MSN:
It’s been around for thirteen years. You morons. The article’s fairly interesting, though. The Department of Defense: Your unlikely ally in the fight for standards compliance!
Category: Obsessions
Warning: You might think this is a little gross.
I spent a lot of time outdoors in the woods this past weekend, and only discovered Monday night the wealth of bug bites this had bestowed upon me. Naturally, they were all in (shall we say) a couple of delicate, sensitive and well-covered areas. Like right under my socks.
“Ah,” I thought, “bug bites. Fortunately I don’t scratch bug bites, because I have willpower!”
I believed that, too. What I didn’t count on was all the walking and bicycling and shoe-wearing I get to do in the summer, and the fact that I have to dress up for work now. By the time I got home last night, I was no longer mentally fit to stand trial. Black socks get hot, and they chafe.
At last, I tore off the beastly things and went at my ankles like a crazed badger. It was glorious, ecstatic, full-body pleasure; it was sex with a thousand Claires. I have no regrets.
I’m paying for it now, of course, but I have willpower again. I know I can resist. And most importantly, today I’m wearing white socks.
Scary, Scary Text Ad
Man, I wish somebody had told me.
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Brendan: |
I need a journal entry for tonight so I don’t have a blank spot in my calendar. Give me an idea. |
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Maria |
Um… I don’t know? This is why I don’t have a journal. |
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Brendan: |
But you should! |
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M: |
If I had a journal it would be made up of random snippets of conversation. Out of context. |
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B: |
You’d have a quote log! |
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M: |
I think quote logs are supposed to be funny. |
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B: |
I just got an email from Mindy. I was hoping it was from my friend Mindy, but no. |
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M: |
No? |
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B: |
No, this is more “Girls In Heat Playing With Horse Studs.” |
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M: |
Maybe Mindy is trying to give you a message. |
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B: |
I’m so putting that in my journal. |
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M: |
No! Don’t! |
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B: |
*click* |
MSN:
50 Cent touts new duds
Who the hell says “touts” or “duds?” Headlinese is so far removed from English now. You should get a foreign language credit if you take journalism in high school.
There are a number of lyrical, rhythmic and tonal cheap tricks employed in pop music for which I am an absolute sucker. I started a list of those earlier this year, and eventually I’ll write an entry on it too. One of the most specific and fun to talk about, though, is hip-hop songs that define their own terms. They’re great! They’re extremely helpful to geeky white people like myself–you’re given a new cool slang term, and immediately know its usage and basic etymology–and moreover, they’re completely happy and unself-conscious about it. I think Radiohead would have a lot more fun if they took a few pages from the same book.
I first noticed the phenomenon quite some time ago, but I was holding off on writing about it until I had three examples I could remember all at the same time. Last night, Maria inadvertently provided the third, and they are as follows:
- Nelly’s “Pimp Juice:” “She likes my pimp juice! Pimp juice is anything attract the opposite sex.”
- Alicia Keys’s “Girlfriend:” “I think I’m jealous of your girlfriend, although she’s just a girl that is your friend.”
- and the granddaddy, TLC’s “No Scrubs:” “I don’t want no scrubs. A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me–hanging out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride, trying to holler at me.”
When I told Jon about this, months ago, he immediately suggested that we start putting our own terms into general parlance via Rhythm Method songs, then created the first one on the spot: “She like mah mantelpiece! The mantelpiece is the bulge in the front of your pants.”
If anybody knows more of these, drop them off. With a little thought we could have our very own Rap Dictionary.
Today is the day I plug Mindy in the blog. Mindy Mindy Mindy! Mindy is a frosher, only she’s not because the year is over, only she still IS because that’s who she is in my head. And yes, Mindy reads this and wanted to be name-checked like Emily and Strother and whoever else. Congratulations, Mindy: approximately five more people have now read your name.
What I really (still) want is for all my friends to get blogs, or Livejournals, or their own sites, or something. The presence of my crew on the interweb is disappointingly low. I want to check in on them and read about their love lives and be fascinated by the way they think, especially when I’m exiled to Richmond, but they stubbornly persist in their absence. Get blogs, all of you! I promise to link you if you do!
Oh, that means I should talk about Sara. Sara is a (former) frosher with a blog! You could all take a page from her cyber-book, other friends.
I’m still going through the sum of all my belongings, sorting and repacking things for the great exodus to Louisville, and yesterday I found three items of interest. The first is a piece of paper from last summer, on which is scrawled the following:
If I die, and somebody goes to a vanity press or something and has a posthumous collection of my work published, and it’s not called Destroy the Evidence, I shall be very angry and want an explanation.
And you know, it’s still true.
