Bizzybiz Blog

You'd Think They'd Have Learned To Stop Asking Me Questions By Now

2012-01-27T16:40:00.000-06:00

The day before this conversation I had been accused of walking around the office with a shit eating grin on my face after I'd had a very nice chat with a boy.

The CEO: Are we still giddy today?

Me (giggling like a complete jackass): Yes.

The CEO (to BrownsFan): I hate it when she gets new ones.

You Can't Argue With This Logic

2012-01-27T15:10:00.000-06:00

Mrs. Sizemore: Wand of truth?

me: yes, the wand never lies

Mrs. Sizemore: Oh?

me: never. it never lies. if you wave the wand the truth will be revealed

Mrs. Sizemore: Have you tested this?

me: wand of truth says "not exactly"
SEE?
IT NEVER LIES

Mrs. Sizemore: Hahaha

Having A Social Life Makes It Really Hard To Blog Sometimes

2012-01-27T14:52:00.002-06:00

I was told this morning by StereoNinja that I am being a shitty blogger in 2012 so far. Which I know, but see, there's this thing where I'm busy at my job and travelling and other excuses both legit and complete and utter bullshit. One of them is that I went on an epic trip to Austin last weekend. And I really want to tell you all about it, but chronologically it doesn't make sense if I skip over all of December and my birthday. Also, personally it doesn't make sense either. I have never skipped December or my birthday, they are my favorite things. So herein I will attempt to briefly recap the last month and a half so that in the next post I can describe the most epic reunion of my entire life. Cool? Cool.

A Brief Recap of What Amberance Has Been Up To Since Early December, Minus The Parts That Are None of Your Business and You Don't Want to Know About Anyway (Trust Me)

On December 10th, as advertised, I walked onto a stage at Martyr's with 16 other women and took off all my clothes in front of hundreds of strangers and it. was. AWESOME. Despite it being oddly disconcerting to be walking around in a bar all night in a nightie and a robe while everyone else around me was dressed, but whatever. The show on the whole was excellent. The girls graduating were amazingly talented and creative and their acts included a girl who stripped to the Imperial March as Darth Vader and left the mask on the entire time, two girls who did a number together to Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive" in which one of them was the cowboy and the other one was her horse, and a girl who according to Michelle L'Amour said that she wanted to do a number in which "I do all of the things you always tell us we should never do", and so did a completely disinterested strip tease dressed in a ratty house coat with her hair a complete mess and a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, then finished with taking her bra off to reveal another flesh colored bra underneath to which she had sewn baggy tits that hung down to her knees and when she couldn't get the nipple tassels to twirl she just picked them up in her hand with a shrug and juggled them. It was the most hilarious strip tease I have ever seen.
The bartender bought me an auto hammer for Christmas and I was filled with joy. I am a tool for tools. And puns.
The next day I flew to Cleveland for two days because something is seriously wrong with me. I packed a backpack for the trip. My brother had also come to town, for four days, and had brought three huge suitcases and a garment bag, prompting me to ask my dad if it was weird for him that his son is his daughter and his daughter is his son (I did, after all, get an auto hammer for Christmas).
I saw my brother again the following weekend when he came to town for the annual New Year's Eve party thrown by some friends of ours. My loving brother greeted me with a loud "Fuck you," when I walked in, due to my having worn an amazing tank top with chains and tiny handcuffs for straps that everybody but him loved, including all the women who were pregnant which was ALL OF THEM.
The following week we had our work holiday party, to which I took the gorilla after giving me his word that he would behave himself. I shouldn't have worried, he was absolutely fine. It was me and my coworkers who were out of control, but it wasn't our fault - someone had brought a Shake Weight to the gift exchange which we were inappropriate about, and then we were under the minimum for the contract we'd signed, so the obvious thing to do was to order lots more booze which led to me teaching everyone how to twirl nipple tassels and shouting "It's PHYSICS" at everyone who tried to object.
The following Monday I flew to Portland and didn't even try to kill my boss once!
Which leads us to my Amber's Super Ultra Fantabulous Birthtacular Celebration Extravaganza: Now With MORE KELLY! weekend. This did not start out well. El Nino or whatever the hell the weather is doing had kept things pleasantly warm and dry in Chicago this winter, right up until the night of my birthday when it decided to drop 8 inches of snow on us overnight. This meant that only Charlie and Mrs. Sizemore showed up to my party at Tai's and got to see my Epic Cake which depicted me in not a whole lot of clothing.
So hot it is literally on fire.
This gave me the opportunity, after we had partially eaten it, to yell "WHO IS GOING TO EAT MY CROTCH?" at some innocent strangers for a totally legitimate reason. Earlier in the day, I had taken my pink princess wand to work with me in order to command people to do my bidding, such as wear hats and sing to me, and had ended up using it help my co-worker figure out what NOT to get his wife for her birthday by waving it at him after every suggestion and saying "No, that's stupid." Because of this, I decided to name it the Wand of Truth and then brought it to the bar and had a duel with the bartender and his magic wand because his Schwartz was as big as mine. The next day, Kelly and Mike showed up and we spent the weekend playing Pulse on our respective iPads and eating/drinking our faces off. Kelly ate some caterpillars. Lots more awesome things happened, but that is the thing that stands out - Kelly eating her way through a plate of caterpillars at Sticky Rice.

So that about brings us up to speed, and though I've missed some major things out (see bolded header), I feel better about blogging the Epic Austin Trip. Which I will do shortly to avoid further admonishments from StereoNinja. You don't want to piss off a ninja*.

*he is not a real ninja**.
*OR IS HE?

U-S-A! U-S-A!

2012-01-04T12:52:00.000-06:00

My Google Chat status read "amberica" this morning. H-Town noticed and changed hers to "God Bless Amberica". And then this happened:

me: lol
i was talking to one of my english friends yesterday who is going to be in the u.s. soon
and he said it would be weird not seeing me because "america = amber"

H-Town: haha
i have to say, if everyone viewed "america = amber", then the world would be a much better place

me: if by better you mean whorier

H-Town: well duh

god bless amberica
whorrre that i lovvvee
stand astride her
and ride her
from the bed, to the floor, to the porch
from her "mountains"
to her "prairie"
to her CENSORED, white with foooooam!
godddd bless amberica, my ho sweeeet hooooooo
godddddd bless amberica
my hoooo, sweeet hooo

flag unfurls

eagle cries

terrorists worldwide surrender

me: oh my god i can't even breathe right now

H-Town: haha
i'm pretty sure francis scott key wrote the original of this right after he wrote the whore-spangled banner

Next Time I'll Just Ask For A Beer

2011-12-20T15:52:00.000-06:00

Most people are amused by my lack of sophistication in regards to wine. Most, but not all. To wit:

StereoNinja*: Do you want some wine?

Me: Sure

StereoNinja: OK, white or red?

Me: Whichever one tastes the most like candy.

StereoNinja: Neither, this is not fucking sangria.

*StereoNinja, like MrBalls, is a blog name that is barely (if at all) related to the person it is meant to indicate, due mainly to the fact that I decided to post something about him at a time when he was unavailable to discuss what he'd like to be called. I googled "bad fake superhero names" and this is what I got. He is not an actual ninja**. Or a stereo.

**OR IS HE?

More Holiday Earhole Joyousness

2011-12-16T15:00:00.041-06:00

I haven't been feeling well at all lately, and that is the excuse I am using for backdating this post to Friday when I'm actually sitting here writing it on Tuesday. It's not because I forgot to do it until just now. Nope. Not at all. Behold, your funny/cheesy/classic Christmas songs that don't suck of the week:

Rudolph and Gang - "Here Comes Fatty Claus": I have no idea whether this is a real band or a made up one just for the sake of this song, but googling it seems to indicate the latter. The only place I have ever seen it is on the John Waters Christmas album, and you should probably just go ahead and buy the whole thing because John Waters picked all the songs, which virtually guarantees there's something slightly insane about all of them. If that doesn't sell it, then let me inform you that the first line of this song is "Here comes fatty with his sack of shit". Yeah, thought so.

Chris Isaac - "Christmas on TV": Ok, this isn't exactly a cheesy song, but I am categorizing it as such because I got yelled at last month for owning anything by Chris Isaac at all (suck it, Simon). It does start out as a cheesy song (a guy missing his lady on Christmas because she's far away) but somewhere in the middle it takes a hard left turn and becomes one of the most depressing Christmas songs I've ever heard (it's his ex-wife and she's really just around the corner living in his old house with her rich new boyfriend). And since I am a horrible person it makes me laugh every time.

The Beach Boys - "Little Saint Nick": You know you love it. Stop pretending like you don't. No one is fooled.

40 Days Friday Music Update

2011-12-09T19:19:00.034-06:00

Ok, so I was so wrapped up in my public nudity event, I completely forgot to blog y'all some holiday music on Friday, so I'm going to cheat and backdate this post I'm writing to Friday (it's Monday night) and also meet the funny song/cheesy song/classic song criteria all in one song because I'm too lazy to pick three songs out. So here it is:

"Santa Claus and His Old Lady" - Cheech and Chong: My dad has very one dimensional taste in music. As in the only band he likes is Led Zeppelin, much to the chagrin of my step mother. In fact, there's only two songs I've ever heard him listen to on purpose that aren't Led Zeppelin songs: Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" on Thanksgiving, and "Santa Claus and His Old Lady" at Christmas time. This is a stoner Christmas masterpiece (such a stoner masterpiece that I'm suddenly wondering why he let us listen to this all the time when we were little). Recession, repression - it's all the same thing, man.

This Is A Totally Normal Conversation In My World

2011-12-07T19:38:00.000-06:00

The gorilla texted me in the middle of the fucking night on Monday to find out what I was doing this week.

Me: Just now realizing I forgot to respond to your text because I was half asleep when I got it. Pretty busy doing things involving nail polish and nipple tape from now until showtime on Saturday night. Next week I should be less busy, other than adding MORE TREES to my dwelling.

The gorilla: How can I not buy into the "nipple tape" excuse?
Of course, I am off to zee Germany next Monday evening, and will gone some days...but I will make something work. I want a tour of the Christmas forest.

Me: Forest will be up at least until the new year, no worries.
Nipple tape - for the discerning stripper who's not quite ready to go full frontal.

Once Again, Here's Some Stuff To Listen To

2011-12-02T16:17:00.000-06:00

It's Friday, and therefore time for another installment of holiday tunage you (probably) won't hate. I'll follow my funny song/cheesy song/modern classic format that I just realized I accidentally set forth in the first two posts.

The Clydesdale - "Imo Shoot Me A Reindeer": The Clydesdale is an alt country/rockabilly band based in Las Vegas, and this song can be found on the absolute masterpiece of a compilation MERRY X-MAS DAMMIT From The Double Down Saloon. It is far and away my favorite Christmas song to sing. As if the rest of the song isn't good enough, the interlude in the middle of it when the singer's neighbor asks her "What in the name of my beer can Christmas tree do you think you're about to do over there with that rifle?" really sells it.

They Might Be Giants - "Santa's Beard": I love TMBG so suck it. This is classic Giants, in true Giants style. Originally on their second album Lincoln from 1988, it can also be found on their Christmas EP, Holidayland.

The Ramones - "Merry Christmas (I Don't Wanna Fight Tonight)": The Ramones, I said. Own it or you're stupid.

Amber And Heather: Food "Lovers"

2011-12-02T15:30:00.000-06:00

H-town: i have no motivation left today

me: yeah, i feel you dawg

H-town: if you worked in DC, we could just leave and go drink a beer

me: totes. or if you worked in chicago

H-town: mm hmm

me: beer...and tacos. TACOS

H-town: i had a huge burrito for lunch
chipotle, she is my weakness

me: she is a cruel mistress
who can resist the lime cilantro rice? who?

H-town: those 30lb burritos! OH!

me: i want to say no, but every time she holds her finger to my lips and says "sshhhhh, no one has to know. let me show you what i can do with my sour cream."

H-town: HAHAHAHA
for me, it's the guac that costs $2 extra
"Sshhhhh, you'll want me."

me: it's like, at that point you've already fucked it all up. you might as well go all in

H-town: yup

Or Too Early To Help With The Next One?

2011-12-02T13:02:00.000-06:00

The mutineer (on his Facebook status): .... FUCK. I dont remember how I got home last night.

Me: Well done, sir.

One hour later

The mutineer: I just woke up... again. I have a boner and I think im still drunk
did i just say that out loud?

Me: No, you typed it. With one hand, I assume.

Four hours later

Friend of the mutineer: I appear to have come across this conversation four hours too late

The mutineer: It's not too late for your input, [friend] ;-)

Me: probably too late to help with the boner situation though.

Day 30 And We Made It, Dammit, We Made It

2011-11-30T12:39:00.106-06:00

I would like to have written something brilliantly profound or hilarious for the last day of NaBloPoMo, but unfortunately I went to Victoria's Secret at lunch because I needed a nice nightie and robe for my show.

I don't know if it's like this at every Victoria's Secret, but the one on Michigan Avenue has some crazy-attentive sales associates. Five, count them, FIVE different people came up to me inside the first five minutes I was there. It was an insane parade of helpfulness that was not helpful at all. "Zomigod, hi! Welcome to Victoria's Secret! Can I help you find something? Did you know this whole thing right here is on sale? Do you know what size you are? I can totally measure your boobs right now in the middle of the store! We have a new perfume! All of our whatever-the-shit collection is buy two get one free! Do you want to get discounts in your e-mail because we will totally send you coupons! How about a new bra? Do you need a new bra? Because we TOTALLY sell bras here!" The thing they all seemed the most excited about was this t-shirt* they were "giving" away: "If you spend $75 in the store today you get this free t-shirt THAT PREMIERED AT OUR FASHION SHOW!" Four out of five helpful associates pointed this out. I ended up getting one because let's face it, you buy a lipstick in there it's going to cost you $75. It is awful. It is some kind of slate color and has metallic/sparkly writing on it that says something like "HOLY FUCK WE HAD A FASHION SHOW AGAIN". It's as thin as a piece of paper, has a seam up the middle of the back (ok I don't know a lot about clothes, but I do know that is not how you sew a t-shirt) and they only had mediums left, which is interesting because the medium could fit on an elephant.

I came back to the office and rushed into BrownsFan's office to show her my new underpants (as I'm sure you do with coworkers at your job, right?) and also try to pawn off the train wreck of a shirt on her. She didn't bite, though she did sit there helping me make fun of it and pointing out other problems with it I hadn't even noticed, like how the neck is all stretched out weird and it has some sort of bizarre flap hanging down in the back. And that is when she showed me the link to the fine gentlemen over at Project Rungay who have kindly reviewed the Victoria's Secret Fashion show, starting with the brilliant line "Your heterosexual mating rituals are just so darn hilarious and confusing to us." This entire blog post is really just a set up to the link for their two part review, which you can find here and here. Enjoy.

Thus ends NaBloPoMo 2011.

Fin.
*I wanted to put a link here to this absolute piece of shit of a shirt, but I can't find it on the VS website anywhere, not even under "Supermodel Essentials", a heading that pissed me off in a major way, in large part because it's a bunch of fucking sweatpants. In fact, the whole website seems like it's designed to make me angry. There's a section called "Very Sexy Seduction" which I guess is as opposed to the other kind of seduction that isn't sexy at all. Also, underneath a giant banner ad for free slippers is a note that reads "Watch the supermodel slipper video, then meet the matching pajamas" (emphasis mine). Meet them? MEET the pajamas? Oh my god, go fuck yourself, I am not watching a video of goddamn slippers and I certainly don't want to have a fucking conversation with any pajamas. What is wrong with you, seriously?

UPDATE: BrownsFan read that I couldn't find the shirt on the website and thought to herself "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!" It's this one, except mine is grey rather than black. This piece of crap apparently retails for 45 real fucking American dollars. They have got to be kidding.

Day 29 And I'm A Star! (A Little)

2011-11-29T23:17:00.000-06:00

I'm just now back from dance rehersal for the group burlesque number at the student show at Martyr's on December 10th and I am very excited about it, despite the fact that everything hurts right now because double rehersals suck bowls full of dick and my abs, good lord, the pain. So. Much. Pain.

I'm trying not to read too much into it, but the lines have been set and I am in the front row just stage right of center, despite being taller than many of the girls behind me. There's a possibility that this is because our instructor thinks I'm one of the better dancers. It could also not mean that, and merely be an indication that I've got the choreography down more than some of the others. And, of course, they don't really know me all that well, but there's a slim chance they've sensed what kind of not-a-lady I am and have put me in the front row because they know I will not be nervous about taking off all my clothes as opposed to some of the women who have specifically requested to be in the back row. All I know is I didn't make a request for any specific row, I was just told to go stand in front so I did.

I've had a number of people tentatively ask me if I wanted people to come, or if I'd prefer they didn't because of concerns it might be easier to take my clothes off in front of strangers rather than people I actually know. If you're one of the people who has been wondering this but hasn't asked me, here's what I told everyone else: I have no problem with anyone coming to see me in this show, but I am not going to ask anyone to go. This is not because I don't want you there, it's because I'm part of a group number that is a part of a student show. I'm going to be onstage for less than three minutes with 16 other girls and I'm not comfortable asking people to spend $15 and sit through tons of other numbers in order to witness my three minutes of shared fame. But you're more than welcome to do that if you'd like. All the other numbers will involve girls getting undressed as well, which is pretty cool. It's not like you'd be sitting through an entire Star Trek convention to catch a brief glimpse of my ass. Tickets are available here if you want them.

Day 28 And It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like They Shouldn't Have Given Me An Office

2011-11-28T14:31:00.001-06:00

The CEO came in my office last week asking where all the Christmas decorations were. I told him it would be a motherfucking Christmas wonderland in here if it were up to me, but that if I started decorating the office before Thanksgiving there is a good chance that someone might stab me. He agreed that this was a legitimate concern.

Today, though, it is officially the first office day after Thanksgiving, so my first order of business was to start setting up the few things I already had left over from my Cave of Wonders days (this is what I called my cubicle at the old office space, but only in my head - they know I am crazy but it's fun to keep them guessing just how much): little felt stockings were tacked to the wall, my somewhat sparse Christmas village was arranged on top of my overhead cabinets and three wire trees covered in glitter were placed on a shelf (and now everything in my office is covered in glitter because glitter is the herpes of craft supplies). It wasn't nearly enough crap. Emergency decoration shopping was in order.

The nearest place where I knew there to be Christmas swag was downstairs at the CVS, so I headed down and grabbed the first few random things I saw, bagged them up and came back upstairs. COO and BrownsFan were sitting in the conference room when I came in, so I stopped to show BrownsFan what I'd gotten - a nutcracker, an old style German Santa, and a mealy little two foot "lighted" (in quotes, because lighted usually means the lights are already on the tree when you buy it. Not this time, they were just shoved in the box with the tree and a bunch of shitty plastic ornaments, but what do you want for $9?) tree. BrownsFan and I then briefly discussed potential wiring configurations for the various things I was planning to set up that would require a flow of electricity. This was the point at which COO finally realized what was actually happening. "Wait, so some of those things are going in your office?" he asked me, gesturing to the two GIANT bags I was struggling not to drop.

