An ode to: THIS FXCKING STAIN

It’s been a long time (shoulda left you, left you) but I’m back. I’ve been busy REAL jobbing it and my normally mediocre life has been obnoxiously mediocre recently. But back to what’s exciting and new.

So basically all the rules of adulthood I learned in seventh grade. The first being is that cool kids sit in the back of the bus. So whenever I get on the bus that takes me to work I make sure to do make a B-line straight to the farthest row. I know everyone I strut pass recognizes that someone as cool as me is heading to the back of the bus, so my B-line becomes an 18 foot runway where I do a very dramatic, Beyonce-inspired B-line (wait… is that where we get B-line from?) But 2 or 3 days out of my week I get the bus with THIS waiting for me:

What in the living, ACTUAL fuck is this!? I have stared into this lint-ridden cesspit for tens of minutes on 14th St and cannot figure out for the life of me what it is, how it got there, or what it’s going to do next. It looks like that Pokemon Ditto died here! It totally ruffles my cool feathers every time I get on the bus, but I guess if this is the sacrifice I have to make for 20-something popularity…. well then I suppose it’s my cross to bear. 

When I Attempt to Flirt…

Skunk Ape Be Skunkin

Florida is stupid. I hate to generalize about states (particularly because people are so cutting about my very own shitbox home state), but come ON! It gets a pass because of Miami and eternally homosexual Florida Keys, but at the end of the day it’s just a dick-shaped extension of Alabama. Between Chelsea Lately an Buzzfeed there has been a lot of anti-Florida propaganda circulating the internets and it’s gotten my loins frothing at full throttle. There are literally trillions of reason why the Sunshine State sucks, but this probably one just fucking takes the cake.

Allow me to call your attention…. to the Skunk Ape.

According to the oracle of my generation, Wikipedia:

The Skunk Ape [also known amongst certain idiots as a “Swamp Ape”]is a hominid cryptid said to inhabit the Southern United States, from places such as North Carolina and Arkansas, although reports from Florida are most common. It is named for its appearance and for the unpleasant odor that is said to accompany it. According to the United States National Park Service, the skunk ape exists only as a local myth. Reports of the Skunk ape were particularly common in the 1960s and 1970s. In the fall of 1974, numerous sightings were reported in suburban neighborhoods of Dade County, Florida, of a large, ugly-smelling, hairy, ape-like creature, which ran upright on two legs.

 

It gets better. 

 

When you do a simple google search, you find that there is an entire site dedicated to tracking this elusive beast. It’s creatively called skunkape.com. According to these resident experts, Skunk Ape sightings occur “sporadically” and “in groups.” Additionally,  “Fecal and hair samples were collected, but DNA tests proved ‘inconclusive.’ It could not be determined exactly what type of animal the samples came from”

 

The folks at SkunkApe.com understand that their life’s pursuit may seem a bit trifling to some, but they have strong eco and biological precedent to aide their cause. For instance, Austalian wallabies (no that is not a typo on my part, on the website it actually says “Austalian”) live in remote parts of England (Although further research suggests that NO THEY REALLY DO NOT!) and the fact that humans are constantly discovering new and rare species unknown to the field of Zoology previously.

 

So there you have it folks. The American south is inhabited by a Grendel with a gland problem. IPSO FACTO! Aside from the fact that I literally cry from laughter whenever I think about the Skunk Ape, the fanciful child in me really wants it to exist. I mean if I had to choose between cryptozoologists discovering a magical pegasus-unicorn with a jewel-encrusted saddle that covers R.E.M. songs and cures AIDS or a 5’8” chimp that smells like a taint…. well that’s not even a choice, is it? Maybe it will have a knack for acting and they can finally make a sequel to Harry and the Hendersons (which is unequivocally the greatest injustice Hollywood has ever committed ever).

 

So believe on, skunkape.com, the cryptozoologists society, and the innocuous people of Florida. Sometimes all you have to do… is believe. 

The Token Irish Member of British Pop Bands: A Tribute (through GIFs obvi…)

There’s a certain infallible formula to successful pop groups. Bands from the UK are no different, except they get that added boost from the Emerald Isle. The obligatory Irish member is ubiquitous for all of the greats from Great Britain. So with this weekend being the most sacrosanct of Irish holidays, we salute those Irish men and women who have blessed pop music with their adorable brogue.

