Losing Sleep

This summer, the sleep pattern I've unwittingly adopted would trick you into thinking that my life is interesting. Most of the time, when people stay up until 5 AM or later, it's because they're at sexy parties at a club with enough lights to make you think you're in Las Vegas while tripping on acid. I stay up until 5 AM or later to dramatically lipsynch my favorite songs in my room while reading the same entries on my Facebook news feed five times over and having conversations with people that consist of nothing more than Mac OS X-related pickup lines. (Can I see an iPhoto of your Core Image? ;)) It would be cute if I was 12; at 17, it makes most people question my mental health.

Because I am going to New York City in a couple days on college visits, and, after that, I actually have to do work so that I'm ready for school to begin in September, I made a noble effort to combat this sleep cycle by going to bed at (gasp!) 2:30 AM. It was my first attempt in over a month to go to bed before the sun woke up.

The story of what then happened is something you'll find either amusingly relatable or hilariously pathetic. Or maybe you'll just find it pathetic.

2:19 AM

Determining that nothing had been said in the MSN conversations I had been participating in for at least 20 minutes, I decide to take the golden (and rare) opportunity before me to cover myself with sheets. However, I determine that I would have trouble getting to sleep without music, so I get out my phone and headphones. (Worst mistake of the night, easily)

2:50 AM

I am about 2 minutes into flailing around on my bed and enthusiastically mouthing the words of a particularly raucous Amanda Palmer song when I come to the sudden realization that the sound in each of my ears is not balanced. Panicking about hearing loss, I switch the ear each earphone is in and notice that it is a problem with the earphones and not my hearing. Trying to get the case off my phone, which is latched into the gaps in my phone's slide-out mechanism as tightly as a Lil' Kim dress, I idly turn the volume up to the maximum setting. This results in Amanda Palmer screaming I'M SO EXCITED! into my head really loud. I don't share her excitement.

3:10 AM

I have finally given up on the fruitless process of trying to get my case off of my phone. Deafened and irritated, I take the earphones' plug out of the jack and proceed to jam it in repeatedly with the determination of a virgin on prom night. Eventually, this produces a clicking sound, which satisfies me enough to resume my stage performance pantomiming ritual.

3:30 AM

I am satisfied with the ear balance, but the previous conundrum has given me a resentment for my earphones, so I use the phone's browser to look for new ones. My music abruptly stops and the application playing the music quits itself without provocation. This repeats three times. I go over to the Android Market to look for a new music app, but I make something like three typos and the resulting search leads me to an app that lists Turkish television schedules. Two more attempts leads me to music applications, and I install the one with the prettiest icon.

3:40 AM

The app plays music about as well as an app that lists Turkish television schedules. Maybe it was the Turkish TV Guide app. I don't know for sure. Disgruntled, I uninstall it and go to the ugly, but functional, default Android music app. I resume my search for earphones.

4:10 AM

After spending 30 minutes convincing Amazon that I am not looking for $4 Phillips earphones sold by we-sell-stuff-lol.com, I find things that I hope will be in my price range but are actually double my price range. I am saddened. My phone amplifies this sadness by playing a really depressing Massive Attack song.

4:50 AM

Birds begin chirping.

4:55 AM

I listen to the song about Amanda Palmer being so excited one more time and decide it is a sufficient finale for my imaginary bedroom concert.

5:00 AM

I take out my earphones and try to ignore the fact that I ended up staying awake just as late as I would if I had remained online. It doesn't take me long to realize that the crickets and birds are having a not-imaginary and actually quite loud outdoor concert that is wafting uninvited through my bedroom windows.

5:05 AM

I think of something clever to say about crickets that I can no longer remember. I consider getting up and updating my Facebook status but remind myself that I actually, at one point, had desired to sleep that night.

Somewhere between 5:10 and 5:20 AM

I fall asleep.

12:33 PM

I am violently awakened by my phone ringing. I attempt to pick up my phone but I cannot, in this state of mind, figure out how to take a call, so I throw my phone down in disgust. This somehow automatically ignores the call.