"What do you mean 'some'? ALL OF THESE THINGS are going in my office. Plus more things. I'm going to turn the air vent into a giant candy cane, and an office that size needs at least two trees. This is just what I managed to find at CVS."

BrownsFan turned to the now gaping at me in shock COO and told him what she'd known in her heart all along: "We never should have given her so much space."

Day 27 And Bob Costas Puts The Smack Down

2011-11-27T22:41:00.046-06:00

When Cap and I were growing up, our father had a very succinct way of explaining the right way to demonstrate sportsmanship. "Act like you've been there before," he told us, and I like to think that we grew up to be people who are gracious in both victory and defeat.

In case you missed it, Bob Costas went on a rant of Andy Rooney proportions at halftime tonight, and it was one of the best halftime segments in recent memory. I wholly and entirely concur with his assessment. End zone celebrations have now become a dick swinging contest of who can act like the biggest egotistical asshole and it's probably too late to put that genie back in the bottle, but if you absolutely have to act like a complete fucktard, you should at least be able to draw the line ahead of the point where you cost your team a penalty and valuable yardage.

Having said that, if Stevie Johnson had ended his Plaxico thigh shooting pantomime by Tebowing, I would have pissed myself laughing.

Day 26 And I've Learned My Lesson

2011-11-26T12:42:00.001-06:00

Look, I admit it. It's entirely my fault. I shouldn't have gotten cocky - Han Solo knows best, after all.

You may recall sometime last week that the bartender and I were complaining about a lack of creativity in sitcom writing as far as Thanksgiving episodes, and my specific complaint that holiday cooking disasters are simply not that frequent (exclusive of those who wind up burning the house down via deep frying the turkey and by the way, America, this is why you're fat). I've long felt this way, but it was only last week that I was compelled to write it down and thereby ensure a near disaster in my own kitchen this Thanksgiving.

Of course, I can't really take all the blame here. Roasting a turkey requires a roasting pan. We don't own a real roasting pan, owing to the bartender arguing that they are a bitch to wash afterward (which is a ridiculous point given that he's not the one who winds up having to wash it, but whatever) (and in fairness, we don't actually have room for one in our kitchen right now anyway). Instead, he goes out and buys me a crappy disposable one every year, and even though it's crappy, I'm not going to pretend I don't like having one less dish I need to wash. Point being, I roast turkeys in a flimsy piece of aluminum. This has never been a problem in the past, but as stated before, this is because I've never bragged about how it's never been a problem in the past either. Turns out, this would be the year.

All was going along according to my meticulously well laid out plans, as always. An hour before the turkey should have been done, I opened up the oven to put the stuffing in. I'd put the roasting pan in sideways earlier because that was easiest, but now the stuffing wasn't going to fit next to it, so I picked it up slightly and spun it sideways to make room, put the stuffing and the parsnips in next to it, closed the oven and walked away. Ten minutes later the bartender came into the living room and asked me "Why is there smoke pouring out of the oven?"

I went to check. He was not fucking kidding, smoke was absolutely billowing out of the fucker, and when I opened it I instantly saw why: when I spun the shitty roasting pan sideways it had ripped slightly. The drippings had leaked out of the pan into the bottom of the oven and ignited. "MOTHERFUCK." That was me. Less because my oven was on fire than because it was obvious my hubris was the cause of my downfall.

The thing is, you can actually look at this another way. I immediately went into crisis mode: I shut the gas off, pulled the turkey out of the oven, siphoned off as much of the juice as I could of what was left, reinforced the bottom of the pan with aluminum foil and put the whole thing on top of a cookie sheet, turned the oven back on after the fire was out and put the turkey back in. The ruination of Thanksgiving dinner was almost entirely averted. The turkey and the stuffing were unharmed and I'd even saved just enough of the drippings for the bartender to make some spec-fucking-tacular gravy. The only thing we lost were the parsnips, and as much as I love parsnips, I'm unlikely to complain about not getting to eat a vegetable (and anyway, there was corn). So my original point still stands, and may even be reinforced: it's NOT that hard to cook Thanksgiving dinner even if your oven catches fire and fills your entire apartment with smoke.

Day 25 And It's Another Christmas Music Installment

2011-11-25T17:10:00.046-06:00

I was about to start writing a post about Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, but then I remembered that it's Friday so it's time to give you another three suggestions for Christmas songs that you might be able to get behind. To wit:

Richard Cheese - "Christmas In Las Vegas": In case you're not familiar with Richard Cheese, he is primarily known for covering popular songs in lounge music style, a la Frank Sinatra (Nirvana's "Rape Me" and Metallica's "Enter Sandman" are a couple of my faves). He has very few original songs, but this is one of them, and it's hilarious - Santa sells his sleigh for gambling money, and Mary gets a suite comped at the Wynn, which beats the shit out of a filthy stable any day of the week.

Barenaked Ladies - "Elf's Lament": To reiterate from last week's second selection, the rules of music listening do not apply to Christmas music, so there's no need to worry that I may have become a huge Barenaked Ladies fan when no one was looking. They have a brilliant Christmas album though, including this song in which the elves get fed up with working for shit wages and decide to start a union.

Run DMC - "Christmas in Hollis": Look, there are other rap Christmas songs. Hell, there are other rap Christmas songs by Run DMC for that matter. You can just go ahead and ignore all of those. This classic from 1987 is the only one you'll ever need. Trust me.

Day 24 And There's Nothing To Watch

2011-11-24T23:51:00.000-06:00

The gorilla: Is it me or is there nothing on tv?

Me: It's fucking ridiculous. This is Thanksgiving. Shouldn't Star Wars be on, line, five channels right now?

The gorilla: I would even watch Phantom Menace right now. I am calling TBS. I am going to give those motherfuckers an earful.

Me: Excellent. While you're at it can you mention that their "Very Funny" lineup is not remotely funny? Thanks, you're a peach.

The gorilla: They hung up on me.

Me: I'm not surprised. You really should stop starting conversations with "Listen, you cunt"

Day 23 And The Gorilla Is Kind Of A Dick

2011-11-23T23:12:00.001-06:00

The gorilla: I made my cousin cry cause I told her I think she may be a midget. Why is honesty not appreciated?

Me: ha ha ha ha ha you are my favorite

Day 22 And Irresponsible Spending Month Has Started A Bit Early

2011-11-22T14:08:00.000-06:00

I poked my head in at Claire's this morning to see what they had because I'm a girl now and I'm told that one of the things girls do is accessorize. And wouldn't you know it? The place is filled with Christmas trinkets AS THOUGH THEY WERE EXPECTING ME. So I went in and pretended to mull over the things I wanted to purchase, even though I pretty much knew that in the end I was going to be like "One of each, please". When I went to the counter with all 7,000 or so small shiny objects, the salesgirl made what for anyone else would have been a pretty sound assumption. "Oh! Are you having a Christmas party?" she asked me.

"Nope, I'm just crazy," I replied with absolute honesty.

Anyway, long story even longer, I'm now sat at my desk in my office dressed in completely normal office attire* with the exception of a tiny black sequin fascinator top hat with glitter covered holly on it. This is significant, because as BrownsFan can attest, I think fascinators are the stupidest fashion trend pretty much ever. Oh, hey ladies! Hows about we all start wearing hats that are nowhere near big enough to fit on our heads? Because that's what hats are for, not making sure your head is covered! WHAT A GREAT FUCKING IDEA! It isn't. At all. But if you stick a piece of holly on it and add some glitter, well then I am ALL IN, MOFOS.

Then there's the rest of this stuff that is still in the bag next to me, such as ornament shaped earrings (earrings? When have you ever seen me voluntarily wear earrings?), a hair clip with a mini santa hat on it (santa hat fascinator? Whatever, I don't care), candy cane striped braces (suspenders, ya tools) and the crowning jewel: false eyelashes WITH TINY CHRISTMAS BOWS ATTACHED TO THEM. I don't even know who thought of this. I've never woken up in the morning thinking "You know what I need? Bows for my eyelashes." But as soon as I saw them I knew I'd needed them all along. And I've just recently learned how to apply false eyelashes! It's like a sign! Seriously, how could I NOT buy them?

Anywhore, I will now be accessorized like a proper girl for a while. A proper girl who is CHRISTMAS AS FUCK.

*Normal for me. There's not actually anyone else walking around in here wearing Chuck Taylors and a hoodie from a band called Dead To Me.

Day 21 And I'm Still Having Gender Issues

2011-11-21T20:36:00.000-06:00

Me: I learned how to curl my hair yesterday. Like a girl.

CEO: (laughing (probably more at me than with me)) I'll just leave that one alone, dear.

I took a class in how to do your own hair in pin-up style yesterday, partly because it's something I should learn what with the burlesque and all, and partly because it was being taught by the amazing Sara Jean, who styled my hair for both of my photo shoots at Vavoom Pinups and it looked AWESOME. Also she is super cool. She's a good teacher (way better, in fact, than she thinks she is), but even so my hair looks a shit ton better when she does it than when I do it. It's hard to do on yourself anyway, but when you add in my left handedness and my complete lack of fine motor skills/ hand-eye coordination, you end up with weird crooked curls and burnt fingertips. At any rate, in addition to actual make up, I now also own a curling iron and hair spray. This is going to take some getting used to.

By the way, I did find out what a teasing comb is. It's actually just a really skinny brush with a pointy tail on the end, and it did not make fun of me. To my face anyway.

Day 20 And I Illustrate A Few Commercials That Don't Suck

2011-11-20T18:29:00.001-06:00

"Are there any commercials that you actually like?" asked BrownsFan the other day when I was complaining about the one where the guy gets a good deal on a messaging plan and new phones and his cuntrag of a wife responds by tell him she should have married someone else because apparently advertisers think that we think it's fucking hilarious when a perfectly nice guy is married to a verbally abusive cuntrag (it isn't. Stop doing this).

As a matter of fact, there are several, particularly the overwhelming majority of promos for anything on ESPN. The one I'm liking right now is the College Game Day Man Satchel promo, but honestly, except for the ones where they desperately try to convince me that NASCAR is interesting, they rarely mess things up (speaking of screw ups, did anyone else see Lee Corson say "Aw, fuck it" on live television yesterday? Because it. Was. Awesome.).

I also love, and have always loved, The Most Interesting Man in the World. There's not a bad one in the bunch. In fact, even when he says nothing at all, it is still some of the best advertising on television.

See? It can be done!

Day 19 And Surprise! The Television Is Upsetting Me

2011-11-19T16:01:00.000-06:00

The bartender pointed something out the other night while we were watching New Girl, and as much as I am loathe to criticize anything Zooey Deschanel is involved with because I want to kiss her whole face, I have to admit he has a point. Every single sitcom, every year, has an episode that revolves around making a disaster out of trying to cook Thanksgiving dinner. They are never funny, ever, and the reason why is this: It's not actually that hard to cook Thanksgiving dinner. It just isn't.

I know this because I've done it a number of times. And I really can't figure out how people think that putting a roast in the oven and leaving it there for hours is at all difficult. There is almost nothing you need to do with a turkey as far as roasting it, other than to remember to defrost the thing in time, but even if you forget that, there are completely thawed turkeys at the store and you can run out and get one if the one you bought isn't ready by the day before.

The most difficult part of making Thanksgiving dinner is getting the timing right, but even that isn't really that hard if you make a schedule. It's simple really, you work backwards: figure out what time you want to have dinner, figure out how long each individual dish takes to cook, subtract that from what time you want to serve dinner and write it all down in chronological order. You don't even need to factor in the prep work most of the time. You can bake the pumpkin pie a day or two ahead of time, cube bread for the stuffing and chop onion/celery/apples/whatever you put in your stuffing the night before, peel the potatoes and the parsnips when you wake up in the morning. Even making homemade gravy shouldn't really throw you that much if you want to try it, because you need to let the turkey sit for half an hour anyway so the juices have time to redistribute (FYI, if you are carving up your turkey immediately after pulling it out of the oven and it comes out dry, this is the reason), which is more than enough time for gravy making.

Sitcom writers: this cliche is getting really, really old. If it's that hard to come up with an idea for a Thanksgiving episode, don't worry about it. You can skip it and I promise you no one will miss it.

Day 18 And I'm Still Cramming Christmas Down Your Throat

2011-11-18T21:09:00.000-06:00

I was casting about today for something to write about because NaBloPoMo is seriously hard, especially when your life consists mainly of things you can't or don't want to talk about anyway (though there are hints about it on my twitter feed sometimes). BrownsFan suggested that since I posted something on the internets someplace else that should count for NaBloPoMo, but that actually happened yesterday and anyway, most of you aren't even supposed to know about that.

Instead, I remembered that I'd said in an earlier post I would profile a Christmas song every day for the whole 40 Days of Christmas. It occurred to me shortly afterwards that such a series might get really boring for everyone but me really fast, so in lieu of that, I'm instead going to do one every Friday. This would be that post.

Eric Idle - "Fuck Christmas": Let's face it, I'm going to buy anything with Eric Idle and Christmas in the same sentence, but it's wholly worth it even if you're not obsessed with Monty Python (though if that's true, you probably have no soul). You could also make an excellent drinking game out of it - if you drink every time he says "fuck" you'll be wasted in under two minutes.

Straight No Chaser - "12 Days": Ok, number one, SHUT UP - the rules of what music it is or isn't ok to own DO NOT apply to Christmas music, ever, with the possible exception of Justin Bieber because I simply have no tolerance for that kid for some reason. As long as I don't have any non-Christmas music by these people then I have not committed any errors by owning things like Barenaked Ladies or Dan Hicks (or Chris Isaac. Kiss my ass, Simon). Number two, yes, I KNOW this is the single most irritating Christmas song ever penned, but that's what makes it so great: they skip verses, incorporate other songs (including the "Boar's Head Carol" which I've never heard anywhere else other than the Madrigal Dinner at church growing up) and other funny things that I don't want to say because it would ruin the surprise.

The Pogues - "Fairytale of New York" - You are honestly an idiot if you don't own this song. I shouldn't even need to talk it up - it's a classic, often cited as the best Christmas song of all time, and it's the fucking Pogues for Pete's sake.

Day 17 And I Have An Announcement To Make

2011-11-17T13:14:00.000-06:00

The e-mail I'd been waiting on tenterhooks to get for over a month showed up in my inbox at 8:32 p.m. last night. I'll be performing in my first burlesque show, the "TEASE! The Season" Student Showcase, at Martyr's on December 10th. Immediately following that show, the Chicago Starlets will be performing their own show, "BrrrrLESQUE!", which will be amazing if the last show I went to was any indication. Thank god I don't have to follow them.

Day 16 And It's The Best Day Yet

2011-11-16T15:37:00.002-06:00

Hey, do you know who wore a tartan plaid skirt, white blouse, red fencenet stockings, gold sequin ballet slippers, a white fur hat, snowflake earrings and 25 (I counted them) red and green bracelets to the office today? This girl:

Waddup.

FYI, that's me.

BrownsFan caught a glimpse of me when I walked past her office this morning and demanded that I come back and show her what I was wearing, as if this was something I needed to be told. "It's the first day!" I announced, even though everyone knew from my outfit what day it was. Everyone but one person, that is. "It's the first day of the 40 Days of Christmas!"

"The 40 Days of Christmas?" asked the new guy incredulously. "It seems like it's early for that. It's not even Thanksgiving."

"It isn't. It's the 40 Days. It's a real thing. I didn't even make it up."

"There's a website," BrownsFan added.

At this point, COO looked up from his desk at me, so I curtsied. He shook his head at me and addressed new guy. "I'm glad you're getting to see this now, before you've had a chance to work together," he said. "I don't want you to think that you caused it somehow. She's always like this."

BrownsFan went on to explain to him that soon I would start dressing in appliqued corduroy dresses with snowmen on them like a kindergarten teacher and needlework shirts that I designed and stitched myself because I'm fucking crafty like that (she did not say "because she's fucking crafty like that."). He looked slightly baffled. There is no way he's prepared.

I need to go tree shopping for my office this weekend. I think I can probably keep it down to two trees if I choose the ornaments carefully and fill in the blank spaces on the countertop with nutcrackers and Santas, maybe a little train. And a wreath, my door will need a wreath, certainly. Oh and some thick red ribbon I can wrap around that weird diagonal airvent to make it look like a massive candy cane. They really should never have given me so much space.

Day 15 And I Am Preparing For My Next Class On How To Be A Girl

2011-11-15T14:15:00.002-06:00

YOU GUYS. Did you know that there's a difference between a bobby pin and a hair pin? NEITHER DID I. I totally thought that was two different names for the same thing. Apparently it's not, as evidenced by the fact they are listed as two separate things on the list of supplies I'll need on Sunday for the workshop I'm taking in how to do pin up hair. Also seemingly two different things: "clips to hold larger sections of hair" and "box of single prong clips". In addition I have NO IDEA what a teasing comb is. It's probably a comb that's going to make fun of me for not knowing anything about hair.

Day 14 And I Recap Kelly's Wedding

2011-11-14T12:47:00.149-06:00

I was going to do another "Bizzybiz Wedding Awards" thingy, like I did for her sister's wedding, but really, a lot of the categories don't apply so much here outside of Best Kept Secret (Kelly, for successfully hiding a purple wedding dress), Best Use of the Union Jack at an American Wedding (which was the same as last time, except that we knew it was coming this time, so we prepared ahead of time and followed it with an Ohio Smackdown by O-H-I-Oing to the McCoy's "Hang On Sloopy" because my family are fucking rock stars) and Furthest Distance Traveled, which would have been the folks who came from Poland, but I don't know their names and really everyone traveled pretty far with the exception of Kelly and Michael. My point is I'm not doing that. I'm just going to chronologically hit the highlights.

I arrived later on Wednesday night than I should have because I was stupid enough to fly United and they broke our plane, as they do. The gorilla has promised to punch me in the face if I ever try to fly United again. Anywhore, Kelly and Michael picked me up and drove me to the hotel, where Kelly's family had arrived from England and were drinking in the hotel bar. By the time I'd set down my stuff and gone down to say hello, the bar had closed, which led to much complaining since hotel bars in the U.K. never close until the last person drinking gives up. We stayed for a little while while they finished beers and the discussion revolved around the couch from Friends and whether anyone had ever watched the show for reasons I will never be able to sufficiently explain.

Thursday night was girls night out, which was planned, and boys night out, which was apparently not planned, but went more along the lines of "The girls are going out? Oh, we should probably do that too." We went to a restaurant for a lovely meal, I drank a sangria because I had asked for the wine that tastes the most like candy, and then we all dressed up in Mardi Gras beads and went down to a bar in Venice that used to be Kelly's local. Immediately on walking in, we encountered two young gentlemen who showed us their muscles in exchange for beads. The both immediately started hitting on Kelly's grandmother. Come to think of it, all kinds of men were hitting Kelly's grandmother all weekend long. One of the guys also noticed that Kelly's friend Chuck was with us and observed "You must be gay." He is. There was much rejoicing.