7. Siobhan Fahey (Bananarama)
Def gets first prize for the most Irishy-sounding name.

6. Siva Kaneswaran (The Wanted)
Siva fills two diversity quotas: he’s the Irish one AND the, well, not white one. What I wouldn’t do to him after a few pints of Guinness…

 

5. Nadine Coyle (Girls Aloud)
Shamrockin’ my world.
 

4. Una Healy (The Saturdays)
 Irish Car Bomb(shell).

3. B*Witched (B* FUCKIN’ WITCHED)
Even though they are not part but full-blown Irish, B*Witched cannot go unmentioned in a round-up of Irish contributions to pop music. What would our respective youths have been like if we weren’t bopping around to C’est La Vie on our CD players? Hell, I was bopping around to that song today on my way to work and I’m a 25 year-old man.

 

 

2. Niall Horan (One Direction)
The Irish Tourism Board should have visitors kiss this little four-leaf clover instead of that massive cold sore in the making, the Blarney Stone.
 

1. Melanie C (Spice Girls)
POTATO SPICE! Who can deny this athletic little leprechaun doesn’t deserve the top spot? Mel C was a trailblazer: Not only was she the Irish member of the most successful girl group of all time, but she was also the resident tom boy of the group (insofar as she wore color-coordinated track suits and had a bad-ass barbed wire tattoo).

 

HAPPY ST PATTY’S DAY

I have no doubt…

I have no doubt that [Chavez] will return alongside Jesus Christ…to establish peace and justice in the world,” -Mahmud Ahmadinejad

uhhhhhhh what now?

Emoticons Make Me :-(

DISCLAIMER! I’m recycling a post I originally wrote for my best bud Steve’s blog a while back. For generating content purposes I thought I would post it on here, so no plagiarizing is occurring at this moment. ALSO everyone check out Steve’s blog @ stephenrowella.wordpress.com

My diatribe du jour focuses on the peeviest of all pet peeves for me: emoticons. I would characterize my personality with the same word as I would my love life: settling. As a result, I’ve made a lot of concessions to the millennial cutesy AOL lingo txt-krazy brain drain that’s slowly eroding away at the contrived, jumble hybrid of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Germanic dialects that we call “English”. Besides prefacing a sentence with an emphatic “OMG” here or there, I think I’m pretty tame compared to others. For one, I still use vowels when I write #winning. Furthermore, I don’t substitute words with just their homonymonic number, and I even go so far as to type out laughter instead of the disingenuous “LOL.” Regardless of my own choices in life, I do not mind in the slightest people who do any of these things. However, nothing gets wedged more in my craw (well, my proverbial craw since, being that I’m neither bird nor insect, I do not have a craw) than emoticons.

Not to be melodramatic, but emoticons are the worst things ever. Many a friend has been on the receiving end of my (most likely vodka-fueled) tirade about emoticons. While most people would let this go, I’m going to perpetuate my overblown disdain by spewing out my venomous vociferation into the blogosphere. Maybe I can incite some sort of revolution,
leading me and miscreant group of fellow anti-emoti-comerades to a paramilitary compound in the Montana where we’ll wage some sort of fatwah against those who use this unholy union of letters, symbols, and punctuation marks to convey human feelings.

As I tend to get scattered and incensed over this topic, I think it’s best if I innumerate my qualms with emoticons in an ordered, bulleted list.

• For starters, the portmanteau “emoticon” looks like it should be the name of a character in Transformers. But instead of being something awesome, it ends up being something shitty and lame.
• They do not express emotions, merely retardation.
• NO ONE LOOKS LIKE THAT! If you have two beady eyes, a vertical slit for a nose, and a mouth that extends past where your ears would be then you are Lord Voldemort.
• Typically, they’re just redundant. If you told me your grandmother died a freak, grisly death at the hands of a large carnivore, oil rig explosion, or serial axe-murderer and people ask me how you’re doing, I’m not going to be like “Well he seemed unphased by it but then I saw the colon crying an asterisk together with one parenthesis so he’s probably taking it pretty hard…” 
• When girls use emoticons to be flirty, most times it’s understandable. If you’re a guy and using an emoticon, you better be under the age of 10 or foreign.
• The fact that there are people in the world who make emoticons as their signature basically proves to me that there is no God.
• Much to my chagrin, the “carrot as a nose” has been catching on in popularity this past year.