12:34 PM

My mother calls the home phone. I somehow manage to hang up on her again. She calls back. I answer. I yell something obscene about not being able to operate telephones. My mother becomes afraid of me. She reminds me that I should expect relatives coming over later. I say something and my mother clearly cannot understand me because she unexpectedly says goodbye. I say goodbye and hang up.

1:45 PM

I wake up after falling back asleep immediately following the phone call with only one eye that will actually open, one pillow (I started with two), and covers that are thrown completely off the bed. I do not question this. I reminisce on the previous night and think only one thing: I fucking need to go back to school.

7 Reasons I Might Become Anorexic

I was inspired to write this post by eating a donut. That could be one of the seven reasons, but I already spoiled that one for you and you are expecting seven numbered reasons based on the title, so that won't work. To make you feel better, I can guarantee you that none of these reasons will be something conventional like "Hollywood promotes skinny people" or "horizontal stripes" because those are boring.

7. Jillian Michaels

To anyone with a body fat percentage higher than 1 and a BMI higher than 15, this woman is the antichrist. This is the same woman who now is affiliated with two television shows concerning awkwardly invading the personal lives of fat people and forcing them to not be fat by yelling at people named Joelle when they don't do THIRTY FUCKING SECONDS ON THE TREADMILL RAAAAAAARGHHHH. All of this would be bad enough if she wasn't also pictured in what I'd easily nominate the scariest fucking video game cover of all time:

Skinnier guys might find this photo sexy. Chubbier guys consider the scariness of this photo about on par with getting your sleeve caught on a conveyor belt that leads to a meat grinder. Her eyes stare into your soul like she's remotely measuring your BMI and her accusatory finger definitely knows about that hot fudge sundae you ate last night.

6. Restaurants

For many years, before the massive 21st century push for "healthier food," restaurants were able to get away with putting pretty much whatever they wanted on your plate as long as it wasn't going to kill you immediately. This does not mean, however, that it won't kill you long term. Most restaurants now have nutrition facts posted on their own website, but even this resource has not at all inspired them to change their ways.

Probably about a few months ago, Applebee's began their campaign for Meals Under 550 Calories. When I first heard about this, I thought, "What the hell? Isn't that kind of high for a diet food?" I was so adorably naive. I promptly looked up the nutrition facts of all of my favorite dishes at Applebee's and found that having a calorie count that wasn't in the quadruple-digits was a luxury. Granted, that hasn't stopped me -- I, with little reluctance, tacked about 1,750 calories on to my thighs the last time I went there -- but it does give me all the more reason to be afraid of Jillian Michaels' finger of divine judgment.

5. Buttons

You know how zippers, unless the clothing is so extremely ill-fitting that the zipper breaks, do a pretty good job of hiding your actual weight? This is why jackets are so desirable. Buttons have the opposite effect.

My weight has a tendency to be in flux most of the time. I lost a lot of weight two years ago, and, in celebration, bought a lot of clothes. The half of it I proceeded to put back on disagreed with this behavior, and now none of the clothes from that era fit me particularly well. They fit me just fine, but the buttons, especially those near the bottom, struggle to hold the shirt together, producing those irritating and very unflattering gaps in the shirt where the buttons are pulling apart. I'm trying to think of something funny to say about that, but it's so traumatizing that I can't do it. My apologies.

4. Waitresses

I am an exceptionally fast eater. It's something I've done instinctively since I was a little kid when we had twenty minutes to eat lunch and 19 of those were spent in a line trying to cover your pockets so that the imaginary bully didn't steal your lunch money, even though no one's lunch money ever actually got stolen. This is not usually a problem when I'm at home, because my parents understand and they don't (audibly or visibly) judge me. Waitresses do not work in this way. Waitresses make an attempt to be as tactful about it as they possibly can, since I don't think that they have a history of getting heavy tips from patrons that they call fat (I'll have to conduct a study), but their comments like "Oh, you really must have enjoyed that!" or "Wow, did you even taste that?" are soul-crushing and demoralizing. This happens most frequently, for some reason, at Denny's. I should probably just stop going to Denny's. But their Philly Melt is so good.