By this time we were winding down because we are actually pretty old. Boys night had already been wrapped up, and Kelly's dad had come to pick a few of us up in the van. On arriving back at the hotel, I discovered the English boys and the very charming Franklin (a friend of Michael's who was a groomsman and also my aisle-walking partner because I win) had solved the bar closing problem of the night before by buying out the entire stock of beer from the sundry and drinking it sitting in the lobby. Obviously, I joined them. Everyone else went to bed. We did too, but not until 3 a.m. and certainly not before I'd had a chance to rant about how The History Channel is a complete failure at showing programs that involve any actual history, Ghosthunters is the stupidest show on television, Nostradamus accurately predicted precisely jack shit and the Mayans probably just ran out of paper, an observation that Franklin the history teacher found particularly amusing.

Friday night was the rehearsal dinner at a place called Vito's and if it is not a front for the Los Angeles mafia it fucking well should be. Eating at Vito's is not so much having a meal as it is having an experience. Courses get served one at a time with long breaks in between during which massive amounts of wine are consumed - we ate dinner for 3 1/2 hours. I sat with my aunt and uncle recapping the more hilarious parts of the actual rehearsal and drinking iced tea (the deleterious effects of drinking with Englishmen still fresh in my memory from my trip in September, I was wise enough to skip a day). I ate so much I was genuinely concerned about fitting into my dress the next day.

The actual wedding was quite possibly the most hilarious ceremony I've ever been to. Kelly and Michael both struggled to repeat their vows (the really were very long sentences) and Kelly actually interrupted hers because she was laughing so hard at the tiny bug that was crawling around on Michael's collar. I managed to keep my composure while Franklin read the poem he'd written for them, but only because I'd heard it the night before. I barely held my shit together when Kelly's uncle read an excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit.

I split the rest of the evening fairly evenly between dancing and a series of conversations with Franklin, Simon, Jo and a girl called Jen who was actually working there in a fancy room that had an actual name, but that I kept calling "the hookah room" because it seemed like a room that should have one. At one point, Simmy ran up to me and yelled "Bridesmaid shot!", so the four bridesmaids linked arms and ran up to the bar where I screamed "WE NEED A SHOT FOR GIRLS!"

When the night had wound down, I said a tearful goodbye to Jen (I was convinced we were real friends at that point) and took one of the shuttles back to the hotel, a trip that consisted of my brother yelling a lot, Simon being embarrassed by his father, and someone stupidly handing me a camera to take photos for them, which obviously led to me convincing Simon to take a photo down my shirt so that someone I don't know could be surprised by a photo of my boobs the next day. Also, Simon kept repeating how he couldn't believe that Cap and I were brother and sister, being as we're so different and he is so loud, which was met with hysterical laughter when I told the family about it the next day. It's funny because it's true.

Congratulations Kelly and Michael!

Day 13 And AAAAAGGGHHHHHH!

2011-11-13T14:17:00.071-06:00

Spiders. There were massive fuck off spiders the size of my fist in the garden at the wedding and apparently that is TOTALLY FUCKING NORMAL IN LOS ANGELES AND NOBODY WARNED ME. By the way, fuck all of you for not warning me.

I noticed this while standing outside waiting to have photos of the wedding party taken in this gazeboish thingy. I was standing with the boys because, hi, it's me, and we were all near some sort of fruit tree. When I gave it a closer look I realized the entire thing was covered in spider webs. "Um. You guys. There's, like, a million spider webs in that tree." They turned to look.

"HOLY SHIT look at that spider!" In the tree in a spot I mercifully couldn't see, the boys had found a spider so massive that even they were grossed out by it and everyone moved away from the tree. But for me it was too late. Because upon encountering a spider, my brain goes into overdrive and then I can't stop. I looked around and realized I was fucking surrounded - they were in the tree, the bushes, hanging from the power lines. Someone suggested I might calm down if I stopped looking for them, but that's not how it works. Once I know where they are I can't STOP looking at them, because if I look away and then they move, I'm then faced with knowing there IS a spider but NOT knowing how close it is to me which is completely unacceptable.

I maneuvered myself to be as close to the middle of the patio as possible and crouched down on the ground, mumbling insanely and trying desperately to convince everyone around me that my life was in great peril. Whenever this happens I get so hysterical and say such madly ridiculous things that unless they already know me very well, most people assume I'm just exaggerating for effect and/or trying to be funny. The only person around who knew otherwise was Simmy, who blessedly started waving people off when they came over trying to make jokes about about the possibility of spiders getting ON ME or tell me stories about the biggest spider they'd ever seen.

I held it together long enough to make it through the photos and then sprinted (in five inch heels) back into the house where I immediately encountered my father and burst into tears. I sobbed on his shoulder for a good 10 minutes while he led me to go sit with my family who obviously wanted to know what was wrong with me and needed no further explanation from my dad other than "There were spiders." It was my uncle who had the magic words which finally calmed me down enough to stop crying, shaking and eventually go enjoy the wedding. Which I did, and will tell you about tomorrow.

The good news is that I finally feel a feeling about Los Angeles, which is that it can take its fist sized spiders and shove them up its ass.

Day Twelve And I'm A Bit Busy For This Today

2011-11-12T09:14:00.008-06:00

This afternoon my fake cousin Kelly will be married to Michael, and with any luck, I will be drunk before dark.

More importantly, today marks two months until my birthday.

Priorities.

Day Eleven And I Had Someone Else Write My Post For Me

2011-11-11T06:28:00.003-06:00

Today is Veteran's Day. Go find some veterans and hug them, but try not to do it in a creepy way - you're supposed to be thanking them.

Normally I would write a post that just said thank you, or list out the people in my life who have served their country, or something along those lines. This year I've decide to give everyone a gift. Below is a true story as told by my amazing and beautiful friend Erin, who is a veteran of the U.S. Army and who is also super awesome. Thanks to all the veterans everywhere!

The Bird Story

I joined the Army on September 10, 2001 because I have magnificent timing. "What could go wrong?" Yep. Anyway, I became an Engineer in the Army and ended up getting stationed in Germany. Incidentally, I was the only female engineer in my company for nine months straight. Please remind me in the future to tell you about the initial hilarity/eventual nightmare that this entailed.

Anyway.

I got to Germany right about the time when George W. was busy pissing off all of Europe with his stupid WMD bullshit about Iraq-- he *especially* had pissed off the French and the German people. Fantastic. We were not very welcome in Germany. I remember being on Guard Duty (standing at the entrance of the base, fully armed and prepared to blow away anybody who posed a threat) and an elderly German man rode past on his bicycle, giving me the finger and yelling, "Go back to your own country!" I completely agreed with him. Anyway, bad things started to happen-- people yelling at us on the street, bar fights and eventually a stabbing at the local pub. We were put on Base Restriction for our own protection.

There were exactly four things to do on base: go to the movies, rent movies, bowl and get drunk. Usually, the first three activities involved the fourth.

One night, after going bowling (while drinking), coming back to the barracks and watching a movie with some friends (while drinking) and then finally settling in alone in my room (while drinking), I decided that I was not quite drunk enough. Mind you, in the course of four hours, I had consumed three giant German beers and one... it's not a pint, and it's not a fifth-- it's the one in between-- let's call it a fish bowl-- so, I had consumed three giant German beers and one fishbowl of tequila. But I wasn't drunk enough, so I went to the base liquor store and bought another fish bowl of tequila, went back to my room and popped in another movie. I got about halfway through my second fish bowl and... I started to not feel so good.

Are you familiar with the stage of inebriation when you know you're going to be sick but you *really* think that you can prevent it from happening? This stage usually involves food.

It was around one in the morning at this point and everything on base was closed. The only food I had in my room: bread and peanut butter. Score. Peanut butter sandwiches. I made myself a stack of peanut butter sandwiches, maybe 5 or 6 of them, and started happily munching away at them. Halfway into the second sandwich, I realized that I did indeed feel better...but I was so thirsty from the peanut butter. I didn't feel like going *all the way* down the hall to get some water, and after all, I had that half-bottle of tequila sitting right there next to me, and I *was* feeling better, soooo... I washed all 5 or 6 sandwiches down with the rest of that bottle of tequila.

Strangely enough, shortly after, I started to feel not so good again. And again, I thought I could fix the problem. "I'm just hot. I should take my clothes off." So I did, and that helped a little, but I was still not feeling so good. "The window," I thought, "I need to open the window." And I did. These were old Nazi barracks (I'm not kidding, seriously, they used to be Nazi barracks), and they had the giant windows that went all the way to the ceiling. So, three in the morning, wintertime in Germany, I am naked, relishing the cold winter air on my naked body. After a minute, I felt okay and I left the window open and slipped into bed. As soon as my head hit the pillow, the room started spinning out of control and I shot right back up, stumbled over to the open window and proceeded to vomit for what seemed like an eternity. Remember, I'm 5'7" and weigh all of 120 pounds and I've consumed three giant beers, two fish bowls of tequila and 5 or 6 peanut butter sandwiches, all of which were brewing in my stomach the whole night. Drunk as I was, I can still remember thinking-- as I was puking-- "Jesus, this is taking FOREVER." At some point, I stopped and made it back to bed.

I woke up the next morning cold and confused. "It's freezing in here! Why is the window open? Why am I naked? What did I DO last night?" It all came back to me when I went to close the window and saw that I had not *quite* cleared the ledge all the way while I was puking my guts out the night before, as there was a huge, frozen mound of tequila/peanut butter sandwich vomit right outside my window. Fuck. Me.

One of the many things that blow about the military is something called Base Inspection, and this usually involves the Commander of the base strolling around and seeing what's fucked up. It can happen at any time. Knowing this, I went outside to see what the damage looked like from the ground. This is when I discovered the 15-foot long puke-cicle stretching from my window to the ground along the side of the building, with another little frozen mound of puke at the bottom. "I'm too hung-over for this. I'll deal with this tomorrow and hope for the best."

There was no inspection that day, thank goodness.

The next morning, I woke up unpleasantly early to sound of 10,000 birds chirping right outside my window. "What the fuck!" I opened my curtains to find that the puke mound was gone, and all sorts of birds were hanging out on my ledge, pecking away at what was left of it. "That's disgusting." I immediately went outside to see what was still left on the side of the building, and holy shit, it was ALL gone. All of it, the mound on my ledge, the puke-cicle, the mound on the ground, all of it. "Oh my god, thank goodness, I really didn't want to clean that up. But that's fucking disgusting." Relieved, I went back inside and didn't think much of it again.

Yes, at least not for a day or two when I started seeing dead birds around base. And not just one or two, but a whole mess of them. The first dead bird: "Aww, a dead bird." The second: "Huh, that's weird, I just saw a dead bird." The third: "What's with all the dead birds?" The fourth, fifth and so on and so on... "Wait a minute. Oh, fuck." I finally realized that all the dead birds on base were right next to buildings. I looked up at some point and that's when I discovered what clearly appeared to be a bird splat mark on one of the building windows. The birds, who were completely shitfaced on my tequila vomit, were drunkenly flying into windows and accidentally killing themselves.

I never harmed a single human being when I served. But I think I killed a shit-ton of birds.

In conclusion, birds are gross.

Day Ten And...

2011-11-10T18:03:00.001-06:00

I'm in Los Angeles.

I've never been here before because I had always assumed that I would hate it. Kelly has been trying to get me to come out here for years, insisting that I would love it. I resisted as long as I could, because I was certain of the opposite. Then she decided to get married and forced my hand. I haven't been here a whole day yet, but the preliminary verdict is already in: I don't hate it.

I nothing it. I have never in my life been in a place I felt more indifferent about. Everywhere else I've had some sort of feeling about either way:

Chicago - Immediately felt like home, so I made it my home

Baltimore - Hilariously scary

St. Louis - Fun except for their bullshit cheese

Cleveland - Please fucking kill me

Los Angeles -

My theory is that this is because everything about Los Angeles seems to be things that I simply don't care about. We've discussed recently how much of a fuck I don't give about celebrities. Similarly, I don't understand fashion, never have, never will, and will wear jeans and a t-shirt every single day if left to my own devices. I have zero interest in going to the beach. The only time I see movies is when my roommate comes into the living room and puts them on for me - if you leave the DVD sitting right next to the DVD player, I still can't be arsed to walk over and put it in. It's not that I hate any of these things, I just have so much better shit I could be doing. And Los Angeles is the embodiment of all these things I'm incapable of caring about.

Who knows, I'm here another couple of days and I suppose it's possible I'll develop some sort of opinion other than "meh". For now I'm just happy to report that I was wrong, but so was Kelly.

Day Nine And I Am Saved By An Anonymous Reader

2011-11-09T13:54:00.002-06:00

An anonymous reader commented on this post this morning to the effect of "Okay, if you know so much about Christmas music, maybe you should suggest some for the rest of us." Your timing is perfect, anonymous, as I had no idea what to write today, having cheated already by writing yesterday's post today and backdating it (which was just a link to someone else's videos anyway). So below are a small handful of suggestions of Christmas albums you might want to pick up in the event that Bing and Frank just aren't doing it for you. In no particular order:

The Vandals - Oi To The World! - This absolute fucking gem of an album was released in 1996 and then re-released in 2000 and is among my favorite Christmas albums of all time. Songs such as "My First Christmas (As A Woman)", "Thanks For Nothing" and "Oi To The World" (which was also excellently covered by No Doubt) stand on their own as punk songs regardless of the season.

The Yobs - The Worst of The Yobs - This band is actually The Boys, but recorded all their Christmas music under the name The Yobs. It contains the single most inappropriate/offensive Christmas song I have ever heard, "C.H.R.I.S.T.M.A.S./Gloria" (which is also covered on the aforementioned Vandals album), as well as "Oy Santa" in which they ask Santa "What do you call this fucking pile of shit, you cunt?" and "There's No Santa Claus" about a father's lame attempt at pretending to be Santa.

Destructors 666 - Bah Humbug - Rounding out a trilogy of punk rock albums, Bah Humbug tells you where you can "stick that fucking mistletoe" in "Merry Christmas and Fuck Off" and lists all the reasons to hate the season in "Xmas Xmas (Bah Humbug)".

Lest you start to think I may not love Christmas as much as I claim, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's Everything You Want For Christmas is always at the top of my Christmas album list, not the least of which because of their cover of "Mr. Heatmiser" from the 1974 claymation classic The Year Without Santa Claus (do the bartender and I have matching Heatmiser and Snowmiser bobbleheads on display in our living room all year round? Yes. Yes we do). There is also the fantastic "Last Night (I Went Out with Santa Claus)" which I triple dog dare you to try not to dance to, and "A Party For Santa" in which we are reminded we should all make sure Santa comes more than once a year.

While the cheese factor might be a bit high for some, I absolutely love A Twisted Christmas by Twisted Sister. It's mostly covers of classic Christmas songs done over in Twisted style, but they also sneak in a few tributes to other bands (i.e. The Ramones (Ho, ho ho! Let's go!)) and even their own song "We're Not Gonna Take It" which it turns out is basically the same riff as "O Come All Ye Faithful".

The Fleshtones - Stocking Stuffer - If you like surf rock bands from Queens, and I assure you that you do, then this is the Christmas album for you. Songs such as "Christmas With Bazooka Joe" and "Super Rock Santa" are virtually impossible not to love. Better still is their amazing cover of "Hooray For Santa Claus", which for the uninitiated is the theme song of what is widely regarded as one of the worst movies of all time, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (yes, of course I own it, what a ridiculous question) - it's bad enough that it appeared on an episode of MST3K.

There are also a number of individual songs that deserve recognition as "must have" songs on any Christmas playlist I'm likely to come up with, but I think I'll save those and post one a day through the 40 Days of Christmas (some of which may or may not count as NaBloPoMo posts, depending on how lazy I get).

So there you have it, six Christmas albums that you can rock out to whether you love Christmas or hate it. By no means, mind you, is this even CLOSE to a comprehensive list of my Christmas collection. If I tried that we'd be here for years discussing it and trust me, you don't want that. It should be enough to get you started, though, and there will definitely be more suggestions coming in about a week(!).

Thanks, anonymous, and also my apologies as I suspect you probably had no idea what you were getting yourself into.

Day Eight And I'm Now Just Posting Links To Other Things

2011-11-08T21:41:00.012-06:00

The one drawback to living in Chicago is that it's rare to be able to watch an entire Browns game. However, after Sunday's abysmal performance, this may actually be a blessing.

Witness here Cleveland area comedian Mike Polk Jr. (the same guy who did the Cleveland tourism videos) speaking out on behalf of Browns fans everywhere.

I'll see you Sunday.

Day Seven And I've Started Complaining About Commercials Again

2011-11-07T21:20:00.001-06:00

As I started writing this post, I had to look up what company this was actually a commercial for - I dislike it so much I forgot to make note of who was even doing the advertising, thus negating the point of spending money to advertise at all.

AT&T is introducing its new 4G LTE service and I honestly want to throw my television out the window every time this commercial comes on. It consists of two guys sitting in a parking lot, ostensibly tailgating, while barely looking up from their smart phones other than to tell tell their friends how far behind the curve they are by not being glued to phones themselves. They are the embodiment of all those things that I hate - the people who ruin every single damn conversation by whipping out their iPhone to get the information that will give them the last word, the hipsters that constantly tell you how much better they are than you because they've heard of something first, the fucking morons who are so afraid of being offline that they don't bother to interact with real people anymore at all. "That's so 12 seconds ago" is an actual line in this commercial, and it is repeated twice more with varying times of how late everyone else is on some trivial piece of information, none of which are over a minute. I want to take both of their phones and throw them on the ground, smash them to pieces with a bat and use the shards to stab these guys in the throat. SHUT THE FUCK UP. YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE AND I AM NEVER INVITING YOU TO TAILGATE AGAIN.

Day Six And I Don't Even Know Who I Am Anymore

2011-11-06T22:30:00.039-06:00

As it turns out, I'm taking this burlesque thing pretty seriously: I have a stage name picked out, I'm hoping to do my first show in December, I'm obsessing over choreography, and I practice my shimmy when I walk down the street (this is easier when you assume everyone is already looking at you like you're a crazy person anyway). Which is why I spent two hours at the studio today learning how to put pin up make up on my own face.

I say "pin up make up" but I actually mean "any kind of make up at all". The whole exercise was a reminder of just how not girly I typically am - there is so much about make up that I don't even know. For example, did you know that applying foundation is not the first step in putting make up on? I had no idea. The very name of it, "foundation", suggests that this is the step upon which the rest of your make up application should be, you know, founded. But it isn't, this is actually step three and comes after moisturizer and a product I had never even fucking heard of, called "foundation primer". I couldn't even grasp the concept at first. The only primer that exists in amberanceland is the stuff that goes on walls before you paint them, and is also a step you can skip if you're working over a wall that has been painted before and you are covering it in a color that is close in both hue and shade to what's already there. You can't, apparently, skip foundation primer, unless you want your make up to slide right off your face.

