, with my pillow thrown across the room and my mom wondering why I've been screaming "REEL IT IN!" for multiple hours while apparently asleep.

My internet is back now, of course, and I'm a little less upset, but I'm still shaken. The friend in my dream had her leg entirely cut off, and there was a giant crowd around my house because she was at my house for some reason, and she came out completely nonchalantly, got into another friend's car, and went to the mall. It's times like these when I wish dream interpretation worked, although that probably just means that I have a weird fear of getting my leg cut off and I am overdue for a mall trip. Don't even know where to start with Ellen DeGeneres and the jello, though.

Morning War

There is a pleasant way to get up.

Then there's the way I got up this morning.

My mother is something of a worrier, and she's definitely one of those crazy people that advocates for getting up hours before you have something to attend to. Today, the issue was an 11:00 AM doctor's appointment at a place that is 30 minutes away. I ran this through the little time calculator in my brain and it popped out 9:30 -- one hour to get ready and half an hour to get there. I set my alarm for this optimal time, but in the back of my head somewhere, I knew that there was no way in hell I'd get away with it. She had her mind set on 9 AM at the latest, and it never took her that long to stomp up the stairs and investigate. 

Naturally, this meant that she was up in my room no later than 14 minutes after her imposed deadline, staring me down and wondering how dare I not wake up on her schedule. Of course, I couldn't just let this go -- my dream of Perez Hilton trying to take over the world by buying up all of the world's cereal boxes and the only way to stop him was to cover his house in golf clubs (I don't actually know if this was my dream, since now, I don't remember it, but it must have been that interesting because I remember being really pissed about my dream being interrupted in that moment) was being heartlessly truncated -- and I started a half-awake argument with my mother. This is the kind of argument where everything you say is really intense and it feels like there are actually 10,000 people in an audience watching you and you're not really in an argument, it's actually a boxing match and your words are giant puffy boxing gloves. Using gold mines like, "I did set my alarm!" and, "No, that isn't cutting it close! Not in the real world! Maybe in your fantasy world, but not in the real world!" I managed to demoralize my mother quickly enough for her to exit the boxing ring and go downstairs. Despite this small victory, I had still lost overall -- I was awake and there was no way to change that now.

I "went to bed" (more like collapsed melodramatically on my mattress and stuck my head in the nearest available pillow) at 4:30 AM. Why? I was in a group chat talking about the "most trusted name in pumping" and the wonder of dual-ended dildos. (If you must know, we were making fun of the contents of an online Canadian sex shop.)

In case you don't have a brain calculator like I do, that means I got roughly 4 hours and 45 minutes of sleep. Much like arguments, at that level of sleep deprivation, everyday tasks become intense tasks.

That is a face of intensity.

By the time my brain solidified and I was coherent enough to list off the scientific name of at least 5 different oral antibiotics, I was ready for the appointment. Intense driving, however, is not generally recommended for your health, so I resigned to the passenger's seat and watched as the road in front of me grew gradually longer.

You know how sometimes, when you have a really bad headache, everything sounds about 150% as loud as it actually is? Imagine feeling like that at an Adam Lambert concert with a boulder on your head and a middle-aged woman screaming in your ear about Enrique Iglesias water-skiing nude. My mother jumped from subject to subject with remarkable agility, covering Craig Ferguson's last monologue, Inception, Enrique Iglesias, Inception again, how much everyone in New York sucks at driving, a conspiracy theory concerning Tim Hortons' pricing in different areas, the ownership of a local restaurant, and another local restaurant's rumored involvement in the Mafia before abruptly switching to singing along to George Michael's rendition of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me." I really tried to contribute to the conversation when a response came to me -- like "they charge more in higher income areas and less in lower income areas" or "Enrique Iglesias is totally not the biggest thing in Latino music," but all of my responses bubbled and foamed from my mouth like I had rabies. It's really hard to understand people when they're talking if they have rabies.

This is all I set out to say with this blog post, but I feel compelled to add some sort of moral, so the moral of the story is to never interrupt a dream involving Perez Hilton, world domination, and golf clubs. It makes you have a bad day.

The Monster in the Mailbox

Mail is evil. This could be easily written off as one of my many neuroses, but, at the very least, history is on my side on this one.

Just ponder, for a second, the history of mail. I'm not talking about telegrams, those are too easy. I'm talking about the fucking Pony Express. You know, the days when "mailmen" were actually kickass cowboys that carried your mail on fucking horses through the deserts and mountains of the wild west. It's kind of like texting, only it takes a lot longer and there's a guy on a horse risking his life (and risking being kidnapped by a Mormon fellowship) so that you can send "omg lol wats up" across state lines. (I think AT&T might still use that system, actually.)

Just think of all of the evil things that have been done with mail. Anthrax. Bombs. Credit card bills. Publisher's Clearing House. Invitations to "parties" from creepy boys in your neighborhood in which you're probably going to be greeted at the door with chloroform, scissors, and a cucumber. It's all happened through the mail. Our government, completely unaware of the tremendous evils that can be done through mail, call mailmen and mailwomen public service employees and give them extra benefits for doing the "service" of exposing us to anthrax and cucumber rapists. It isn't right.

