You suck, Hollywood Video guy
Did you really think that you could get away with leaving a sign on the door saying “Back in 15 minutes” when it is pouring down rain and I want to rent a movie WITHOUT ME CALLING YOU OUT ON MY BLOG?
An incident in the women’s bathroom
Tonight I had my fiction class at UVA. It was great, as usual, but I was drinking a forty of Hurricane during workshop and consequently had to take frequent trips to the restroom. It was actually a twenty of Diet Doctor Pepper. I was alone in the restroom when I heard a very loud pair of shoes barge in and loiter in front of my stall door, where I was actively urinating. The hinges on the door allowed for a lot of peeping space, and I nervously ducked down because the intruder was obviously checking me out through the cracks. Then the person went into the stall next to mine. I saw white tennis shoes and socks facing the toilet under the division. I heard a male voice murmuring to the bowl, but no liquid or flush, and then suddenly the person stomped out without washing his hands. The whole incident took less than half a minute. I tried to finish up quickly so I could catch the culprit, but DDP creates a long stream. A female classmate entered the bathroom as I was exiting the stall, feeling very violated.
“Did you see someone leaving?” I said. “I think a man was just in here.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I think it was___(another classmate). He was in here last week too.”
I furiously washed my hands and returned to the classroom, where __’s complacent white tennis shoes confirmed my suspicions. Not wanting to embarrass the guy, but also really wanting to embarrass him, I said, “Hey __. Were you just in the women’s bathroom?”
“Oh, was I?” he said, unapologetically. “Yeah maybe. I get them mixed up all the time.” Evidently the little skirt on the bathroom door says nothing to this guy except “Lift me up.”
My triumphant Halloween costume
Yes, I have a Halloween costume this year. And yes, it’s a miracle of being clever without being pretentious. And yes, you will probably need a visual aide to understand what I am, but I will have this visual aide on hand for when you compliment my outfit. I remember a Halloween party I attended once where a graduate student wore a noose around his neck and a name-tag that said “Chad.” He was a “hanging chad.” I was like “Gimme a break, asshole.” Anyway my costume is awesome this year and I’m not even showing skin. Please invite me to your party so I can gloat about how adorable I look.
Head count of naked children
I’m very grateful to Little Babushka for chronicling Sunday’s epic birthday party so I wouldn’t have to. For me, leaving the party was like waking up from a wonderful, but equally intricate and exhausting dream. I could have written down the dream, but I was still in a fugue state and didn’t think I could make any literary sense out of it. So thank you, LB, for putting words to the madcap house of mirrors that was the Insolent Child’s third birthday party.
Editor for Hire
I wish that I could hire myself as an editor, but I am much better at telling other people what to do. It’s hard to detach myself from my own writing. That being said, I have a lot of editing experience, and I’d love to help you get your book published.
Gay superheroes
This is what happens when you dare to be gay in comic books.
PS I didn’t know Batwoman was a lesbian. Corey – want to weigh in on this?
Weekly news roundup, stolen from Harper’s via Boing Boing
James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of DNA, said that while he wishes everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” Lynn Cheney announced that her husband and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. “Every family,” said the Obama campaign, “has a black sheep.” A New York man was arrested after wearing a stolen Rolex watch to his parole meeting,an Ohio woman stood accused of digging up her ex-boyfriend’s grave and stealing his ashes, and a Virginia woman was fined for attacking a Comcast store with a hammer after the company cut off her phone and Internet connections. ”I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor and I went to hit the telephone,” she said. ”I figured, ‘Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.”’ A New Jersey woman sent 80,000 cans of Silly String, which can locate trip wires, to U.S. troops in Iraq; a military spokesperson thanked her but admitted that soldiers don’t use as much Silly String today as they did at the beginning of the war. Forty-nine percent of New Jersey residents admitted they’d rather live somewhere else. Taku the killer whale died unexpectedly at the San Antonio SeaWorld, 5 of the world’s 350 remaining Asiatic Lions were found dead next to an electric fence in India, and the curator of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum asked the public to donate pubic crabs, claiming that their population was dwindling as a result of Brazilian waxes. ”When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction. Pubic lice,“ he explained, ”can’t live without pubic hair.”
How dare the world make me write about government spending?
Isn’t the whole point of a bureaucracy to keep this stuff from happening? I never thought I was very good at math, but perhaps I could have had a career as a government accountant. It’s just play money anyway. I feel like government officials and heads of state must have some real currency that they don’t tell us about. We’re all chumps for trading goods and services for paper dollars, while they know that only glass beads or cinnamon or something has true value. Why else would they offer a trillion bucks for Baltic Avenue?
The U.S. State Department is unable to account for most of $1.2 billion in funding that it gave to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police, a government report said Tuesday.
“The bottom line is that State can’t account for where it went,” said Glenn D. Furbish.
Of course it can’t. This reminds me why I like to take my car when Darren and I go to appointments together. Loose change always falls from his right pocket into the space between the passenger seat and the car door. On Saturday Big Wis and I were excited to find three quarters there before we went to the park.
Something beautiful I read today
From Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson:
Leon Sanchez asked, “Are the women in with you madre, Fish-man?”
“My name Fiskadoro.” He was aware that mucus flowed from his nostrils, but he felt he would demean himself by wiping it away. “My father is dead.”
The others nodded. Harvard gouged a depression in the sand with his toes and placed his heel in it.
“My father is dead!” As soon as he’d said it, Fiskadoro saw he’d made it true again – again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn’t simple. It wasn’t one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person’s life was to drink it.