Similarly, it turns out you're a fool if you try to put on eyeshadow right on top of your foundation. Yes, that's right, there is a primer for that too. Eyeshadow primer, it turns out, comes in many shades, but it is best to use one that is close to what will eventually be the lightest eyeshadow you'll be using that day. You'll be using more than one, FYI, you never use just one shade of eyeshadow at a time. Your eyes will have no depth if you do that. Duh.

I left the studio with a face full of make up, false eyelashes and a list of things I would need to pick up if I wanted to take on this whole "wearing make up" thing. I'm not entirely sure that I do, but it might be too late to turn back now: I have signed up for a class in pin up hair that will be taught by the amazing Sara Jean, and I recently bought a pair of turquoise shoes that I can wear with exactly one outfit in my closet (FYI, I have never, ever, bought a pair of shoes that I couldn't wear with the majority of clothes that I owned before this pair. It felt dirty in a not good way.) (Also, by closet I mean lingerie drawer. Those shoes don't go with anything I own that can be worn in public in a non-performance setting). If I start to become one of those women who shops, please do us all a favor and tie me to the couch in front of a hockey game until I snap out of it.

Day Five And The "Roll Tide" Promo Is Stuck In My Head

2011-11-05T19:58:00.001-05:00

I'm sitting in my living room facing my television watching the highly touted LSU versus Alabama football game on CBS, for free, and laughing out loud at the people who spent in excess of $20,000 on a ticket to see this (regular season, mind you) game live as the Alabama kicker misses his second field goal of the game in a scoreless first quarter.

Who knows, maybe by the end of this game that will turn out to be money well spent.

Update: As I hit the "publish" button, Alabama had their third field goal attempt blocked. Roll Tide.

Day Four And I'm Talking About Christmas Already, Natch

2011-11-04T19:25:00.021-05:00

"Did you see the window at Bath & Body Works downstairs?" asked BrownsFan in an incredulous tone earlier this week.

This is one of my favorite times of year - when I am completely ready for Christmas, right on schedule with retail, and everyone else is appalled. H-town was complaining the other day about Sears being the first retailer to air a Christmas commercial on television. This was fully a week after I had been to Sears and purchased several new pairs of Christmas socks (I almost bought a "sexy Santa" apron too, until I remembered I already have, like, five of those).

Truth be told, I've been slowly adding Christmas music to the playlist on my iPod since August. For some reason I had pointed this out to the stranger when I met him in September (I'm not sure what possessed me, especially given that I hadn't told him about this blog until after we'd met in an attempt to keep him from finding out that I'm crazy). Apparently it made an impression, because a week ago he e-mailed me asking for a list of non-traditional, non-cheesy Christmas songs that rock for purposes that were not specified. I was happy to oblige - "Hey, can you help me with some Christmas music?" being up near "Would you like some chocolate?" and "Hey, wanna fuck?" at the top of the list of questions I like to be asked. I'm not sure he was expecting The Vandals to have a Christmas song, let alone a full length album.

The 40 Days of Christmas is less than two weeks away, FYI.

Day Three And I Have Lost All Sense Of Propriety

2011-11-03T13:53:00.000-05:00

(not that I had any to begin with)

me: i saw a headline yesterday that Kim K apologized to her fans for her failed marriage
no word on whether she apologized to, you know, HER HUSBAND

H-town: you're expecting normalcy
that does not exist in her world

me: I'm not sure she actually grasps the concept of marriage

H-town: also, isn't she only famous 'cause she has a sex tape?
and then the reality show offer happened?

me: oh also cuz her dad was OJ's attorney and her stepdad is bruce jenner. that's what my brother told me anyway
whatever, i've made a sex tape and i'm not famous. wtf?
that was probably an overshare, my bad :)

H-town: uh oh

me: i need to do a better job of making sex tapes with people who lack discretion, this whole " i respect your privacy" thing is holding me back from fame and fortune
behold, today's nablopomo post

Day Two And I'm Already Resorting To Chat Convos

2011-11-02T19:50:00.003-05:00

Cap: Hold the effing phone...you're going to england in march?
Give me dates

me: oh, yeah. want to come?

Cap: YES
MAN U!!!! Giggs is retiring this year.

me: giggs is retiring every year

Cap: No, this is the first time he's said it
It's always media speculation

me: maybe he'll pull a favre

Cap: I don't want a picture of his dick

me: LOL awesome. you win

Day One And There Is Already Nothing To Talk About

2011-11-01T11:55:00.000-05:00

Attention internets/celebrity gawkers: There is no amount of headlines, hashtags, facebook updates, E! News segments or US Weekly exclusives that will increase the size of the fuck I don't give over the demise of Kim Kardashian's marriage. For the love of Mike, shut the hell up. Now, normally I don't ever post commentary about what celebrities (or in this case "celebrities") are doing. This is because I usually don't know what they are doing because I do not care. In fact, it was just under a year ago on the way to a New Year's Eve party with my brother* that I even found out what the shit a Kardashian was. But this time, there are two things that have caused me to make note of it: I'm being clobbered over the head with stories about it, and it's NaBloPoMo.

I don't know why I do this to myself. I tell myself that if I do it, it will remind me to get back in the habit of writing every day. It never does. Even if that did work, I rarely find things I put up during NaBloPoMo to be "quality" blog posts. They tend to be more like "OMG, Happy Thanksgiving lolz" or "My cat is butthurt because I won't give her any string. Cats - such a mystery." or "MOTHERFUCK! CHRISTMAS IS, LIKE, REALLY SOON" (to be fair, posts on that subject could happen at any time) or, you know, some bullshit about a specific Kardashian that I probably couldn't pick out of a Kardashian line up or roomful of regular large-assed women (she is the one with the badonkadonk, right?). But it does give me a chance to pretend like I'm part of some sort of blogger community for a month, which is nice since I'm usually too anti-social to count as an effective member of any community. Also, right now it is giving me an excuse to tell everyone to shut up about someone else's very short marriage, which I assume ended right about the time the Vegas line on it said it would. So there's that.

*In this same conversation, Cap looked over my fairly conservative outfit and announced, "You look normal. Maybe you won't embarrass me tonight." I obviously took that as a challenge and when we arrived at the party, got the face painter that had been hired to draw a giant blue penis on my face. Amberance for the win.

BRAAAIIIIINNSSSSS!

2011-10-24T20:44:00.004-05:00

The zombie 5K was this weekend in Baltimore, and I am proud to announce that I survived. Well, actually I didn't, I died. But I lived through it. I'll explain in a minute.

My training can best be described as "half-assed". Actually, half-assed may be a slight exaggeration. Quarter-assed is a bit more like it. As you may remember from previous posts, I HATE running. And while I started out with the best of intentions, no amount of progress in my abilities was enough to convince me that I liked it. In fact, I think it made me hate running even more. I started to rationalize reasons why I didn't really have to train. "I had dance class on Tuesday, that should count." "I totally did cardio-kickboxing for 10 whole minutes, that's exactly the same as running for 20 minutes." The last couple weeks I didn't bother to train at all, telling myself even more lies: "The adrenaline of being chased will carry me through it." "I should just sit on the couch all week - I need to conserve my energy."

Despite the nagging feeling that I was woefully under-prepared, I was getting very excited. A few days before the race the organizers sent out a tantalizing e-mail. There would be mud, red dye, strobe lights and four feet of standing water. We should "use our best judgement" in the event we had a seizure disorder, or an allergy to latex. Oh, and could we also print out and sign this wavier indicating that we understood we might potentially die? It was starting to sound awesome.

Race day came, and H-town and I got up at the ass crack of dawn to drive out to the race site. There were actually three of us who would be running together: me, with my half- to quarter-assed training, H-Town, who also hates running but had trained diligently, and Callie, who is a maniac and does this sort of running shit all the time. We discussed our training regimens and reactions to it on the shuttle from the parking lot to the race site. I reported my reaction the same way I always do: I am never, EVER running anywhere ever again.

Callie, H-Town and me, blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.

On arrival at the actual race site, we got our race packets, put on our numbers and our flag belts and got in line to check our bags. Each of us was in a different line, but we all had a similar experience of being given tips by people who had already completed the race. We already knew there were two kinds of zombies - "theatrical" zombies who were for show, and "athletic" zombies who would chase you and take your flags (this was the zombies' job. If you finished the race with none of your flags left, you were dead, and weren't eligible to win a prize). We were advised to look out for zombies who looked theatrical, but would turn around and chase you after you'd passed. We were also given advice for the "four feet of water" we'd been warned about, namely that it was way more than four feet deep, it was very cold, and we should grab the ropes to pull ourselves across rather than try to swim it. We all met up at the starting line and compared our notes. And then the race started.

We were not prepared.

Our various levels of training made no difference as we quickly realized that no one had actually trained properly at all. Running at a steady pace on relatively level, always dry, usually concrete surfaces is in no way at all adequate preparations for running through the woods up and down ridiculously steep hills, the surface of which had been reduced to a muddy slop, while being chased by zombies. In hindsight we should have been practicing running up and down various inclines and a fuck ton of suicide sprints.

We first realized this when we encountered our first obstacle - giant piles of hay we had to climb over. We reached the top and looked down to find a sea of zombies waiting for us on the other side who were sprinting after people trying to get their flags.

Holy Fuck.

This would become a theme - go through some arduous task like climbing up a cargo net or clawing your way up a muddy hill, and face the waiting zombies on the other side/at the top. Also, for something that had been billed as a 5K run, there wasn't really a whole lot of actual running. Sprinting away from the zombies used up most of your energy so that when you did get to a zombie-free straightaway, you were usually too spent to run it. Which really didn't matter anyway because those sections were almost all so incredibly muddy you couldn't possibly have run through them without constantly falling. Still, it was pretty cool and we were having a ton of fun.

Until.

The water obstacle was to swim across a pond. There were two ropes stretched across it to help in pulling yourself along. We scrambled down the embankment and stepped into water up to our waists. It was stunningly cold, but seemed manageable. For five seconds, until we took another step. We all found ourselves submerged to the neck in 40 degree pond water. There is no way to grasp exactly how cold that is without actually doing it. The shock of the cold hit me like an anvil to the chest. FUCKING HOLY HAIRY NUN TESTICLES, I thought, but didn't say, because I was too stunned to speak. The bottom of the pond was nowhere to be found. We pulled ourselves along the rope hand over completely numb hand, urged along by H-Town, who was the only one with the ability to speak and was channeling her inner Dory - with Tourettes- all the way across. "JUST KEEP FUCKING SWIMMING!" she screamed. "FUCK YOU, NEMO!" I had a sudden moment of clarity remembering the text of the waiver I had signed - I could actually for real die in water that cold if I didn't get out of it as quickly as possible.

Somehow we all managed to get across to the other side and pull ourselves up the steep embankment. With two miles to go we were now cold, tired and soaking wet. Additionally, my saturated hoodie added another 10 pounds of weight for me to try and run with. We got to a very steep downhill that I almost ended up tumbling down, only to be faced at the bottom of it with an even steeper and higher hill that we would need to climb, which was also a river of mud. Climbing it took just about everything out of me, so when the zombie who had been sitting on the ground giving people high fives as they came over the hill suddenly jumped up and snatched away my last flag I barely even reacted. It actually turned out to be more fun once we had no flags left to worry about (it's not like we had any shot of coming in the top 3 anyway). We started deliberately messing with the zombies, trying to hug them and get them to high five us. We also did our good deed for the day and started running interference for the runners who did still have flags, blocking the zombies from being able to reach them, or tricking them into thinking we still had a flag on us somewhere.

The end was now in sight. Cold, wet, exhausted, filthy, lungs on fire, we could see the finish line (chain link fence that you had to crawl, or as H-Town did, slide under), and Callie led the way for the three of us, who were all determined to finish the race actually running. We babbled to one another excitedly while we got our medals, developing the strategies that would have been a lot more useful to us if we'd thought of them during the race. We grabbed our bags so that we could change into the clean and dry clothing we had brought, pausing first to have our photo taken together while we were still a hot mess, and giving the photographer and her friend who had yet to run all the advice we could think of. The shoes we ran in were all destroyed and we threw them away with great ceremony. Then we went off in search of the free beer we had been promised and something to eat.

The beer was like the nectar of heaven. The cheeseburgers H-Town and I procured were the most delicious either of us had ever had in our lives and we ate the crap out of them. We said goodbye to Callie, who is insane and was teaching a yoga class later in the day, and decided to head down near the course to watch some of the next wave. We stood near the first obstacle, the giant piles of hay, with a number of other people who had also finished the race, and watched as the next wave crested the hay and headed into the sea of zombies. We'd been through it before and knew that the direction they needed to run wasn't readily apparent, so the entire spectator gallery began shouting at them and pointing "To the right! THE RIGHT! Head for the trees! Go towards THE TREES!" After the wave passed by us, we went to the section between the maze and the downhill, where a ton of zombies waited in ambush all the way down the hill. Again, we used our knowledge to help the runners. "Wait for a group! Go in a group! There's too many of them, you'll never make it by yourself! Everyone go together and overwhelm them!" Most people took our advice, and a few of them even gathered around a leader who would get them all geared up Braveheart style and then all together make a break for the zombie gauntlet shouting guttural war cries. One who didn't was a guy dressed up as Superman, who actually did manage to get past them all without losing any of his flags, although one of the more enterprising zombies managed to steal his cape.

We drove home in absolute exhaustion, extremely pleased with ourselves for choosing an early heat when we noticed the traffic backed up for miles along the two lane road that led to the race (the traffic turned out to be a huge problem and quite a few people unfortunately didn't get to run). We got home and spent 15 minutes excitedly relaying to H-Town's lovely wife all the details of our adventure before passing out.

I hate running, you guys. I really, really mean it. But there's just something about being chased by zombies. So despite the fact that I still swear I will never run again, when H-Town turned to me on Sunday afternoon just after we came home from dinner and suggested that we might want to sign up for the zombie run next year in Indianapolis I agreed that we were kidding ourselves if we thought there was any chance that we won't.

I Might Be A Super Massive Nerd

2011-10-24T19:15:00.000-05:00

Search terms that have recently led people to this blog:

"I can't bend my legs in my stormtrooper outfit"

"Can the ton ton make it to the first marker"

It's possible I may need to diversify my hobbies.

Got Three Hours To Kill?

2011-10-11T15:51:00.000-05:00

I'm sure you're all sick of me telling you every time I'm on Total Talk Nonsense by now, seeing as I've been on it a lot lately, but this time is different. This week on Episode 234, I am in studio for the second time in order to respond to a listener request that I sing something on the show. So that happens. Additionally we discuss Scott's weekend trip, Riot Fest, the worst songs of the 80's, running, science, an upcoming contest for the listeners, a contest to be judged by the listeners, and when it's ok to go full Marty. But most importantly, to reiterate, I sing live on the show. So, you know, check that out maybe.

I Need To Hang Out With Fancy More Often

2011-10-11T01:06:00.002-05:00

In honor of National Coming Out Day today

Me: Wait, "lesbian" is a verb now?

Fancy: Yeah. I lesbian, you lesbian, he/she/it lesbians...

Me: I don't think he lesbians.

Fancy: Well he would if he could.

There's Never A Dull Moment At Riot Fest

2011-10-10T12:56:00.001-05:00

Riot Fest was this weekend and the bartender and I attended, as we do every year, because apart from getting to see a whole lot of excellent bands at the one music festival that is indoors, it is also some of the best people watching of the year. This is the same festival where I nearly incited an actual riot by wearing a shirt which read "I should be in the kitchen" last year, and the one where we saw a guy come out of the pit with his eye socket crushed the year before that.

This year we showed up for the last four bands at the Congress on Saturday night. Almost immediately we saw an 18 year old kid walking around in a TSOL shirt and the bartender had his first chance to get his damn-kids-get-off-my-lawn on. "Please, that band broke up before that kid was even born," he lamented (sort of, in that no original members were left after 1990). We headed down to our usual spot (down near the front to the far right of the stage, near the beer and away from the pit, with the rest of the old people) just in time for Strike Anywhere.

Just a note for my friends who don't frequent punk rock shows: the pit is a space generally right in front of the stage where people basically slam into one another on purpose, which is allegedly fun. A circle pit is a space either there or just behind there where these same people frantically run around in a circle while slamming into each other on purpose, and bears a strong resemblance to a stampede of jacked up apes. This is also apparently fun. Anyone can go slam/run around in these spaces BUT it is important to be prepared for the fact that as you are slamming into people, other individuals will also be slamming into you, and you'd better damn well be prepared for it. There are no safe zones in the pit. Those are the rules. This is why I found it hilarious when the weirdo guy with the Santa Claus beard who was standing still in the middle of the circle pit waving his arms like he was directing traffic got noticed by one of the stampeders, who promptly ran directly at him at full speed and knocked him flat on his ass. (Side note to the other people in the circle pit: the reason your circle fell apart is because you started it at the beginning of a four minute long song. No one wants to keep running for four whole minutes. You know the songs. Pick a shorter one next time you assclowns.)

As Leftover Crack took the stage, our safe zone away from the pit was invaded by a lone lunatic, who created a one man pit for himself by pacing back and forth like a lion stalking its prey and intermittently hugging random people while screaming into their face. He was hilarious, but his flailing around reminded me that the bartender hasn't fully recovered from his surgery. Even on the sidelines things can happen, so I took the opportunity to position myself on his left side at a slight angle, so I could be his bodyguard against stray dancers. This came in handy when some girl in a big fucking hurry to get down front decided that she didn't have time to politely slide between people like a normal person and instead came running through the crowd throwing elbows like Kevin fucking Garnett. She got me square in the ribs and I was sore most of the next day.

Suicide Machines were on next (Riot Fest has a history of bands reuniting to play it, which is how I got to see Screeching Weasel a couple years ago) and, while they did rock, they didn't leave us feeling any younger. "Yes, I'm talking to you young lady," the singer said to a girl down front. "ARE YOU READY TO POGO?" Most of the crowd responded by screaming and doing just that. I tested out my readiness for pogoing by bouncing on my toes a little bit. Flakes of rust started falling off my knees and I informed the bartender I was too old to pogo. "Me too," he said, without even bothering to check the status of his knees. He knew.

The headliners of the night were the Descendents, who were absolutely fucking phenomenal. Additionally, I finally felt less decrepit when Milo Aukerman decreed that "Thou shalt not commit adulthood". Given that he bears a remarkable resemblence to my dad I decided to take that to heart.

The Descendents alone would have been worth the cost of admission, but the glory of Facebook came through to make this the best Riot Fest ever by informing me of a secret promotion at Taboo Tabou entitling me to 50% off any vibrator in the store with my Riot Fest ticket stub and/or wristband. You better believe I was all over that. I took advantage of the brilliant weather Sunday afternoon and walked down to procure my very first Lelo for the bargain basement price of $80. Worth it? The only reason I'm typing this post is because I'm recharging it already.