Example A :

 

:^)                   

Just LOOK at that smug little asshole! Whenever I see this shithead at the end of every text, I don’t think to myself “Oh whoever I’m talking to is trying to indicate happiness.” No, I think “Oh this person I’m talking to has someone morphed into Roger Klotz from Doug.”

•  Much like a tropical-borne disease, emoticons are diffusing out of insipid tween banter and have infected whole other segments of the population. One time, at my old job, my boss ended a memo to me with a wink-face. I think I would have felt less violated had he just groped me as I was reaching for toner, or put a pube in my Coke like Clarence Thomas or something.

Emoticons are meant to show a wide array of emotions, but for me I only feel one emotion: murderous, white-hot rage.Literary giants like Strindberg, Tolstoy, and Austen made their lives fine-tuning linguistic nuances to eloquently and succinctly capture a myriad of impossibly elusive human feelings, and all we can come up with is sentences that look like
they were typed in wingdings more than anything else.

Basically, emoticons can go  :-0 on my 8===D

Grandma’s Dead (but only in Sweden)

I love to learn. Life should be nothing if not didactic. But if you read this and you’re in school, let me tell you that about ten minutes after receiving your diploma all the discipline and methodologies you cultivated in the pursuit of knowledge leaves you and you become this simple mass of organic matter. When your brain is given the opportunity to not think it bungee jumps into an abyss of stupidity (I think this is probably the secret to The E! Network’s success). So I thought I would use my spare time to learn, and I thought it would be best to improve some of my languages. So I decided to go for Swedish. Why did I even learn Swedish in the first place? Well, I studied there in undergrad and fell in love with it. The weather was bitter cold, the people were aloof, quiet, and fashionable… it was like a collection of 9 million me’s. So I enrolled in a basic Swedish course at a local university. Also how could I not pass up this excellent set-up for a Mean Girls reference whenever people say incredulously “You can speak Swedish?” I can reply “Yeah, everyone in Africa can speak Swedish.”

For any polygots in the audience, you can agree with me that there is a time-tested pattern of language pedagogy. You begin with the basic verb “to be” and then expand from there using different themes (on vacation, in a grocery store, taking a trip to your OBGYN’s office, etc) to gain more verbs, vocabulary, and grammar. In a recent lesson we worked on the catch-all theme of family. So we went around the room and talked about our family unit using the vocabulary we knew for introductions  professions, personal descriptors, and numbers.  

So we get to me. Let me just say I say with the utmost humility that I have a pretty solid grasp of the Swedish language compared to my peers (I’ll probably write another post about languages and the various morons characters in my class later on). I say confidently I had a mother and a father and a cat and a grandmother. I tell the class about my parents and my cat, easy breezy. But then it got to my grandmother. My prof asked me her name, what she looked like, and how old she was. I stumbled through the first two questions but then I froze at the age. I wracked my brain for how old she was (I narrowed it down to the decade: the 70’s) but then I totally spaced on the word for the number 70. I hate switching to English because I feel like it’s a cop-out, so in a rash moment I said what I knew how to say.

“Hon är död.” She is dead. 

The teachers hastily expressed his condolences and moved on. But I could not move on. She’s DEAD!? WTF possessed me to say that? Suddenly I became wracked with guilt. What the fuck kind of monster am I!? I was too proud to simply make up some arbitrary  age and ask for the word in English to I casually say my beloved grandmother died when she’s actually alive and well (except for a case of pesky colitis). Jesus Fuck, who DOES THAT!? What if she suddenly keeled over that very minute and then comes back as a vengeful poltergeist hell-bent on ruining my life because of one shithead remark (We’re a very petty and melodramatic family. Our family crest should be that of a griffin holding a grudge.)

The minute class was dismissed I frantically raced back to my home and wrote a long email to my grandmother about my life, how she was doing, and reiterated several times how much I loved her and missed her. I feel relieved, exonerated of the shame I brought upon my family for being suck a cockwit. The next day she replied to my message with an overtly racist email forward about Obama.