(To avoid accusations of chauvinism, I should probably note that all of my experiences with this phenomenon were with waitresses. Male waiters are very rarely paying attention to what they're doing enough to comment.)

3. Pockets

Even more traumatizing than the feeling of having buttons that are slowly separating like tectonic plates is the feeling of trying to get something out of your pocket when your pocket is as tight as shrink wrap. This is usually caused when jeans "fit" in the sense that they get on, but they don't actually in the sense that the pockets are nearly fucking impossible to get into. Unfortunately, since the next size up is so baggy on me that I look like a deflated hot air balloon, I must deal with these airtight pockets that do not lend themselves well to things like tollbooths. I guess there are advantages, though; I'm fucking impossible to pickpocket. If I just kept walking, the pickpocket would probably get tugged down the street behind me.

2. Auditoriums

My school auditorium is fairly old. Space between the chairs is at a premium. At the chorus concerts, the chorus sits in a certain section of the chairs as the band and the younger kids perform first. When we all stand up to get on stage, the scenario plays out the same way every time. I see the people in front of me confidently strolling through the aisles of chairs as if they were as wide as grocery store aisles, so I try to be a conformist and do the same thing, only I find that I can't because my hips are bouncing me back and forth like a really narrow pinball table. Then I need to get up and sing on stage about shit like the beauty of the earth when I'm far more worried about why I'm a guy with seemingly child-birthing hips. That's not fucking beauty.

And the big one...

1. People at the dinner table who say "Oh, this is simply too much food for me!" while I am still eating and I ordered/gathered considerably more food than they did and am probably going to end up eating their leftovers, too

This may seem obscure and irrationally long compared to the six other reasons, which are mostly one word, but it's long because it's specific and it's #1 because it's been happening to me all the fucking time recently. I love my mother, but she has a fondness for doing this to me a lot lately, and she is not helping, especially not when she subsequently offers me the rest of her food while my face is still buried deep in a pile of calories stacked twice as high as hers ever was.

Do you agree with these things? Do you not? Are you actually Jillian Michaels reading this blog, and, if so, are you aware of the donut I ate last night...? Please don't be Jillian Michaels.

If Perez Hilton Made a Cell Phone

I haven't had much to say lately. My phone and I are having a very tumultuous relationship. The device is reaching end-of-life and I'm getting to the point where I am starting to reevaluate my commitment to our relationship. I downloaded the Android 2.2 manual update for it and installed it, and for the moment, we're on a second honeymoon (everything is so much FASTER. I still can't use it to accomplish much of anything, but I can send texts that say "lol" in AT LEAST 0.3 seconds less than before) but even this will end, and I'll be unable to keep my drooling over new Android devices contained.

It must have caught me looking at some Droid X specs pages, because I'm pretty sure it's exacting revenge on me. A couple days ago, I just touched the faceplate of the case I had on it and it snapped right in two. I thought that would be an isolated incident, but it clearly wasn't. I signed on this morning to find that Perez Hilton has been so wisely selected by Motorola as a promotion vehicle for their new Droid X. The Droid X used to look kind of like a super version of my phone. Now I just see it as dirty whore that will call me fat and try to take inappropriate pictures of me at night and add captions like "LOL, lovehandles!" and "omg, acne alert" after uploading them to a blog with seemingly hundreds of thousands of rabid readers.

While I was thinking about that, I started to think about what it would be like if Perez Hilton was handed a developer kit and all of the parts necessary to make a phone and was allowed to build his own cell phone alone.

I came up with this...

I will disregard the likely fact that an app somewhat like this already exists somewhere and stay curled up in my safety ball of ignorance.

But seriously, Perez Hilton? Motorola thinks it's a good idea to associate themselves with a guy who managed to make a career out of calling female celebrities that way more than 110 pounds "fat" when he is noticeably overweight himself? The same guy that thinks it's hilariously clever to post candid shots of celebrities on the internet and make obnoxious little tooltips next to everything marking out their every flaw? If I buy a Motorola product now, is it going to call me fat? Is it going to disallow me from using it if I have eaten over 500 calories in the past 48 hours? Is it automatically going to set this picture as my wallpaper?

These are valid concerns.