Even More Commericals I Hate

2011-10-05T14:23:00.001-05:00

Today is not a good day. Yesterday wasn't so hot either. The good news? I watched a lot of television because of it, and in so doing, became aware of a whole new crop of commercials that I hate. Please enjoy my misplaced rage!

It's popcorn chicken time again at KFC! I love this. It is, in fact, the only time I ever voluntarily eat at KFC. This time around, though, their promotional material for this glorious event is suspect. The premise is not so bad - popcorn chicken is really small pieces of actual chicken, whereas nuggets as found in other fast food establishments is some sort of ground up and reconstituted mish-mash of bits. Therefore popcorn chicken is superior to chicken nuggets. Fine, I'm on board with that. What I'm not down with is their expression of this, i.e. "What part of the chicken is 'nugget'?" I don't know, asshole, what part of the chicken is "popcorn"? Popcorn ain't no body part I ever heard of. I agree that your chicken gets the blue ribbon in this contest of mediocrity, but you can't justify that by claiming the competition's chicken isn't a body part and then naming yours something that is ALSO not a body part. That's an easy mistake to fix - just leave your snarky comment out of the commercial and carry on explaining it without resorting to poorly executed sarcasm that makes no fucking sense. Now pass me the honey mustard and fuck off.

As long as we're doing fast food, let's go over the newest offering from Subway, shall we? The promotion they have going on right now is that all of their foot long subs are $5 throughout the month of October. Neat! Cheap shitty food! Loads of it! What shall we call this too-much-bread-barely-any-meat extravaganza? Oooo I know! How about Anytober? How about no, dickface? That is the worst portmanteau I have ever seen. You're replacing "Oc" with "Any"? That's not even the right number of syllables. Did you think real hard on this one, or did you just use the first stupid idea that popped into your head because it fits in with your already nauseating theme song? It's my favorite month of the year but from a television watching perspective I can't wait for it to be over so I don't have to see this commercial ever again. Anytober. Eat shit, Subway, you already serve it to your customers.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled, less rage inducing advertisements.

Sibling Fight (Except It's With My Best Friend's Sibling, Not Mine)

2011-10-03T22:49:00.002-05:00

E-Town: how's the runnin?

Me: there is zero chance i will be ready. or ever do this again
zombies and [H-Town], i keep telling myself. zombies and [H-Town]

E-Town: you're tougher than that
just do a slow jog

Me: it's warm enough this week to go running outside again, so that's a bonus

E-Town: that's good
make me proud of ya

Me: still wish you could make it :)

E-Town: yeah, me too
we can kill them in Indy next year
I might try two of them next year

Me: that's crazy talk. I would potentially be a zombie next year though

E-Town: I'd punch your face if you came near me as a zombie

Me: you aren't allowed to hit the zombies
so nah
imma take all your flags
anyway, home go time. have a great night!

E-Town: I'd hit you.
night

MrSteve May Know Too Much

2011-10-02T16:11:00.000-05:00

MrSteve called Friday morning for a chat, and ended up getting more than he bargained for (don't worry, he's used to it). Specifically, he got some (slightly) greater detail on my encounters with the stranger than I went into on the blog. Which really just confirmed what he'd already assumed, to wit:

"I kind of figured something happened because that's how you shake hands."

I resemble that remark a bit too much to be offended.

England Trip Do Over - Part 4

2011-09-30T18:34:00.003-05:00

After a few false starts on Sunday, I finally managed to get out of the hotel and meet the mutineer at the Red Hart for a delicious lunch of various things that had been fried (ordering a meal all on my own the night before had depleted my social bravery reserves, so I got him to order for me in exchange for buying him some chips*). We ate over an intense discussion about playing in bands and the relative superiority of +44 over Angels and Airwaves, which we both agreed was steaming pile of emo horseshit. I also had two Strongbows. I should have realized ahead of time that this would turn out to be a mistake later on, but I was distracted by my delightful company and the onion rings. After lunch we headed back to the hotel where the mutineer kept me company for a few hours until the day's main event.

Steve had been telling me for weeks that he was going to have me tend bar in his pub while I was over. I had been telling him he had no idea what he was saying for just as long. "I think you'd be a natural at it," he told me, despite my repeated explanation of how I already knew that wasn't true: a) I have crippling social phobias and b) I break and/or spill EVERYTHING I touch. When I told the bartender of Steve's plans over dinner one night he dropped his fork in shock and asked if Steve had ever actually met me. Luckily, events transpired that prevented him from implementing this ludicrous idea. Instead, he came to the hotel to pick me up, where I showed off the coils of rope that had been left behind on Saturday before heading down to the car park where we stood in awe for 10 minutes watching a black squirrel frolic by a tree (hey, it's not every day you see a black squirrel).

We headed out to a place called The Rusty Gun, obviously the most appropriate place to take an American visitor to dinner. It's also one of the most appropriate places to take Steve for dinner. As he will be the first to tell you (the comic will be the second), Steve only eats weirdo food. Take him anywhere in the world, and his instinct is to find the most outrageous thing on the entire menu and then order it. He's the exact opposite of me, really. No matter where I go, I pretty much only eat four things - pasta, hamburgers, prawns and dessert. It's because I know I like these things, and I want to make sure I do not starve to death because I ordered something I might potentially hate. Steve, on the other hand, is on a perpetual culinary adventure.

I will now go back on what I just said about myself in the previous paragraph. I order the same things over and over again everywhere, mostly, except that when I'm in England something weird happens to me where I suddenly decide it's time to try some new vegetables. I don't know why this happens - maybe it's because certain things are more common there than here or maybe it's because I'm drunk a lot - but my first trip over to see the comic I ate some parsnips in an attempt to appease his mother (the poor woman nearly short circuited when he told her I didn't eat potatoes and almost gave up on making me a roast dinner altogether. Instead she went overboard and made about twelve sides in the hope that I might like at least one of them) and I have been addicted to them ever since. For starters I had prawns (see?) and Steve ordered the soup of the day, which was celeriac. I'd never heard of it. "It's a root vegetable," he told me. "Try it." I was dubious, owing to the word "vegetable" which typically connotes "horrible things are about to happen in the vicinity of your taste buds" to me. But he wouldn't drop it, so I borrowed his spoon and (after a rambling description of Don Hertzfeldt's animated short Rejected when he gave me the crazy eye for holding it up and shouting "My SPOON is too big!") tentatively tasted the soup. Immediately, Beethoven's "Ode To Joy" began to play. Diamonds rained down from the sky, a pile of kittens appeared out of nowhere and a bevy of angels hovered nearby smiling benevolent smiles at us. Celeriac is DELICIOUS, and I made him write it down for me so I could look it up later and see if we even had it here (we do, but it's called celery root), which he did while I inhaled pretty much all of his soup.

It was at around this point when the trouble started. We'd gotten a beer at the bar before being seated and then ordered a bottle of wine to go with our dinner (me, something that had the word beef in it and seemed safe, him I don't even know what the fuck) which I drank what I felt was more than my fair share of because he kept insisting he was driving. Then our waiter, a charming and ingratiating man who resembled a young Lurch with a shaved head, brought over the dessert menu which had something on it that contained the word "chocolate" three separate times in its description. Obviously I made Steve order it for me, thus giving him the opportunity to order us some dessert wine as well. You may recall I was two ciders into the day before Steve had even shown up. Consequently, by the time we left I was well and truly fucked.

Steve drove me back to the hotel, where clearly the only thing to do was head for the hotel bar and pour more cider down my throat. We phoned Nat the Evil Lesbian to join us, and together we hatched diabolical but hilarious plans for when I return in March. Our laughter seemed to attract the attention of the people at the next table - a nice couple from Lincolnshire who may or may not have been at the wedding the previous day (I asked them but don't remember their answer because I was piss drunk). After Steve left (early, I decided, even though it wasn't. I had gotten the Loud), Nat and I joined them at their table where we regaled them with tales of how we'd met and what we'd done all week and they told us about their grown children (or something, I was drunk). They were genuinely disappointed when we rose to leave and even more so when I explained that my level of drunkenness would most likely prevent me from meeting them for breakfast before they went home in the morning. It did.

I woke up Monday and was not any more English or 20 years old than I had been earlier in the week. I was supposed to have lunch with Felix and Charlie and their progeny. When Felix texted me to let me know something had come up and they couldn't make it, I gratefully went back to bed until the middle of the afternoon. I only got up again in order to collect the stranger from Hitchin station, who had cleared a few hours of his schedule to spend the afternoon with me tying knots in things and showing off some tools he carries around in a very nice pair of cashmere socks. I was starving by the time he left and decided to go out for a delicious roast dinner (no parsnips, sad sad). That accomplished, there was nothing left to do but pack up my things (and my new rope) and try to catch a few hours sleep before catching a bus to the airport for my flight home (I didn't. Instead I called the bartender and had him put the cat on the phone so I could tell her I was on my way home because I am insane).

Even when I've been away somewhere brilliant, and even when I leave somewhere before I really feel ready to go home, I always feel an enormous sense of relief as soon as I'm back on the ground in Chicago - it's how I know I'm in the right place. I was grinning from ear to ear the entire cab ride back to my apartment. When I got there, I discovered that my amazing roommate had bought me two bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos (I do not know what they do to the Doritos in England, but it isn't good), some Reese's peanut butter cups and a huge pumpkin (he would later tell me it's my "practice" pumpkin to help me decide what to carve on my real Halloween pumpkin). Home sweet home.

I'll see you in March, Hitchin.

*Fries.

England Trip Do Over - Part 3

2011-09-26T12:01:00.001-05:00

I woke up Friday to brilliant sunshine and a wide open day. Both of these things are atypical of all my previous trips, so I was very excited. I wandered around by myself for a bit, simply because I could. The one thing I made it a point to do was wander up Tilehouse Street because it is my favorite street in the world. Since I grew up with an English family as a huge part of my extended one, I'd been hearing about it all my life, and had developed a picture of what England looked like in my own head which was shaped entirely around the loose oral history I'd been hearing about since I was 3. My first time visiting the comic he had taken me on a walking tour of Hitchin, which I thought was lovely, right up until we hit the bottom of Tilehouse Street, where I stopped in my tracks and stood with mouth agape. That was it. That was my England. Apart from its not being constantly shrouded in mist (and I've been told to come back at a different time of year because it will be), Tilehouse Street was exactly what I had been picturing all my life. It was like someone had mined my brain, extracted that image and had it built in real life. The comic insisted that was to be expected, as my family was from St. Albans which is just down the road and looks very similar, but I wasn't having it. Magic had just happened. I wanted to stay there forever.

Tilehouse Street

I was getting pretty hungry, having not eaten the night before, and had decided to call Nat the Evil Lesbian to see if she wanted to meet for lunch, but decided first to have a walk through the arcade. Which is where I simply ran into her. It was my second time bumping into someone I knew and I was probably overly excited, as walking around town bumping into people is basically her job desciption. We went and got some lunch which we ate on the lawn at St. Mary's Church, and which led to the only dark point of what was an otherwise perfect day: on finishing our lunch, we were about to throw our rubbish in the bin* when Nat exclaimed, "Oh look, there's a giant spider in there!" There was. A giant, GIANT spider. Like, huge. Like, way bigger than any spider in England has a right to be, because listen up England, one of the reasons that I go there is because there are not supposed to be any huge bugs that can get me, ESPECIALLY not spiders. THIS IS WHY I DON'T GO TO AUSTRALIA OR BRAZIL. You are supposed to be a safe haven for me, and you are RUINING my fantasy of a land of tiny harmless bugs with your ridiculously large bin spiders. CUT IT OUT. Nat, the one who is terrified of actors dressed up in scary outfits who pose no real threat to her whatsoever, for some reason decided to THROW HER THINGS IN THE BIN ANYWAY, thus disturbing the giant spider which obviously WAS a threat to our lives and making me scream like an idiot, "What the fuck do you think you are doing? THERE ARE OTHER BINS. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

When I'd calmed down a bit and thrown my own rubbish away in a different, spider free bin (I made her check before I would get near it), she went about doing the tour guide portion of her town ranger job, and took me inside the church, to meet the coffee guy in the square, and to her office where I bought a bunch of souvenirs including a bottle of delicious apple juice to take home (which did not end up lasting even 24 hours). Right around this time, I got a text from MrBalls, who was on his way into town with his best friend, her husband and their offspring. I went off to meet them at Halsey's for tea where we ended up having the best waiter ever. First of all, he had no idea what cakes they had, so we sent him in to go check. When he came back he still didn't know what one of them was. "It looks like the apple ones, but the decoration on the top is different so I think maybe it's not. But the woman who brings the cakes said this morning that she had changed some of the decorations so it might be. I really don't know." I fell in love with him. After our tea and a fork duel, MrBalls and I popped over to see Felix at his salon before heading to a birthday party at the Sunrunner.

We were early, and so we got our beers and sat outside waiting for the others with one other friend, the mutineer, who had shown up when we did. People started trickling in one at a time, most of whom I didn't know but was introduced to by MrBalls, Nat or Sulu. Much of the night is fuzzy because beer! What I do remember is MrBalls saying the mutineer was the most perverted person he knew, which made my head spin around fast enough to cause whiplash so I could argue the point - they both conceded when I pulled my pink bullet vibrator out of my purse, turned it on and started poking the mutineer in the arm with it. Later, after the party started winding down, he was kind enough to walk me home and make sure I made it safely into my bed.

The next day I got up late and had time for very little other than to have some tea and a shower and get sort of dressed before heading to the train station to collect the stranger, who was spending the afternoon in Hitchin with me. I walked him through the square pointing stuff out as if I owned the place, and we stopped for some coffee and a snack at the coffee stand where I greeted Rick the coffee guy like I'd known him all my life. A light rain dissolved into an absolutely beautiful afternoon, which I missed entirely due to the fact I spent all of it indoors. However, it seemed to be thoroughly enjoyed by the wedding party going on in the hotel right outside my open window, which we spied on in between various attempts to disrupt it.

After walking the stranger back to the train station, I realized it was getting a bit late (by Hitchin standards) and I had better find something to eat before the whole place closed down. This led me to do the unthinkable: I discovered a restaurant BY MYSELF, went inside it BY MYSELF, ordered dinner AND dessert BY MYSELF and somehow got through all of those things without dying or bursting into tears. I got a text from the comic sadly informing me of our F.C.'s latest humiliation (which I had wisely chosen not to watch) and text-gossiped with Nat about our respective transgressions the previous evening.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am not English and I am not 20, and my liver can only handle so much abuse. Consequently, instead of going out on the most lively night of the week, I called it a night and went to bed. Besides, I was meeting Steve for dinner the next day, and I had not yet spent an evening with Steve that didn't end with the room spinning. Sunday would not turn out any different.

*trash in the garbage can

England Trip Do Over - Part 2

2011-09-24T22:42:00.002-05:00

There are two things I forget every time I go to England: 1) I am not English and 2) I am not 20. I woke up at 7:00 a.m. Wednesday morning with a raging hangover and wanted nothing more than to down a glass of water, roll over and go back to sleep. It was not to be. We had planned a trip to Thorpe Park which everyone had been looking forward to for a month, and begging off because I drank too much was not really an option. I got dressed sitting on the floor of my room and made it downstairs to the car where Sulu, MrBalls and i.c. hater were waiting on Nat and me. "Good morning!" grinned i.c. hater as I slid into the backseat.

"No," I replied. We collected Nat and headed out. Now here's the thing: I love roller coasters. LOVE them. But some years ago I started noticing a change in my constitution. I had always gotten a bit motion sick on long car rides, but at some point in the mid 90's I realized that I was starting to get motion sick going on roller coasters. One particular trip to Cedar Point ended with me collapsing in tears - I'd gone on three brilliant coasters and was so shaken up and nauseous I was sure I would never be able to ride again. Luckily, I quickly discovered the joy of Dramamine and my thrill riding ways were able to continue. I was totally pumped, despite my hangover. "Even if I puke after every ride," I announced as we walked in, "I am going to RALLY LIKE A CHAMP." We got on the first coaster and I kicked my feet happily as we chugged up the first hill. And then we plunged down it.

You guys. There is no amount of motion sickness medication in the world that can counteract the effects of both motion sickness AND being hungover at the same time. I came off the ride almost in a daze from how bad I felt. We ended up settling into a pattern where I would go on two coasters in a row and then sit one out while I recovered. This worked out really well since as it turns out, Sulu is kind of a giant pussy about roller coasters and I often had her for company.

The newest attraction at Thorpe Park is Saw. There are two rides: an absolutely insane roller coaster with a drop that is greater than vertical and a sort of haunted house type thing. We went for the haunted house first. Along the way we had picked up a couple more friends, so the seven of us plus the four or five people behind us were lined up train style with hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them and sent inside. We were immediately accosted by a terrifying man who went straight for Nat (she was in between Sulu and me), prompting her to scream, or rather screech "STOP TOUCHING ME!" This had the effect of basically painting a target on her, and in every subsequent room the monster people seemed to go straight for her. I got through the entire thing mostly ignored while Nat kept up a steady stream of screaming and yelling: "STOP TOUCHING ME! GO AWAY! FUCK OFF!" The situation wasn't helped by the fact that our friend at the front of the line was as terrified as Nat was and was leading the line along at a pace that made it seem as if her shoelaces had been tied together.

Next up was the roller coaster. There was a queue*, so we were idly chatting while we waited when someone brought up Ben & Jerry's ice cream (this happens every time MrBalls and I are anywhere near each other) and led to a comment from i.c. hater to the effect that he hates ice cream (i.c. hater! Get it?). We demanded clarification. "Well, I don't like the way it is so cold. It's really a bit agro, isn't it?" The rest of us were all perplexed, but true to his word he refused to eat it any of the Half-Baked pint we bought on the way home.

This time around, it was Sulu who became hysterical on the ride. She was sat between Nat and me for moral support, and the both of us were patting her legs reassuringly as we went (straight) up the hill and she babbled uncontrollably. At the top of the hill she started screaming and she did not stop for the entire ride. She was physically shaking when we came off it. I was a bit shaken up as well, but it was of the hangover variety, so as the rest of the group prepared to get back in the queue, I was fully prepared to sit it out with a PTS Sulu. Except that when the suggestion was made to go again, she was the first one to agree, and then she RAN to the entrance. It was impressive actually, I don't think we could have paid Nat to go back in the haunted house.

Saw the roller coaster. Note that the way up the hill is vertical. Sulu was not a fan.

The drive home was much more lively than the drive out had been and, as previously mentioned, we stopped for a pint of B&J's which four of the five of us shared, though the bulk of the thing was consumed by myself and MrBalls. Also at some point we invented the term "Dickmuff".