All was right with the world once more. 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Proof that there is a God. And that He loves me.

PUMP’N’DUMP

So until I find a real person job (I’m getting good vibes from the year 2080) I juggle three part-time jobs. It sounds like a lot but I only use my brain at one of them, and since I’m always broke it’s like an unemployment-simulation.  Anyway, the latter half of the week I do admin/ temp work at a run-of-the-mill office. One of the quirky things about being a temp is that you constantly face a barrage of awkward encounters. You show up out of the blue one day and people aren’t sure if you’re a new employee, an intern, or maybe that antagonistic roach monster who takes on the form of humans in order to raise an army of zombies, much like that episode in the fifth season of The X-Files. I realize this puts people in an uncomfortable position, so therefore I make it easy for them and act super cagey and antisocial. I scurry around the office performing my remedial tasks like some overgrown house elf. My job involves a lot of shredding, and the shredder is located in a woman’s office space. SIDE NOTE: this woman is probably my favorite person there. She’s a large Caribbean woman whose voice and her laissez-faire work ethic transports me to a tropical island paradise. When I can understand her, we have pretty good conversations. But most of the time she just rambles on and I assume she’s incanting some sort of Santeria curse. Considering her day could be better if she didn’t have to listen to the sound of a shredder (and me singing Bone Thugs-n-Harmony for HOUR because that’s what I do when I shred. Just a habit, really…), I think it’s best if I take the shredder to another room. So I wheel the monolithic structure down the hallway only to find out that it has a bum wheel that emits the LOUDEST, EAR-PIERCINGLY SHRIEKING SOUND EVER. Already drawing more attention to myself than I actually wanted, I decide I’m not going to be able to make it all the way to the other copy room and make a right into the closest unoccupied space. This particular room was called “The Serenity Space” and had a kitchenette and a chaise sofa (or perhaps it’s a settee… actually nvm I have a really lose grasp on whatever either of those things actually are). “What a peaceful, whimsy-free space to shred some docs” I thought to myself.
So I commence the shreddage.
If you, the reader, have never used a shredder before, let me tell you with one false move it can become an ad-hoc celebration with an explosion of innocuous, bland, shredded confetti going everywhere, like you just burst open the lamest piñata of all time. Well, that’s exactly what happened. When unloading the first bag the shredder blew its finely shred load in my face. No point cleaning it up now because it will just happen again, he thinks unwittingly. About an hour and a half into the shredding I go to get more trash bags and I pass a girl in the hallway. SIDE NOTE No. 2: Another bizarre office behavior I’ve noticed is that the ‘smile’ of feigning acknowledgement. You know, when you cross paths with someone in a pseudo-familiar place like the hallway in your apartment building or en route to the make-out closet at a Church of Scientology singles mixer and you have to make some gesture to the other human being. Sso you make this weird cringe-wince that is so forced and unnatural it almost looks like you’re trying to hold in fart but on the precipice of failure. Notice next time, will you?
I Digress. So this girl passes me and two seconds later pipes up:
“Excuse me, are you using this room?”
“Why yes, yes I am,” I reply. Her back stiffens and she looks at me as if I told her something deeply uncomfortable, like how I had my first sexual experience at a 4-H camp.
“Um well this is the lactation room, and there are four women that need this room to pump.” Oh. Oh God. Why is this happening right now? I wanted to crawl under the chaise/ settee and die, but I had to act with a quickness. I started scrambling to remove everything from the room only to discover that all components of this job were varying shades of cumbersome. I had the colossal shredder (which of course made the same banshee howl when I moved it) the bean bag-sized plastic bag of shredded paper, and then of course the teeny tiny bits of residual shredded paper that used this exact moment to atomically bond with the carpet fibers like those fuckin free radicals POM is always trying to convince me exist so I’ll buy their stupid juice. All the while, this girl was still talking:

