September 2009
2 posts
Nosy neighbors
Madonna and Ellen DeGeneres were at the same awards show and were talking to each other on the red carpet about how they were both wearing panty liners. Madonna asked Ellen where she bought hers, and Ellen said Linens ‘N Things. “Me too!” said Madonna. Then she bent down and sniffed Ellen’s crotch and said, “Wait, no you didn’t. You bought it from Job...
Not passing
I was in Oberlin. I was standing on the side of Wilder Bowl watching all the students walk by and being amazed at how I didn’t recognize any of them, either as individuals or as types.
A professor I used to know, who for some reason looked just like an archeologist in Rhode Island who my father works with sometimes and is friends with, came up to me and asked me if I could help him move a...
July 2009
5 posts
Nationalism
When I left my therapy session I accidentally took my therapist’s notebook home with me. I knew I shouldn’t, but I read what he had written about me during the session. He wrote that my response to my situation was to struggle to create a pure, national music. He thought that this reaction made sense but was futile.
I was really startled and angry to learn that he had misinterpreted...
Advice
I was about to get a nose job. I was sitting on concrete steps with Chris and people walked by occasionally and asked me what my new nose was going to look like, and when I said I didn’t know yet they would give me advice on what they thought it should be. The guy who used to DJ Strangeways at the Green Room (the guy with long hair and plugs, not the short stocky one) had his nose all...
Something isn't everything's nice
I was substituting in an elementary school and all the kids could talk about was a new pop singer they all loved, whose name was Emma. I couldn’t stand her, and thought she was a revival of all of the worst elements of the early nineties. So I took it upon myself to teach the kids about good music.
I started to say “So, if Emma’s supposed to be so special…” but got...
Complications
Scraps died of complications from his stroke* and almost half of the comments on the blog post where I found out were spam.
When I got out of bed I noticed for the first time that something was written in the dust on my wall. It started with my initials, EMR, but I couldn’t quite get the right angle to make sense of what the rest said. I had a strong feeling it was insulting.
*Breaking...
Three-pointer
Chris had one of those talking basketball hoop games, and he was playing it. He had it mic’d, and he was putting the sound through a series of effects pedals until it transformed into a really beautiful, high-pitched, ethereal kind of grinding noise that was going in and out of audibility every ten seconds or so. We could still hear the original, unaltered noises of the game, and they...
June 2009
7 posts
Sexy
I was watching a documentary with a female friend who looked kind of like Elaine Bennis but didn’t act anything like her. She said racism was disgusting but kind of a turn-on. She was very emphatic about it and kept calling it sexy. It was very hard for me to stomach. All the mail at work had half dollar-sized holes through it.
Speech
Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech:
“Let it be known upon every hill: that we are all Americans, and bemoan the power, that there is no evil.”
I tried very hard to understand why he would say that, but it sounded to me like he had lost it.
Figured it out
I was in the bathroom cutting the back of my head with the clippers. I told Chris happily that I had finally figured out how to do it. I had trouble before with the mirror. There was way too much hair on the floor, and it wasn’t my color.
Newman!
I was watching an episode of Seinfeld from the Season 3 set I just bought. It was an episode Newman was in. I was surprised that his character was introduced so early on.
Shave
I didn’t want to but I couldn’t stop shaving my beard off. I kept cutting myself because I was crying so my face was all screwed up and I couldn’t see clearly. When I was done I looked in the mirror and was really startled to see that under the beard I had on clown makeup.
Crash
I went to A Tiny Revolution and found that there had been dozens and dozens of new posts since the last time I read it. I opened each one in a new window and my browser crashed.
Product placement
There was a man with a bunch of batteries strapped around his stomach. I was afraid that people would think it was a bomb, but no one did. I knew it was safe because they were the same brand of rechargeable AAA batteries I use in my mp3 player.
May 2009
11 posts
No one knew it was May
My job sent me on a work-related trip to New York City with a bunch of other people I had never seen before, all of whom were really hot boys that I wanted to fuck. The only exception to that was that one of them was my brother. We all stayed in a hostel, three or four to a room, and that night as we were going to bed I knew that my roommates would be totally into an orgy if I just got things...
Airlock
When I got into work the other two people who work in the same room as me weren’t there yet, so the door to the office was closed and locked. I looked around for someone to let me in, and eventually found Orlando, the janitor, and asked him to do it for me. He came, along with a young, very attractive assistant who I had never seen before. I didn’t catch his name. They had the key,...
Model train set
I was moving into a college dorm at some college in North Adams. The dorm looked just like East Hall at Oberlin. I was moving in at the beginning of the summer, at the same time as the RAs were all moving in, months ahead of the other students. I myself was not going to be a student at the college, but I stll had to take a chemistry exam that I kept forgetting about and was completely unprepared...
Fighting teenagers
Someone came over and I interviewed him about being a new tenant in the apartment. I don’t know why it was me interviewing him, since I’m moving out, but I was. The guy was really disgustingly twinky-looking, and he had a terrible hairdo that looked halfway between James Brown and a mass of wilted brown seaweed. The interview ended up being mostly about the new Star Trek movie, which...
Stitches
Chris had an inch-wide swath of stitches running from the bottom of the front of his chin to just above his clavicle. I didn’t know why and I didn’t know what to do or say.
Chair dancing
Kerry and I were at a family reunion together, because we were related. My cousin’s husband Seth asked us to bring out chairs for people to sit in, and then went to announce that we were doing that, but he misspoke and said we were going to be doing some chair dancing. Some people gasped, and a grandmother who was neither of my grandmothers said she didn’t want that.
By way of...
Should I change my seat?
“I just remembered that when I was twelve I stabilized a CPU,” I announced. No one answered, so I said, quietly, “I’m just proud of myself.”
Then I was on the bus. Sitting across the aisle from me was this really ugly, snivelly middle-aged gay guy named Jerry who I worked with briefly at the temp job before my current one. I was trying to ignore him because for one...
Not far off from everyday real life
I was reading all the blogs I read regularly. I don’t remember what they all said, but I remember there was a comment thread on a post Bernard had made at A Tiny Revolution that had been taken over by pro-American Empire trolls, and Bernard made a comment that it was a “Septic thread for a nation in sepsis”. Then I went to io9 and there was a headline that read “Demons...
Lost it
All I remember is that someone came up with an idea for a comedy sketch about Granny G.
A design for life
I was talking to Brandon in my bedroom. He was telling me that his brother was in a band and that they said their biggest influence was the Manic Street Preachers, so he (Brandon) had been listening to them a lot and didn’t like them. He was making fun of them, but I don’t remember exactly how. I said that I thought they were wimpier than they should have been, and pretty boringly...
Ixodes
I discovered that the backs of my legs were covered in ticks and probably had been for quite some time. The ticks looked like small raised black bumps in the flesh covered by a thin layer of skin, and to take them off you had to peel back the skin and then try to really quickly swipe the tick out of the hole it had made. Each one left behind tiny gouges that I was worried would never heal. I...