The next day I was feeling much better, which was important because I had some seriously grown up plans, y'all. Specifically, I managed to get to Hitchin rail station, buy a ticket and a return from the nice ticket counter man, get myself on a train to Kings Cross in London and then find the prearranged meeting point at St. Pancras station all by myself LIKE A MOTHERFUCKING ADULT. I was meeting a total stranger, hence the bright purple, highly recognizable hair. I'd been internet stalking him for some seven years, and realizing that I could do whatever I wanted on this trip and that I had nothing to lose, I'd e-mailed him and asked if he would be interested in meeting me for a drink. I should back up a bit. The stranger is sort of my idol, internet-wise. His writing is spectacular and is the standard by which I judge all other websites of similar material. I'm not the only one who has noticed, either - his site is fairly popular. So when I sent the e-mail, I wasn't really expecting there to be a response, let alone that the response would be "yes" and "I'll clear my afternoon for you." I figured it would get lost in the sea of fan mail he must get constantly, or that perhaps he doesn't bother to arrange meet-and-greets with potentially crazy fangirls from the internet. I immediately freaked out because HOLY CRAP WHAT AM I GOING TO WEAR and also shitshitshit what if I can't think of anything interesting to say? By the time of my trip we'd been corresponding for a few weeks so I was marginally less nervous (though not comfortable enough to do something intelligent like wear shoes intended for walking in, given that he had told me we'd be walking a fair amount. Instead I wore heels because looking good seemed way more important and I like to pretend to myself that I'm hardcore). We went for lunch and had tapas (my first time, somehow I had missed out on this brilliant cuisine for the first 33 years of my life) and then went and found a coffee shop that served genuine for real delicious coffee, which I took a photo of because I had never seen real coffee before anywhere in England. It was a wonderful afternoon and went by very quickly. The stranger had another engagement, so we made plans for later in the week and then I went home (by taking the tube back to Kings Cross because I am VERY MATURE).

Back in Hitchin I discovered the one thing that would make life in a small town in England difficult for me (actually the second of two things. As I apparently told everyone repeatedly while drunk, what I would miss about Chicago if I moved is that I can get Mexican food made by real Mexicans when I am drunk at 5 in the morning, and in England even if I could find something open that late (unlikely) it would almost certainly be curry and I don't like curry. Tacos!): everything shuts ridiculously early. Well, I say everything, but I mean everything decent - Subway was still open when I got back, but I didn't go for it. I was starving but there was no way I was eating Subway, which I can get at home, while I was in England. It's the principle of the thing. Instead, I went home and made myself some hot chocolate, surfed the internet for a while and went to bed. I had an adventure planned for the next day insofar as I had absolutely nothing planned at all and was going to be truly on my own as far as how to entertain myself. Shut up, it was very exciting for me.

*Line.

England Trip Do Over - Part 1

2011-09-23T22:22:00.001-05:00

I got two entries into my chronicle about my trip to the UK in May before I found out what I suspected all along - I shouldn't have gone. But I did go, and on my last night there, not only did I FINALLY get to spend some quality time with my Hitchin friends, but I even managed to meet and instantly befriend a few more, most notably MrBalls. And since I'd already scheduled the time off work in September for a different trip I wouldn't be going on, I decided to take a mulligan on that first trip, go back to England and do the things I wanted to do the first time.

It is amazing how much easier it is to pack for a longish trip overseas when you don't have to pack five pairs of shoes, twenty ridiculous outfits and a dozen sex toys. In fact, I wound up taking a much smaller suitcase, which was enormously handy during my travel marathon of the brown line to downtown, the blue line to the airport, the tram to the international terminal, a plane across the ocean, the longest line to clear customs ever, the tube to Kings Cross and a train to Hitchin, where blessedly MrBalls was there to pick me up in a car I'm pretty sure he bought specifically for its strong resemblance to a storm trooper helmet (also the smaller suitcase allowed my colleagues at work to make fun of the neon kitty cat paw prints I'd painted all over it to make it recognizable at baggage claim). After checking in at the hotel, we headed across the street and had a beer while we awaited the arrival of Nat the Evil Lesbian who was joining us for lunch. After some nice Italian food with another beer and a trip to Just Desserts for a piece of cheesecake that tasted like angels having sex in my mouth paired with a delicious pear cider, we started casting about for something to do for the rest of the day. This was important: I'd been up for over 24 hours but sleeping was not an option. The only way to get through the jet lag associated with long distance travel is to power through that first day and not go to bed until everyone else does. Obviously what I needed were mass amounts of depressants. For this we headed down The Vic*, which seems to qualify as my local despite the fact that I don't even live in the same country. There we picked up a couple more friends, i.c. hater and the beautiful Sulu. Unfortunately, we also picked up a completely random drunk at the next table. I'm not sure how this happened, though I suspect it had something to do with my hair (Melle had cut it several days before under the instruction that she make me instantly recognizable to a complete stranger in the middle of London. She translated that into bright purple with some red peeking out around my face, which for some reason does not get you a free upgrade on Virgin Atlantic). Regardless, I made the same mistake I always make - I was nice to the idiot and then we couldn't get rid of him. It wasn't so bad at first. He was annoying, but also seemed quite taken with my foreignness, right up until I corrected him that my accent wasn't Canadian but American, at which point all hell broke loose. Suddenly I went from adorable purple haired tourist to wayward insolent colonist. "You're our CHILDREN!" he shouted at me while I ill advisedly stoked the fire by loudly giving thanks to France for financing our revolution and for the lovely statue. When he called MrBalls fat, we took it as our signal to leave and went down the road to a different pub, where we met up with Sulu's old school friend who was freakishly tall and where I had my first accidental run in with someone I know. The Canadian barmaid from The Vic was drinking at a table with some nice gentleman (who would later engage me in a fabulous compare and contrast conversation (cricket/baseball, rugby/American football) which for once didn't involve an argument over which version was better) and we recognized each other. And then I got the Loud. "OH MY GOD NAT I JUST RANDOMLY RAN INTO SOMEONE I KNEW IN HITCHIN," I screamed at her, apparently repeatedly all night long. After several hours of this, Nat finally walked my drunk ass back to the hotel. We had to be up early the next morning for our day at Thorpe Park.

*Or, in the American vernacular, down to The Vic.

England Trip Do Over: Preview

2011-09-22T11:14:00.001-05:00

There will shortly be a series of blog posts up about my trip to England last week, but until I get them up, here's a conversation I had with Fish on the subject of my more untoward activities during my trip to tide you over til I have a real post written:

Fish: so will you be keeping in contact with this person?

Me: i imagine, from time to time
oh and i got to keep all the rope

Fish: I saw the Facebook post. The Man didn't give you no trouble with that at the airport?

Me: Well it was in my checked bags and also, they are not insane over there. I didn't even have to take off my shoes

Fish: No full body scans? That's too bad

Me: I know right? HOW WILL THEY KNOW IF I HAVE A BOMB IN MY VAG?

Fish: recon team

Me: oh well, ok then. that's way better anyway

Running Update: Week Two

2011-08-31T16:01:00.000-05:00

I think the status of my running experiment is best summed up in this conversation with H-Town's brother, runner extraordinaire:

E-Town: how's the running?

Me: I want to stab everything.
btw, I learned this: Do not run on the same day you have burlesque class. FYI

E-Town: haha, ok

Me: my legs are like spaghetti today

E-Town: thin and tasty?

Me: limp and wrapped around a fork

I seriously look like I have just now discovered my knees and I'm still getting used to them. I was confused about why my body was rebelling against this so much - the running part I understand, but I was a dancer for 14 years and I felt like I should be holding up better in the face of pliés and hip circles. Then it dawned on me that the last time I did a plié I was about 17. My body already knew that, and clearly is telling me "No fucking way, lady. You are every day of 33 years old, so stop trying to bend your knees sideways." As with most advice I am given, I've chosen to ignore this, and the 26 seconds of choreography we learned last night has been run in my office today more than once, though I'm not sure if it's because I want to get everything down perfect before the next class or because I like to touch my butt.

Training Day (Or, I Must Be Fucking Crazy)

2011-08-23T18:22:00.001-05:00

You remember that movie Training Day with Denzel Washington, where he's a crooked narcotics officer training Ethan Hawk and all kinds of horrible shit happens? Yeah well my first training day for this 5K I'm running was a lot like that, except with less forcing people to smoke PCP and no one got shot. Though, given the way my legs feel right now, if I were a horse and not a person I would have been taken out back and shot this morning. It's possible I'm being a little over dramatic. It's also possible that I'm not, and that running really does suck as much as I'm telling you it does.

I'm using the highly touted Couch to 5K program, which a number of my friends have done and insist that it works and that they love to run now. I got up yesterday at the ass crack of dawn, slightly wary but also fairly excited. I was going to run! Like those people that I see running! That was going to be me! Day one of the program starts you off slowly: 5 minutes of brisk walking followed by alternating 60 seconds of running with 90 seconds of walking for 8 reps, totaling 20 minutes. This seemed like a no brainer. I can run for 60 seconds at a stretch, right? I'm in excellent shape overall - I lift weights and I shadow box. Piece of cake.

After the first 60 seconds of running I was ready to kill myself. What was I thinking with this whole running bullshit? Am I some kind of idiot? I spent the 90 seconds of my break sifting through my iPod until I found The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up and put it on repeat. It was the only song I had that was angry enough to match my complete hatred of this incredibly stupid form of exercise.

By the time I had finished I'd calmed down a bit, mainly because I knew I was going to get to spend the rest of the day telling people how bad it was and have them pat me on the back and tell me I am awesome sauce. And I did - I bitched and complained about it the entire day to everyone, including Jon and Scott of the incredibly awesome podcast Total Talk Nonsense while I was at their worldwide headquarters recording episode 228 as an in studio guest and being all famous 'n shit. In reality I felt pretty good. I had made it through the whole first workout without giving up, I was energized, confident, proud of myself. I could picture in my mind running the whole 3.1 miles while dodging zombies left and right. I set my alarm for 5 a.m. this morning so I could get up and run the same thing again.

When the alarm went off I was ready. I fucking OWNED that horrible workout yesterday and today would be even easier because I'd already done it! I got out of bed and...

HOLY MOTHERFUCKING CRAP ON A CRACKER. Mentally, I was totes prepared to go out and run. Physically, however, my legs were saying, "Like fuck you are, stupid ass. We're not falling for that shit again. Go away and come back tomorrow." The pain, which originally seemed to be mostly confined to my shins, was tremendous. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed and realized the pain in my upper thighs was even worse than the pain in my shins. Then I stood up again to go wash my face and to my utter astonishment noticed that my ass was actually on fire. Really? My ASS hurts from this? Because, as I said before, I lift weights frequently and there's squatting down and lunging types of things I do that work those muscles and I KNOW that my ass is in shape and what the fuck? H-town's brother, who started out on the same couch to 5K program and now can run like the wind, told me that the reason my ass hurts is because running works the muscles in a different way than weight lifting does. By "different way" I assume he means "the way of the devil". I was obviously not running anywhere today. As a matter of fact, the little bit of walking I did between the train and the places I needed to go saw me stumbling around downtown Chicago like Lurch and frightening all the children and several adults.

If it wasn't for the fact that I love H-town and really want to do something cool with her and also the part about the zombies I would just give up this very minute. I am right now sat on my couch and plotting out my plans for the evening based around doing the bare minimum of moving possible. Because my legs...oh lord, my legs. The Run For Your Lives zombie 5K is October 22nd. Beginning October 23rd I am NEVER RUNNING AGAIN.

I Do, However, Love The Game "Arguments With Friends"

2011-08-17T12:21:00.000-05:00

Just an FYI: Blogger spell check corrected four words I had misspelled in this conversation alone

Fish: you should get words with friends
its basically scrabble
but you can lose to me

me: you're the hundredth person to say that and i will tell you what i told everyone else - i can't play any scrabble based games because i can't fucking spell

Fish: see
but this one
tells you when it's not a word
and it uses the scrabble dictionary
but if you try and make up a word
it is like "go fuck yourself"

me: but if i type a word that i know is a word and i just have it spelled wrong will it suggest "did you mean..."? like a normal online dictionary does?

Fish: no mam

me: yeah, not playing that

Fish: pussy

me: you are also forgetting that i am entirely antisocial and don't want to play much of anything with my friends
you'd be like "let's play a game!" and i'd be like "yes, let us both play a game...separately"

Fish: right
and you can
it's not real time
its almost like you are playing over email
you play a word
and then the other person plays a word when they have their ipad and 10 minutes to burn
i am playing one person right now who hasn't played a word in 10 days

me: oh good, because that's how long it would take me to figure out how to spell a word

Fish: Drama queen is actually 2 words

me: so is suck it

You May Say To Yourself, "My God, What Have I done?"

2011-08-16T15:32:00.001-05:00

I wasn't kidding about that sentence at the end of the last post. As of yesterday, H-Town and I are officially signed up to run a 5K together in Baltimore in October. We are neither of us runners. H-Town is in fact quite fond of saying she would never run unless she was being chased. Someone evil obviously overheard that, because this is no ordinary 5K race - it is a 5K race with an obstacle course built into it and you do all these things while being chased by zombies.

I have no idea what possessed me to think I should do this, really. It's like I saw the phrase "chased by zombies" and laughed so hard at the very idea that I didn't even notice I was signing myself up to run three GIANT MILES, because if I had noticed, I'd have been like "What the fuck is this bit about the running? Uh-uh. FUCK. THAT." and, you know, not done that. You guys, I HATE running. I really, really hate it. I am that girl in the morning that pisses you off walking idly up the stairs to the train platform when you are late for work and the train is pulling up right now and oh my god, bitch, can't you hear the train is coming? GET OUT OF MY WAY. Dude. No. There is no way I am running up the stairs to catch this train because guess what? It is rush hour and there will be another train in, like, five minutes, so chill out because I am NOT running.

So yeah, running, not for me, and yet I'm going to have to run pretty much constantly for the next two months or so if I have any hope of surviving the zombie apocalypse that I have somehow managed to talk myself into. Training for a 5K should turn out to be pretty entertaining to you, the ones who are smart enough to just sit there and watch me get chased by zombies instead of doing it yourself. I'll keep you posted. Now then, where IS that large automobile?

I'm With The Band (And Other Things Currently Scaring The Shit Out Of Me Right Now)

2011-08-08T14:45:00.002-05:00

Whenever someone comes along and rips my heart out of my chest, then stomps it into mush, scoops what's left into a glass jar and puts the jar on shelf in a display case to keep as a trophy, I always react in the same way - by immediately engaging in a series of terrifyingly out of character behaviors that outwardly appear to be exciting new ventures but are really half-assed attempts at self-destruction. If I ever tell you I have taken up skydiving as a hobby, have decided to study entomology, or wish I had more opportunities for public speaking, you should probably assume I am actually just very sad and suggest moping about the house in sweatpants eating ice cream out of the carton as a safer alternative.

In news that may or may not be related to the preceding paragraph, I have recently joined a band and taken up burlesque dancing.

I signed up for burlesque classes in what can only be described as a fit of rage - reading through an awful e-mail (!) for the hundredth time, I suddenly went all Right Said Fred, decided I was too sexy for your party, and googled "burlesque lessons chicago" which led me to the fucking brilliant Studio L'Amour and the associated Everleigh Social Club, where after about 15 minutes into my first class, I decided I was going to become a Starlet as soon as possible. Then I actually saw the Starlets perform and thought "Holy shit, I will never be that good". Then I went home and decided I damn well will be that good even if it kills me because there really is no way I'm disco dancing, so I'm just going to have to shake my little tush on the catwalk. Now, I know there are a few people out there who don't know me as well as they think they do, and are wondering why I think taking my clothes off in front of strangers is out of character. I assure you that none of these people have ever seen me naked, and anyone who has knows that this is, in fact, very out of character for me. I'm just saying to watch out, I don't want you to trip over the irony. The point is, I'm doing that.

Almost immediately after signing up for the burly class, I got a message from my dear friend TTN Jon inviting me to audition for a band he was playing in called the Newburys. The singer they had sort of quit unexpectedly, and with a gig coming up they needed someone to fill in pretty quickly. I went to the audition and they liked me, so I started very quickly learning songs since all told we had precisely four rehearsals (including the audition) before the gig. So here's the thing - as much as I like to pretend to be all punk rock n' that, I've really only been to rock shows as a spectator. I've never actually been in a band before. Ever. Sure, I've been on stage singing loads of times, but classical music is an entirely different experience, one that seems custom made for me since having a personality is largely frowned upon. Fronting a rock band, however, almost invariably means talking to strangers, which falls squarely into the bucket of Things Amber Doesn't Do. Another problem - the friends who were coming to see us have all been in rock bands before and know what they are doing and I quickly developed a massive complex about sucking in front of them. I was also wholly convinced I was going to forget all the words, which terrified me until my amazing roommate pointed out that the songs were originals and no one in the crowd actually knew the words, so if I forgot them I could make something up and no one would know the difference.

I spent all day Saturday freaking the fuck out. I would frantically go over songs for an hour, then become worried I was over-preparing and start worrying about something else. Such as what to wear - I walked to Taboo Tabou and bought a corset because I obviously did not own one single thing I could possibly front a rock band in, which I then didn't wear because it seemed like I was trying too hard. Then I got worried I didn't know the words and went back to frantically going over songs. This cycle repeated itself until I finally just said "fuck it" and got in a cab before I could chicken out of the whole thing. This was my best move, really - I had a posse of supportive friends around me who kept me from disintegrating, plus the door guy who gave me some advice on my way in and lifted me off the ground in a giant bear hug on my way out.

I did ok, mostly. I remembered all the words, stayed on pitch and faced out at the audience, where Scott was taking millions of photos for me with my camera and holding my purse (he's a great purse holder, you can tell he's married) and Phil was standing down front giving me a thumbs up and mouthing encouraging things every time I looked at him (which was a lot). What I didn't do was sing particularly loud, move around very much or talk to the crowd really at all. The volume thing was mostly mechanical - many of the songs were at the far end of my range, and all the air in my lungs was being used up to hit the pitch correctly. The lack of movement was less stage fright and more a function of performing really depressing songs. Even with a catchy melody and an upbeat tempo, dancing around to a song with lyrics about spousal abuse seemed fairly inappropriate. Not talking to the crowd? Ok, that was all on me, but for real I HAVE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE so, you know, lay off me. We did well enough that the crazy guy with biking gloves on dancing in front started screaming for ONE MORE! which was really the only time I managed to speak to the crowd. "Oh thanks, but we can't. Seriously. We genuinely do not know any more songs. Really." This was not a lie. (Later crazy guy would say I was good and ask me to "touch" him. I put my hand on his shoulder and he thanked me and left.)

The one thing I hadn't thought to prepare for was that after our set, people I didn't know would come up and talk to me. I really have no idea why I didn't think of that, and it wound up being by far the most frightening part of the whole experience because HOLY SHIT PEOPLE ARE TALKING TO ME. Overall, though, I didn't die, which was where I had set the bar so I win.

Next up on the tour of Shit I Shouldn't Be Doing: I'm going to Baltimore to run a 5K while being chased by zombies. FYI - I don't run. Ever.