“You see, it’s a federal requirement that offices with a certain number of women have to have a room specifically designed for pumping. And there are four women who work here currently that use this room to pump. So we’re in and out throughout the day to pump, usually it takes about fifteen to twenty minutes whenever I pump”
Why does she keep using the word “pump”? WHY DOES SHE KEEP USING THE WORD “PUMP”?!
I was still hurriedly trying to pick up individual fucking sprinkles of paper when I realized the process of lactation was a complete mystery to me. Is it something you time out, like “Oh gotta milk at 11 on the dot!” or is it something you respond to, like an inconvenient pee? Just in case it was the latter, I decided to come back and clean the place up later and allow this woman to…. pump ( ugh). I left The Serenity Space as red as a baboon’s ass; just in case the encounter wasn’t mortifying enough I made sure to reflexively leer  at her chest for a few moments before we parted ways.
So on that day I had the double donkey punch of making a complete fool of myself while also ruining any chances I had of turning this into a permanent job. But it did give me the impetus to start a white house petition that all rooms designed for such a purpose should be clearly labeled. I have it narrowed down to the “pump den” or the “titty milk lounge.”

Thoughts?

On Turning A Kajillion Years Old…

Yesterday I turned 25. Which is funny because 25 is my ultimate peg for age. As I used to say “I’m 24 which is almost 25 which is practically 30 which means MY LIFE IS OVER!”

I’ve never been one to invest much into birthdays. I mean I celebrate them because I love the attention, obvi, but I fail to see the need for such pomp and circumstance.
Particularly now that I’m in my twenties and on my own, the day passes
like any other, no more or less mundane than any other day. Perhaps
the decidedly lackluster sentiments towards my day of birth are
because the big mile markers are gone; there’s no longer any legal
significance to my birthdays anymore. I can drink, drive (though not
at the same time), go to war, gamble, vote, see a rated-R movie
without my parents, do all those crazy sexy cool things you so longed
to do at a young age back when they seemed so mysterious and taboo.
Sure, I can now rent a car and not get kicked off my parents insurance
for another year, but the reality is the only thing ahead of me now is
a long, arduous, razor-blade lined road towards my inevitable death
(Old age is making me more maudlin by the hour)

To celebrate my special day my bromander-in-chief cooked me dinner. We
were musing about various topics (as best bros forever are oft wont to
do) and when questioned about how it feels to be 25, I gotta admit
it’s sort of the tits.

25 is the penultimate in-between where people at every age sort of
take you seriously. You’re solidly out of college but still young, so
you can hang with students and re-live your prime party days of
undergrad. However you’re also like a proto-adult and actual adults
start to recognize. It’s also one of the last few years when age
improves your looks and is not something you have to resist. Yes, in
the grand scheme of geologic time, I have it made right now

So I couldn’t decide which exercise in reflections (peak/ pit or that
inane viral questionaire circulating through the facebook) but since
I’m trying to take up space why not do both!

Peak/ Pit
Peak- This year has been a particularly eventful. I finished my
master’s, went to Asia, moved to a city I love, and held the beautiful
daughter of one of my best friends. There was no clear-cut cherry
topping, so I guess that I just have to say that the peak has probably
been inching out into the deep end that is my so-called adult life.

Pit- This has also be a particularly capricious year. It has ebbed and
flowed, peaked and troughed, and the higher I went the longer there
was to fall. I suppose this most recent episode (which I’ve decided to
name the January Funk-adelic) was pretty rough. I was pretty manic and
wallowing in self-pity and loathing, and it was a very unbecoming
state of being. While I’m still feeling a few aftershocks of it, I’ve
been a lot better. And in this wonky way it was sort of a good
experience because it demonstrated to be that when the going gets
tough I’m strong enough to weather it (cue: Survivor by Destiny’s
Child… no really I listened to that song a lot when I was feeling
blue)

MOVING ON
I was given the age 22

I was given the age 22

I lived in: Arch Street, quite possibly the most awesome house with
the most awesomest people on the planet of Earth. Then I moved to
Estonia aka Narnia for, like, no reason whatsoever
I drove: my Honda Element when my mommy said I could (22, ladies and gentlemen)
What I did: mastering my masters
Who had my heart: My senior year BF. And Zachary Quinto, but that’s not confined to
just that age but rather for eternity.
Fears: Drag queens. They’re gay clowns, which is literally my worst nightmare

25
I live in: Max City, bitch Max Max City, Bitch
I drive: the Twerkulator
I am: Triparttime
Who has my heart? NO ONE, THANKS FOR BRINGING IT UP YOU PIECE OF SHIT SURVEY
Fears: Still drag queens.