Today, I received this completely innocent-looking thing in the mail:

To most of you, this probably looks like an everyday poorly-drawn envelope with a strangely placed barcode and squiggly lines for addresses. However, my eyes, unblinded by the nationwide mail conspiracy, saw it as this:

Yeah, that's right, dragon wings. My CollegeBoard envelope had fucking dragon wings. With more motivation, I probably could have added fire, more Mormons, and a shower tension rod (old fear that I'll explain later), but this does the job of expressing all of the things I am afraid of in one place.

This discovery frightened and disturbed me. Why did this take so long to come? What if I actually did fail? Where did that baby come from? All of these questions burned in my mind simultaneously, and I was nearly unable to proceed.

After about 5 minutes of sweating and squirming in place, I gained the resolve to open the envelope. I was almost certain of failure, so I made a point to read all of the useless information about myself at the top of the page. Eventually, I could resist my desire to see the number and get it over with no longer, and I looked to the right of "AP US History," bracing myself for a 2.

The dragon wings disappeared. The baby was released from its chewy fate and lived on. The "LOL YOU FAILED" sticker fell off abruptly, and the Mormons started cheering. I saw a 5.

It won't teach me anything, of course -- I will still expect failure every time; it's hard-coded into my genes, much like my adoration for Liza Minnelli -- but it's a relief to know that my mail doesn't have dragon wings.

The Pipe Telephone and How My Second Grade Teacher Defeated Me

When I was in second grade, I thought I was awesome. I was totally the king of relationship advice, I had near-exclusive dibs on the one good computer that was in the room, and I was almost always the first to finish my classwork. Granted, it was all color-by-numbers pictures of birds that don't actually exist and three-word word searches, but that was enough to make me feel like fucking Albert Einstein in a bright yellow Pikachu t-shirt. (That is an awesome mental image. I just realized I have now italicized the word awesome twice. Is that pretentious?)

Unfortunately, my second grade teacher didn't at all comprehend my awesomeness. In fact, she felt threatened. In hindsight, I can see why. She would ask a cute question, like, "Now, kids, what number comes after 99?" and she expected to see a group of slightly confused small children work through the hardest problem of their life. But the second grade me said "fuck that shit" (I don't know if I knew the word "fuck" or "shit" back then, but I'm sure that's what I was thinking anyway) and yelled out "100" like I taught the class. The look on her face every time I'd do that was, if I remember correctly, kind of like a cross between a frog croaking and a toddler's "oh shit" face after they've dropped their lunch all over the floor -- she was vulnerable and defeated. I thought I had won. I had not realized, however, that the horror she felt built over time and consumed her thoughts, eventually culminating in the most nefarious invention I have ever seen.

One day, in class, while we were all trying our hardest to color in the lines with old Crayola crayons to make our color-by-numbers reindeer as accurate and Picasso-like as possible, my teacher innocently called me up to her desk. Realizing that the last two kids that had been called up to her desk had just come back from the principal's office with a look on their face as if their very soul had been pulled out of them through their eye sockets, my heart sank. The smile on her face was a relief for a time, but as I got closer, I realized that it was actually more of a toothy Chuckie grin.

"My husband makes things in our basement. It's kind of related to his job. I've told him a lot about you and he made this for you. I think this will help you!" She was barely able to contain her villainous excitement -- I was in for the psychological knockout of a lifetime.

Out of her desk came a very strange contraption that looked kind of like she had pulled the pipe from the back of her toilet and spray-painted it an unbecoming shade of rusty metallic gray. It was a terribly unwieldy thing. As she demonstrated how to use it, her pupils grew and her eyes widened, and she might as well have been the Wicked Witch of Western New York.

"See, you just hold it up to your ear like this... and when you talk, you can hear yourself! And if you ever start talking too fucking loud like you always do, you will DEAFEN yourself and your ears will bleed and your brain will turn to a mushy pile of gelatin and we will all tear out your intestines in celebration and throw them at the windows of your house so that your mother knows never to send her fucking kids to this school ever again!"

Okay, that isn't what she said, but that was what I heard.

She ensured that she was saying this part as loud as possible, so that the whole class heard. Even with a two-ended pipe up to my ear, I could hear the cackles and giggles. I wasn't going to live this one down.

For three consecutive days, I had to hold the ridiculous thing up to my ear every time I spoke in class. Eventually, I just stopped talking, so that I didn't have to hear myself. My second grade teacher was not only vindicated, but she also thought it was fucking hilarious. I had lost.

It has been at least 8 years since the pipe telephone entered my life, but it has never left. I don't know where it went. I think my mother probably threw it away in a fit of rage towards my second grade teacher's disturbing lack of professionalism and overall villain complex. But, at least in spirit, the pipe telephone has always been attached to my ear, monitoring what I say and never allowing me to raise my voice too much. This blog, named after the pipe telephone that haunts me so, is my 8 year delayed retaliation. This blog isn't just any personal blog -- this is my quest to defeat the pipe telephone.