Battle Of The Florae

2011-08-02T18:59:00.001-05:00

MrBalls*: my plant is dusty
i'm not sure how to dust it without cleaning every leaf

me: as far as i know that is the only way to clean a plant

MrBalls: it's got a lot of leaves though

me: ok new plan, get very drunk, then wash the plant

MrBalls: good plan, I was hoping to meet someone tonight but she is ill
maybe i'll just clean my plant

me: lol yes, that is a good substitute for a girl. plant.

MrBalls: hmm not sure about that, plants don't do the same things

me: oh right. sorry i was thinking of boys and vegetables

*MrBalls is a relatively new friend who has not appeared on Bizzybiz before. I have no idea what his real nickname is or if he even has one, and making one up based on things I know about him would all sound geeky (because most would have the word geek in them). He's asleep right now (I assume, or possibly drunk cleaning a plant) so I can't ask him about his nickname either. MrBalls comes from a fucking brilliant episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I have absolutely no idea why that popped into my head but suffice it to say it is in no way a reflection on my dear friend or his balls and in fact it does not remind me of him in any way whatsoever. I probably should have gone with something about ice cream (he likes it).

It's Shark Week Again, Y'all

2011-08-02T16:38:00.001-05:00

via icanhascheezburger.com

Resolution (I Think)

2011-08-01T19:28:00.000-05:00

I don't want to count my chickens here or anything, but I think I may have solved my mail delivery problem by outsmarting the post office. Also, I don't actually have any chickens, so can't do a lot of counting of them.

I have received actual mail, not junk mail, real mail addressed to me, at my home, for three of the last four days. Some of it came from people or organizations who recently had things they tried to mail me get sent back. I am cautiously optimistic that this will continue.

So how did I solve the problem? Because contacting the local post office on the internets did not work. Contacting the national post office online didn't work either. Phone calls to customer service, the local post office and the main Chicago branch were wholly ineffective. Complaining about the total lack of assistance when they sent me a survey about my recent USPS.com experience garnered no results whatsoever. I was about to contact the Problem Solvers when I decided to try one more time in a last ditch effort before bringing in the big guns. Because the thing is, the US Postal Service is a huge bureaucracy, right? My telling them, again and again and AGAIN AND AGAIN that I hadn't moved did absolutely nothing to get my mail started because you can tell people they're doing it wrong until you're blue in the face, but unless you figure out a way to get inside the system, nothing is going to change. Well, I figured out a way: I used their online change of address feature and I changed my address from my apartment to...my apartment. That's right, I changed my address from the one where I live to the exact same thing and lo and behold, a few days later I got a confirmation letter with a packet of "Welcome to the neighborhood" coupons from USPS, and shortly thereafter started opening my mailbox and finding actual mail inside it. I've beat them at their own game. Bravo, USPS, you are a worthy opponent, but I watch a lot of Star Trek and I am a master at using logic to defeat the illogical.

SOON! Well, Not Really That Soon, But Still.

2011-07-28T12:23:00.000-05:00

My cousin(ish) Kelly, who is super awesome and loves me so much, had all these airline credits that she needed to use up before they expired. So guess what she did. Can you guess? She booked a trip to Chicago to come see me.

FOR MY BIRTHDAY.

Which is not only THE MOST EPIC BIRTHDAY PRESENT EVER but also has given me a perfect excuse to talk about my mid January birthday in late July. You guys. This might be the best thing that has ever happened to me.

The planning, of course, began immediately. My party is officially called "Amber's Super Ultra Fantabulous Birthtacular Celebration Extravaganza: Now With MORE KELLY!" and features EPIC CAKE (to be announced), party hats for everyone!, possibly some partial nudity and some sort of THINGS! THINGS I tell you! It is not to be missed. Do so at your own peril, because later when everyone is like "Wasn't Amber's Super Ultra Fantabulous Birthtacular Extravaganza with More Kelly the best birthday party that has ever been held at any time on this globe?" you will have to be like "I don't know, I wasn't there" and then everyone will be like "Whoa, way to kill the mood there, Debbie Downer" and then there will be an awkward silence and it will be all your fault and they will think twice about offing you any leftover epic cake. So, you know, probably you should pencil it in.

I've Got Your Dime Right Here

2011-07-26T22:53:00.000-05:00

This is not a post about my cat. Having said that, my evil cat is a tortoiseshell, which if you know anything about torties goes a long way toward explaining why she is so evil. When she sits back on her haunches, her particular brindle pattern makes it look like she's wearing a pair of light brown trousers. This is what I was looking at during dinner this evening that triggered me to start singing to her "I love furry pants, so come on and sit back and lick your paws" to the tune of "I Love Rock and Roll". And that in turn caused me to realize why that song has always bothered me.

I turned to the bartender, who is somewhat older than I am, and asked "Hey, was there a time you can remember when songs played on the jukebox cost a dime? Because I only ever remember them being a quarter. So, like, did she say 'dime' in that song because they used to cost a dime or because 'quarter' had too many syllables?"

The bartender is pretty used to my bizarre conversational tangents by now and has learned it's better to just play along. "They've always been a quarter in my lifetime," he replied kindly while thinking in his head Oh Jesus, not again.

"That's what I thought. We need someone older that can be like 'Hey, back in the 50's a song on the jukebox cost a nickel!' or whatever, but I mean, if it's a right-number-of-syllables issue then 'nickel' doesn't work either. But that still wouldn't make sense because that song is from the 80's and you just said in the 80's songs were a quarter. She wouldn't remember songs costing a dime. So what the hell? That's false advertising! It costs TWO AND A HALF TIMES as much to love rock and roll as what she's telling people!"

The bartender chewed his steak thoughtfully for a moment to give me time to stew and then sagely changed the subject back to the cat in an effort to stop my brain from derailing entirely. It worked for about 10 minutes and then we had this exchange: "She was doing that thing today where she just keeps coming in the room to wake me up and then when she knows I'm awake she walks out of the room again."

"She's so shitty when she's mad."

"And then she went and got one of her bottle caps to bring it in my room and bat it around so I couldn't go back to sleep."

"See, the way it should work is, songs should cost different amounts based on their quality. Like, if you want to play a disco song on the jukebox that should cost a dollar and REAL songs should be a quarter. Or a dime! There should be a premium applied for subjecting the people around you to shitty music is my point."

There was a long pause while I waited for him to agree with my obviously brilliant plan, but all he said was "Wow, you're still on that. Oh well, I tried."

Amberance: TTN Mega-Guest

2011-07-25T16:02:00.000-05:00

I got a Facebook message over the weekend from Max, host of the podcast Countless Screaming Argonauts and friend of my ONE AND ONLY favorite podcast on the whole earth, Total Talk Nonsense. Max writes that he wants to be my Facebook friend because he feels like he knows me. In fact, several people who are TTN listeners have expressed new feelings of familiarity toward me, which I think can be traced back to a couple of events: my hour long appearance on TTN episode 2T4 and my subsequent many hours long appearance on episode 2T5, which for those keeping score at home is the VERY NEXT EPISODE. Yes, for two weeks in a row I was a phone in guest on the greatest podcast going and those conversations appear to have been well received by all (bar one). This can only mean one thing - it is all downhill from here. I have achieved all that I have set out to achieve. Short of someday being an actual in studio, Glenlivet or Jameson or Red Stag drinking live guest, there is nothing else I can think of that would top this moment. If you think of anything, please let me know, because I definitely want to try that something. But I'm not holding my breath.

CHECK ME OUT!

Episode 2T4 (or 224 for those unfamiliar with Scott's inability to speak clearly when drunk) where we discuss two major recent events in my life, neither of which have as yet been detailed here on Bizzybiz, the bartender's brush with death and a challenging game of Shit or Shinola that only ended because avocados are fucking gross. I also do a brief impression of Scott.

Episode 2T5 where I am on for basically the entire show except for the news portion. I would get carpal tunnel listing everything we discussed here, but a random sample of topics we touched on include a vitriolic reaction to my conversation on the previous episode by a person who hadn't actually listened to it, Scott's questionable romantic advice, a discussion of a movie I haven't actually seen, disturbing search terms that have led people to Bizzybiz, tet-anus, the gorgeous but reticent Gene Marteen and what precisely constitutes an "average" American house.

By the time you all listen to both episodes you'll know almost everything worth knowing about me other than what I look like naked and how many grapes I can fit in mouth at the same time. It occurs to me maybe this is a bad idea, as one could argue there would be no reason for anyone to read Bizzybiz again, but I would counter that I am certain to have new terrifying encounters with spiders, new bruises from running into things I know are there and new misadventures that only I could manage to get myself into. There is always more stupidity I can manufacture and you can get that right here.

Learning Curve

2011-07-25T12:43:00.000-05:00

My company moved our offices last week, which has been quite educational as far as getting to know my co-workers and finding out which of them are crazy and which are not, something I will not go into here, less out of privacy issues than out of my not wanting to relive the experience because, seriously, oh my god.

On the whole this has been good. I now have an office of my very own with an actual door and a window and a desk made out of wood. Also I have a weird diagonal beam in the back of my office that half covers the windows and truncates the usable space. Obviously I requested this particular office because I thought it was awesome, not to mention the fact that it is also the last one on the far end of the space, meaning that anyone coming this way is doing so on purpose to see me rather than walking by on their way to somewhere else, thus retaining my status of having the most private space of anyone here, which is good because I take naps under my desk Costanza style on a semi-regular basis (I have a pillow and everything). It is also gloriously RIGHT NEXT TO BROWNSFAN'S OFFICE. On moving in, I promptly tacked up a paper ceiling cat ~~to watch me calculate~~ because the CEO thinks it's really stupid. On the other side of BrownsFan is the CEO's office, in which he has laid out his furniture in a way that causes there to be a long alleyway of empty space to one side of his desk that everyone has had a suggestion as far as how to fill. Bowling alley was an idea. I went pinball machine after learning that he has a Star Trek one IN HIS HOME which he should obviously bring here so that I can play it. He has boringly gone with his own idea: tree. I was disappointed until he told me I could decorate it for Christmas at which point I started jumping up and down and squealing. I WILL DECORATE THE CRAP OUT OF THAT TREE FOR CHRISTMAS. WATCH ME.

Our new offices are located in the office tower portion of a train station, which I explored last week in an attempt to educate myself about my new surroundings. Here's what I've learned:

There are no less than three Hudson News stores in this one train station (that I've found so far), two of which are directly across from one another. I bought a 20 oz. Coke Zero and a small bag of Chex Mix in there for over $7. It would have cost me less than $3 if I'd walked a few more feet to the CVS. I learned not to shop at Hudson News.
There is also an Auntie Anne's Pretzels in here. Dangerous this may become. I am trying to forget that I know that.
The trek to and from the office level floors involves a ride on the escalator. It is a huge pet peeve of mine when people get on an escalator and then just stand there, particularly when it's going down. People: The escalator is NOT A RIDE. Please either walk your lazy ass down the magical moving staircase or move the fuck over so I don't have to kill you.
There is one major drawback to working in a commuter train station, which I discovered almost immediately: at quittin' time, absolutely everyone in the world is trying to get into the place you are trying to leave. And since it's the end of the day and everybody just wants to go home, they will mow you the hell down if you get in their way. Since I am leaving the train station I am, by definition, in their way, and getting home for me is now similar to a very frustrated salmon getting pelted with massive rocks on its way to spawn, except at the end I don't get to spawn. This strikes me as a very cruel joke.

Remember when I said I wasn't going to talk about my co-workers at the beginning? I lied. Back in our old space, all of the offices had glass walls and the rest of the space was a sort of open architecture dealy-o, meaning everyone was pretty much all up in each other's business because you could hear and see everything that was happening. If you wanted to have a private conversation or scratch your ass this was not a good thing, but if you wanted to get someone's attention three desks away you could just call to them whatever it is you wanted. Apparently after 20 some odd years, this practice is a hard one for a few people to break. Despite the fact that we have these amazing walls now and that the layout is not at all designed for line of site to anyone else in the place, there are a few people who continue to yell into the hallway when they want to talk to someone. This is usually met with a yelled back "What?" which in turn leads to louder hallway screaming. BrownsFan and I have been supporting one another in our attempts not to strangle the others, who have not yet noticed, despite our reminders, that we have these amazing inventions called "telephones" and that proper usage of said "phones" would allow one to speak in a regular tone of voice whilst still being heard by the person five rooms away one would like to speak to without disrupting everyone else by screaming at the top of one's lungs. The technology is amazing, it's way beyond our time.

More on this later, and photos when I remember to take some. Currently it is time for my desk nap.

I Will Make Every Conversation About Sex Eventually. Every One.

2011-06-30T15:14:00.003-05:00

The cake master's g-mail chat status read "ANTM is still on?" I had no idea what that meant so I googled it. Mistake.

me: Ok, I had to actually go look up what ANTM is, and now I'm upset that I did that
The cake master: hahaha
it's SO BAD

me: it's to the point where I don't even want to watch tv anymore because even if i'm watching something good there's going to be a commercial for something that flat out sucks

The cake master: haha
very true

me: also the history channel should not be allowed to be called the history channel any more

The cake master: why not?
because of the serious lack of history being broadcast on it?

me: who the hell's idea was it to make a reality show about logging? for reals. wtf?

The cake master: oh i know, it's ridiculous

me: also, discovery channel ghost hunters needs to be called "old houses make noises, get over it"

The cake master: omfg
HAHAHA
indeed
and BBC America needs to be called, "Hey, we have a few British shows"

me: OMG RIGHT? I love TNG n' everything but THAT WAS AN AMERICAN SHOW OH MY GOD STOP

The cake master: I actually emailed them about that once
like, BBC has so many good shows, can't we get a few more instead of TNG?
and they responded it's a popular show and they get good ratings on it

me: "it stars a british guy, what the eff do you want from us?"

The cake master: hahaha
right, now they have Battlestar Galactica
which I love, but COME ON
of course, it stars a british guy too, so I guess I shouldn't complain
a British guy with an American accent

me: There's already a Sci Fi channel. It's called SyFy

The cake master: and it used to show Battlestar Galactica!!

me: i really need to bang patrick stewart. fyi

The cake master: haha nice

me: like, a lot

My Opinion, And I Do Have One

2011-06-29T12:26:00.000-05:00

The Post Office is fucking with me, and I'm starting to feel a little bit stabby about it.

This started way the hell back in May, while the bartender was in the hospital. I didn't even really notice it at first - truth is I don't get all that much mail, what with our modern, instant methods of communication, and it's not unusual to go a few days without seeing anything in the mailbox. But I had ordered a couple of t-shirts and realized that it had been over a week and they hadn't shown up, and that it also seemed to be taking an extraordinarily long time for my Gilmore Girls Season 2 DVDs that I purchased from Amazon to arrive (fuck you, that show is awesome). And just as it was dawning on me that maybe there was a problem, I got phone calls from the place where I rent a storage locker to house all nine of my Christmas trees when it's not the season of Christmas trees and from my insurance company, both of whom snippily informed me that they'd sent me mail that had been returned with no forwarding address and, you know, I really should have informed them of the fact that I was moving ahead of time. Except, um, I haven't moved. In, like, four years. The phone calls came when I was in England, so there wasn't a whole lot I could do at the time.

The nearest I can figure out, the screw up has something to do with my neighbor moving out. This would make some sense - my now former neighbor, while nice enough, is a colossal fucking idiot. Shortly after he first moved in I got notices from both the gas and the electric companies of the cancellation of my accounts and the final bills. As I had not cancelled any accounts I called them up and was told my accounts had been cancelled because I had moved and someone else was living there. I explained that I had NOT moved, someone else most certainly the fuck was not living there and fix it now. Turns out the guy who had moved in across the hall didn't actually know his address and was giving all the utility companies mine. Everything got straightened out, he was all "dude, my bad" and life went on as normal. Except, it seems, that he never did actually learn his address, and when he moved out and changed his address with USPS he again gave them mine. And in the infinite wisdom of the Post Office, they assumed that meant that I had moved, so despite the fact that I had filled out no change of address card they were sending all my mail back from whence it came, with a note saying I had left no forwarding address, which indeed I hadn't, BECAUSE I HAD NOT FUCKING MOVED.

Upon my return, I got in touch with them, explained that I had gotten no mail for an entire month and asked that they please stop doing whatever it was they were doing and go ahead and actually deliver my mail. In the meantime, I got in touch with every single vendor I had purchase something from that had not arrived, and begged them to resend the packages to my office where I seem to have more success with actually receiving mail.

I got a phone call from the post office apologizing and saying the problem had been fixed and for a while it seemed that it had. I got a trickle of things in, occasionally, covered in weird rerouting stickers, and I assumed all was back to normal. Which turned out to be a poor assumption. Again, I started getting a mess of phone calls and e-mails from friends who'd tried sending me things, my employer who'd tried to mail my pay stub, the insurance company who'd sent my cards again only to have them returned a second time - was I sure I hadn't moved? Did I actually know my own address? I fired of a message to them on their website, with the former case number, the name of the person who said it had been fixed, a description of how I knew it had not AT ALL been fixed, and a plea to please ACTUALLY FIX IT. At the bottom where it says "How should we contact you?" I checked off "e-mail" and sent the thing off with the understanding that I would be e-mailed an update within three business days.

I received no such e-mail. Instead I received a voicemail from a man at the post office asking me to call back to "discuss" the issue with a number. Which I called. FOUR TIMES. Four times I called the number he left, and four times it rang and rang and rang for 10 minutes and was followed by a shrill beepy sound and a click. Two days later, the same man called me AGAIN, left the SAME number, which I called again TWO MORE TIMES to the same effect, i.e. NONE. I gave up and resigned myself with having to accept that I might never have home mail service again.

And then, yesterday, I finally get an e-mail from USPS. Does it tell me they've looked into and resolved my issue? Do they ask me for more information on the problem, like dates and such forth? Does it include a working phone number that either gets answered or goes to voicemail? No. It reads thusly:

"The United States Postal Service® (USPS®) would like to thank you for your recent E-mail. Your opinions are very important to the USPS® as we continually monitor and improve customer service.

You can provide feedback on your E-mail experience by completing a brief 5 minute survey. To participate in the survey, click on the Web address below. For your convenience, the survey is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week through July 7, 2011, from any computer with Internet access."

Oh really, post office, you want my opinion do you? WELL HERE IT IS. My opinion is that your entire organization should get stabbed in the eye. Right in the eye, with a blunt pencil. My opinion is that this is a vast conspiracy to try and trick me into paying for a PO Box by pretending to be incompetent at delivering mail to my home. My opinion is that you should actually take some sort of action to resolve the problem before you ask me my opinion about it. My opinion is that I hate you.

Don't Ask Me Questions If You're Not Prepared For The Answer

2011-06-29T11:28:00.001-05:00

In the elevator this morning

The CEO: Hey! What are you listening to?

Me: (putting my iPod away) It's on shuffle.

The CEO: So you don't know what you're listening to?

Me: (skipping ahead) Well that was a Snoop Dogg song, the next one would have been Blink-182, then The Creepshow, NOFX, Cake, oooh The Penguins! (holding it up to show The Penquins' "Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine?)" and grinning in victory)

The CEO: (rolling his eyes) I shouldn't have asked.