The second was the package of pictures I took in Brazil, all twelve of them. It’s very strange to me that it’s been four years since I was there. I slept on a mattress one inch thick in the same room as Tiago, the world’s biggest Goons and Hoses fan, and ate a lot of beans and rice and lost probably thirty pounds. I started watching Dawson’s Creek for the first time, and was surprised to find that I liked it, and pined for home and Erika too much.
I had an incredibly sweet host sister named Joana, who tried to reach out to me any way she could: we played Quake II together, and she introduced me to cocoa in condensed milk. I saw a giant Jesus and many, many streetside orange vendors. I went to Mass with my host grandmother, who spoke no English at all but who smiled and patted my hand the way my own grandmother would have. I took showers that froze me, burned me and gave me some nasty electric shocks.
Along with the blue acrylic painting I bought at an art fair (still one of my favorite possessions), those pictures are the only souvenirs I still have from Brazil. The Rio pin I used to have was lost with my first bucket hat, fall term of my first year at Centre; I think the futbol calendar Tiago gave me is packed away somewhere in the attic, probably for a long time. It was a very self-centered time for me, and I wish now that it had been otherwise. I should have learned some Portuguese, I should have thrown myself into life there instead of trying to live here in my head, and I should definitely have played less Pokemon.
No regrets, though. I Went There, and I Came Back.
The third thing will have to wait, probably for quite a while, as I want to make it a part of this site and I’m going to have to write some code to do it. Right now I have to lug bags of potato chips over to Emily R’s house for a pre-Chicago Trip meeting. My life is filled with travel.
I went with Jon, Amanda, Amanda’s sister Kelly and the one and only Artdrey to a Legends game on Friday, then to see Spirited Away on Sunday, and in between…
There are apparently a lot of Beaux Arts Balls thrown by architecture departments all over the country, but the one in Lexington is the biggest, or so they tell me. People put on costumes and go underground and get physically rearranged by the music, and then there’s girls in fashion… things, and after that there are guys who are pretending to be girls.
I’d never been to a drag show before (although I have watched To Wong Foo several times), but I wasn’t really surprised. There were a couple of ladies who were definitely men, and then there was one who was fairly androgynous, and then… there was Jenna.
Jenna was beautiful.
Jenna is my soulmate.
Jenna, if you’re out there, know that I’m out here too, and no, I’m not single, but dammit I could be.
Next topic! I should emphasize more that this was a costume party, as in Halloween costumes, only in April, so with more skin. There were some intricate and pretty ones there, and then the size-over-intricacy ones (meet Mister Pez Dispenser!) and then there were just people out to make their fetishes public.
I came to the conclusion, that night, that costume parties exist to let people show off the way they really want other people to see them. The dude with the tux and the wolf mask wants to sweep you away; the girl with the angel wings and garter belt wants to be touched and untouchable; the guy with that much metal in his face… he’s just doin’ his thing, man.
So if this is the case, I find it terribly appropriate that Audrey and I wore brightly colored rayon old-person jogging suits. They were worth more than a few compliments from other partygoers, and they were the most comfortable things I’ve ever had the eye-grinding displeasure of wearing–the Secret of the Mallwalkers! They were also two terribly comfortable outfits on two terribly comfortable personalities. Even if, um, they did hurt to look at. The analogy breaks down there, I guess.
Part of me wanted to come back in jewelry and a big hat and my soon-to-be patchy pants, sure, but mostly I just had a great time in an elastic waistband, hovering next to my girl and being lifted bodily by the bass. Times that great in pants that swishy are few and far between.
(I’d like to cap off this entry by talking about Spirited Away, but really, can I say anything that hasn’t been said?)
Back from a whole, whole lot of driving (or, technically, riding). I’ve played cards and doodled and finally bought the third Sandman book and now am trying to think of things to amuse a sinus-infected Audrey. This is not to say that the sinusly infected aren’t easily amused–she’s currently zoning out at the fake wood grain on my desk–but rather that thinking of things to amuse her helps make me feel useful in the face of illness. I hate it when people are sick.
And speaking of that, I should really quit talking about “somebody” and talk about Maria, who was the person about whom I was worried and who turned out fine after all. She goes to Brown and she’s one of my best friends in the world, and now you, true believer, will have a reference for when I mention her.
I can’t do what I’d like to do, of course, and mention her name with a link to her blog, because she doesn’t have a blog. Why do so few of my friends have convenient blogs? Get a blog, Maria!
For the perceived length of this spring break, I really don’t have much other news, except this: dream school Carnegie Mellon said yes to me but no to any kind of financial support, which essentially means saying no to me, as I don’t think I’m legally permitted to Stafford-borrow as much as it would cost to go there. Still, it feels good to know that I could be there, in another life. Maybe there’s another Brendan in potentiality who software engineered himself right through Pittsburgh and into Blizzard after all.
And maybe he got smashed by a pig truck. You know, it really doesn’t do any good to speculate.