Me: How to go from Snoop Dogg to The Penguins in six tracks!

My iPod is a dangerous realm for the uninitiated, people. Don't try this at home.

TBS: Very Funny (Just Not On TV)

2011-06-19T22:38:00.003-05:00

The TBS Just For Laughs comedy festival sponsored by Twix (clearly the most hilarious of all candy bars) was this past week and I was lucky enough to be a part of the very first event AND the very last event, while seeing my future husband and getting a bunch of free candy in between. Every bit of it was fantastic and way the hell funnier than the TBS prime time line up of shows, most of which can be described in almost any way you want except "very funny". But allow me to start at the beginning.

The festival kicked off in the most awesome way possible: by confusing the shit out of tourists. The MP3 Experiment is a flash mob* created by the group Improv Everywhere in which participants download an MP3 to their iPod (or similar), synchronize their watches with the atomic clock on the website, show up in an appointed place wearing an appointed color shirt and at an appointed time everyone presses "play" and follows the instructions. I'd been to one before about three years ago, and while it was fun, it was cold and raining and not a lot of people showed up. Not so this time. I got on the train to go downtown and immediately noticed a group of about five people in solid colored t-shirts of red, green and yellow attempting to covertly drink a batch of vodka and lemonade from a tube they'd rigged to a container in one guy's backpack who were clearly up to the same antics I was. In fact, about 1,000 other people turned out to be up to the same antics I was. I installed myself near the bean and played a quick game of "Who else do I think is playing?" while I waited for it to be 1:30. At 1:30, ~~chaos~~ organization erupted. Here is a short video of it. A few awesome people with no idea what was going on decided it was best to just go with it, and started following us around doing whatever they saw us doing. The highlight for me was during our attempt to make ourselves into a giant target. While crushed in with all the other people wearing green shirts, I found myself looking at two guys standing near me who were looking right back and grinning. "Dude, you're the girl from the train!" one of them said. "I KNEW it! I knew you were playing!" High fives were exchanged, vodka lemonade was shared, memories were made. It was an amazing day**.

The following Thursday, I forewent my usual drinking night at Tai's and instead met up with Mr and MrsTrivia, Mr. and Mrs. Paulblo and Mr. and Mrs. Eldest of the Brothers Whose Last Name Rhymes With Schmongola for dinner at Elephant and Castle before making our collective way over to the Chicago Theater to see Demetri Martin and Some of His Friends Who Are Also Comedians. Demetri Martin, by the way, is going to marry me someday when he finally meets me and falls hopelessly in love with me and my hilarious t-shirts. I wore one to the show which I thought he would like, but as I was sitting in the balcony he didn't see it and instead pulled some other guy up on stage to look at his t-shirt (said guy had asked Demetri what was with his very plain shirt because it wasn't funny and Demetri brought him up for a comparison. Guy's t-shirt was a drawing of Jesus shooting Charles Darwin in the head and read "Evolve this". "So my shirt just has a line on it and isn't funny, and your shirt is what's wrong with America," Demetri observed. Point Demetri). The show and everyone on was hilarious (though I think Kristen Schaal was holding back her best stuff for her own show which makes total sense), in particular Hannibal Buress, who we are seeing again in July. I was sitting in a different place from the others who were downstairs and MrTrivia had graciously offered me a ride home, so we had agreed to meet out front at the end of the show. On the way out I received several complimentary Twix bars which amazingly happened to be the exact size of fun:

This is precisely how big fun is.

Outside , I walked over close to the street and began scanning the crowd for MrTrivia and/or the rest of our party. Seeing none of them, I texted him and said "I'm already outside! What do I win?"

"I am too right in front. Where r u?" he responded.

I looked around for him some more but didn't see him. "Right in the middle near the street" I replied and continued looking. As I did so, I noticed a tallish man standing right in front of me turn around slowly. Upon sighting me he said "Seriously?" We'd been standing right next to each other for five minutes without noticing.

The festival closed last Sunday with a show titled Steve Martin and Martin Short in a Very Stupid Conversation. When I saw that Steve Martin was coming to town I freaked a little. I've been wanting to see him live since I was about 7 years old, right around the first time I saw the King Tut clip from SNL in re-run. A good chunk of my childhood was spent next door with my best friend Mary watching Dirty Rotten Scoundrels nearly every other day (also we were watching a lot of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies for which I have no explanation save that we were very young). Martin Short is no slouch either, and the show opened with various clips of their work, including their appearance together in The Three Amigos, a little Ed Grimly and the absolutely legendary Great Flydini. They then had a piss funny conversation in which they interviewed one another, Short interviewing Steve martin about himself, Martin interviewing Martin Short about what he thought of Steve Martin. Martin Short sang a song, Steve Martin played the banjo (brilliantly - there's a reason the man's won 4 Grammys) and then Short returned to the stage and interviewed Steve Martin again as Jiminy Glick. Meanwhile, I was pissing myself, had tears streaming down my face and laughed so hard and so long my abs still hurt four days later. It was funny on an absolutely insane level that should not be achievable without performance enhancing drugs and well worth the quarter century wait.

Demetri: Call me.

*Note to the City of Chicago, CPD and Chicago area news outlets: the crime spree you've been witnessing this summer involving roving bands of teenagers ganging up on individuals in the downtown area to beat up and rob them which you all have been calling a flash mob? Stop doing that. Try group thugging, gang activity, or some other wording of your choice. That is not what flash mob means.

**It started out that way anyway. In case anyone is wondering what happened to the other two posts I was planning about my trip to England, due to an e-mail (!) I received when I got home from flash mobbing, I just don't feel like writing them anymore. Sorry.

Spell Check Break

2011-06-10T12:36:00.000-05:00

Blogger spell check doesn't like real Welsh words any better than the ones I made up. VOWELS, DAMN IT, USE VOWELS.

Britannia 2011 - Parte The Seconde

2011-06-10T12:34:00.001-05:00

Chester

Chester is an old Roman city near the border with Wales, and one of the best preserved walled cities anywhere in Britain. It is well defended to this day - the comic and I drove past our hotel and all the way back around the ring road no less than four times because all roads either lead away from it, are one way streets in the wrong direction, or are under construction with traffic diverted in the opposite direction from where we needed to go. Eventually we admitted defeat and parked in the car park meant for the nearby shopping center. These frustrations were immediately forgotten upon looking out our bedroom window and seeing this directly across the street:

Roman amphitheater, which thankfully was not showing "The Hangover 2".

This was obviously a cause for celebration and we immediately went out and found an Italian restaurant where we ate and drank like motherfuckers, then drunk dialed H-town in Baltimore, yelled something at her about art lovers and equilibrium and stumbled back to the hotel to sleep it off.

The next day we walked around the city, and by walked around the city I actually mean "around" - with almost all of the walls still intact, you can basically walk all the way around on the top of them. There are also spectacular little plaques along the way, inscribed with facts about the their construction, the history of the area, and random factoids (also a recipe), the best of which was this one:

This is awesome and henceforth is the standard by which I will judge the information on all other plaques.

Wales

We left Chester with considerably more ease than we'd had getting there and drove to Wales. Wales is a country of immense beauty, but also a completely insane, largely unpronounceable and completely unspellable language. They have a thing for doubling letters unnecessarily causing their words to be ridiculously long and while the Welsh language does have vowels, they are loathe to use them unless they've completely run out of doubled consonants.

A river running through Llangollen, where we stayed, which in English is the River Dee, but in Welsh is probably spelled more like Gogllywnnscestt or Wydnollffydd or something like that.

Here's the thing about Wales, ok? Because I'm from Chicago by way of Cleveland, right? So I know what cold feels like. When you walk out your door here and it's 2 degrees Fahrenheit with a windchill making it feel more like 12 below, that is a cold that will slap you right in the face, rip off your nipples, then shrivel your lungs into raisins. Whoever came up with the adage "Don't make a fact like that, it might freeze that way forever" was almost certainly standing outside in Chicago in January when he said it. What I'm trying to say is, I've been cold before.

But not like this.

The cold in Wales is a cold like no other cold I've ever experienced. It's a damp, heavy cold that gets in you and stays there, obliterating all hope that you might ever feel warm again. In Chicago, when it's cold, you just go inside, wait two minutes and then Presto! - you are warm. I spent less than 24 hours in Wales, but even after I went inside, even after I'd left, I stayed cold for six days. It was like someone had filled my soul with equal parts sorrow, hopelessness and dead puppies. I'm still recovering.

Other than that, though, Wales is beautiful, the audience at the comic's gig was brilliantly weird and whatever I had for dinner was delicious (I don't remember what it was because alcohol happened. Oh wait! Prawns? I think it had something to do with prawns). And then I went to bed to get some rest for the next day's planned activities, which didn't happened due to there being a drunk comedian in the room who was snoring like it's his job. It didn't matter - we ended up doing none of the things we'd originally planned to do anyway, but with good reason: the comic realized suddenly that Penrith is sort of on the way to Newcastle.

For an account of my time in Chester and Wales in which I do not actually appear other than a veiled reference to the terrible weather being my fault, check out the comic's blog.

Britannia 2011 - Parte The Firste

2011-06-07T13:08:00.001-05:00

Arrival and Punky!

I'm not gonna lie, the TSA scares the shit out of me. Something about the combination of their absolute authority in deciding whether or not I pose a threat to my fellow travelers combined with my paralysing fear of public embarrassment makes the "please take off your shoes" portion of my trip the most harrowing part of the whole experience. Why, then, I decided to wear a fencenet body stocking under my t-shirt and jeans instead of underwear and a bra like a normal person is quite beyond my ability to comprehend. It seemed like a good idea when I left the house. It seemed like an incredibly bad idea when I got in the security line and realized there were only two lines open: one regular line and one irradiating porn producing body scanner line. So I was already on edge when the boarding pass checker with the rapist mustache who I was still thirty people away from caught my eye from across the room and yelled "Honey, you've been distracting me for the last 15 minutes!" All heads swiveled in my direction and I laughed nervously and suggested it was due to my pink hair, which coincidentally was now also the precise color of my face. "That and your amazing smile," he said, and I cringed because it was obvious I was going to get flagged for one of those "enhanced pat downs" of which he was sure to surreptitiously photograph me getting felt up with no undergarments to protect me. That didn't happen, of course - I'm just paranoid. Either that or I've repressed the memory, it's hard to say. At any rate, I got to Heathrow as planned, traded my clothes for a raincoat as planned, met the comic sort of as planned, and went to Luton which was not at all planned, but was necessary if I wanted to see my friend Steve, who chose to time his trip to Spain for exactly the same time as my trip to England. I spent an hour chatting with the group in Steve's pub while drinking out of the comic's Stanley Cup shot glass (it is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up) and trying to deflect questions about why I refused to remove my coat.

On Tuesdays, the comic and his partner Manly Tony record Punky! Radio over Skype. On my first Tuesday in town, they recorded the 300th episode of Punky! in front of a live "studio" (the comic's lounge) audience. Said audience included myself, my darling Sulu and her husband G, Felix a.k.a Hamboy (formerly of the recorder band The Blow Jobs - Felix claims they broke up due to musical similarities) and a guy called Phil who inexplicably carries around a bazouki in the back of his car.

A bazouki player (not Phil)

This came in very handy as Felix had brought three recorders and a tambourine with him and we performed an impromptu mashup of White Riot and Blitzkrieg Bop. I also got to tell the story of the guy who got his face kicked in at Riotfest and introduce the song I had picked out for the show, "She's Only Fucking 12" by 3CR.

We'd had a lot to drink by the end of the show and so the obvious thing to do was go out for Italian food and drink two more bottles of wine at dinner, then head over to the Arena Tavern for some further beers. While the rest of us were comparing our various mobile devices and the games contained therein, the comic wandered off and found a man he'd met recently but whose name he couldn't recall and brought him over to our table in the hopes that he'd introduce himself to the rest of us so the comic could pretend like he'd known his name all along. This plan went awry (as his plans often do) when, upon encountering Sulu and I sitting in close proximity, the stranger abandoned all social niceties and ignoring everyone else greeted us with the question "Are you two lesbians?" I told him we were, but only on Tuesdays.

Having said our goodbyes to the others, the comic, Tony and I went back to the flat, at which time a sane group of people would have gone to bed. Instead, Tony decided to edit Punky! so we could upload it that very night and we all consumed the last of the wine, the port, and half of another bottle of port, then drunk dialed Kelly in Los Angeles for reasons I can no longer remember. Eventually Tony went to bed, while the comic and I stayed up listening to Demented Are Go long past the time my desire to go to bed had kicked in because the comic wanted to hear "PVC Chair" and kept insisting it was the next track, though it never was. We finally got in bed some time after dawn, drunk as fuck and in no shape to get up, pack, and drive to Chester the next day.

The next day we got up, packed and drove to Chester.

Britannia 2011 - An Introduction

2011-06-07T11:25:00.002-05:00

I started to write a post about my trip to England last month only to realize that there was no way for me to make it one post. In the interest of seeing everything his land has to offer, the comic took me on a whirlwind tour that seemed designed to cram everything it was possible to see into one go, from which I am only now starting to recover. The immediate trip to Cleveland upon my return has not helped my situation, nor has dealing with the post office, who allowed my address to be fraudulently changed just before I left, thus ensuring that the half a dozen things I had ordered off of Amazon would be returned to the sender and my insurance company would threaten to drop me for not telling them I had moved. I will attempt to reconstruct the last two weeks over the rest of this one, so please be patient with me - I am still fragile and covered in bruises (not those kind. Ok, those too, but mostly the ones caused by my being particularly accident prone on this trip. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, unless you know where to go to find the truth, in which case the truth will be out there soon, I promise).

Blogging Is Not A Matter Of Life And Death...Unlike Pneumonia

2011-06-03T10:16:00.000-05:00

Relax, I'll tell you where I've been, just calm down. I've just returned from spending 11 days on a 10 day trip to ~~England~~ the U.K., which followed directly on the heels of spending the bulk of two weeks visiting ~~Hell~~ Illinois Masonic Hospital, where they were holding my beloved roommate the bartender in a thankfully successful attempt at making him not die, which nearly killed him in and of itself.

I'll explain that shortly, but let's back up a minute.

What now seems like many Thursdays ago, I was in my usual watering hole doing my usual have dinner with my roommate and then drink a beer while antisocially playing games on my iPad thing, when a pretty looking boy began admiring my very pink hair and asking my advice on how he could do something similar to his very brown hair. I have had this conversation many times, and now that I have an iPad, I can augment it with Facebook photos of my coiffure's previous incarnations. He was impressed, deemed me artistic and started showing me some of his design portfolio, including some work he'd done for a motorcycle club. In turn I showed him the results of the Super Secret Project. It was the most stunning transformation I've ever seen: he was having a normal, relaxed, easy conversation with me and then as if I'd flipped a switch he suddenly became so nervous that he literally could not complete a sentence. He eventually took several deep breaths and managed to choke out enough words for me to understand he was asking me out. It's not like I could say no - he was adorable and there was a strong chance his head might implode from a rejection, so I gave him my e-mail and made vague plans to "eat something and watch the hockey game" on Saturday. In retrospect, it seems hilarious to me that I thought there was any chance I might wind up in some sort of normal situation.

The bartender had not been feeling well, so when he came home from working Friday night at 4:30 a.m. sweating and out of breath I was concerned. He asked me if we had an accurate thermometer (we didn't) and then said the bone chilling words that would kick off a terrifying saga: "I think you need to get dressed. I need you to take me to the hospital." The bartender doesn't really "do" hospitals. Despite that fact, he'd just been to the ER two weeks prior to that due to excruciating back and chest pain that was diagnosed as walking pneumonia. He was given antibiotics and sent on his way. He felt better after a few days, went back for a follow up a week later, was pronounced healthy and sent on his way. Two days later he had a fever of 102.2, couldn't breathe and wanted me to take him back to the hospital. Not good.

We got there and did the whole ER routine: triage, get in a room, vitals, talk to a nurse, talk to another nurse, wait for a doctor, explain everything again, wait some more, repeat everything again for a medical student, then a third nurse, get some blood drawn and then finally they took him away for a chest x-ray, which is when I checked my voicemail and realized I'd missed a call from the comic the night before explaining that he'd been randomly punched in the face. None of my boys were doing well, it seemed. I texted the only one who was (the boy from Thursday night) to inform him that I would not be making our date that afternoon and rescheduling it for Sunday. A doctor came in with the bad news: the bartender's pneumonia had not gone away at all, but rather seemed to have gotten worse. They decided to admit him for a couple days. I texted the newbie and rescheduled our date for early the following week, then went home and fed the cat.

When I got back to the hospital the situation had gone from bad to worse. A CT scan revealed that in addition to the pneumonia worsening, his lung was also being collapsed from the outside due to empyema. He would need surgery, but they didn't want to perform it until they got the infection that caused the pneumonia in the first place under control. They started throwing every antibiotic they had in their arsenal at him hoping something would work. None of them seemed to help, and after two days of this with his condition continuing to worsen it was becoming clear he had some sort of antibiotic resistant super bug and that they couldn't wait any longer to do the surgery. He went under the knife that Tuesday, while I paced the family lounge, tweeting what little information I had and postponing my date until the bartender made it home.

I was wholly unprepared for the scene that greeted me when they allowed me to see him in the ICU after surgery. IVs in both arms, a breathing tube down his throat, oxygen, catheter, epidural, three chest tubes snaking out of his back and his arms strapped down as a precaution because people coming out of anesthesia have a penchant for trying to rip their breathing tube out when they come to. He looked terrible. "You look good," I told him, which he obviously didn't reply to because you can't talk with a breathing tube stuffed down your throat. The anethesiologist came in to check up on things. His name was Dr. Dieter, but he looked less like Dieter from Sprockets and more like The Dude from Big Lebowski. He was also hilarious. "I was only in there for the important part," he said. "Basically, we cut you open, drianed the pus out and then took a garden hose to your chest for about 20 minutes."

Having cultured the fluid to get a better idea of just what the hell had made him so sick in the first place, they put him on an appropriate antibiotic that we hoped would clear up the infection once and for all. In the meantime, breathing tube removed, the bartender was free to insult his oh-so-witty surgeon when he came in each day to pull out the chest tubes one at a time. "I promise you, I won't feel a thing," the surgeon said as he de-Borged my roommate, which earned him "Dick" in response. On the day the final chest tube came out, the plan was that he would get out of ICU, go upstairs for observation for a day and then finally go home. Obviously this scenario was not in the stars because when everything else has gone horribly wrong, why not just pile it on?

As it turned out, after a day and a half on the "right" antibiotic to treat the infection, it was discovered it was the wrong antibiotic for the bartenders kidneys, as they had begun to shut down. So began several stress filled days of constant monitoring in an effort to keep the treatment that was saving his life from killing him.

Finally, FINALLY, he was well enough to leave the hospital and I took him home on Tuesday afternoon, 11 days after I'd driven him there in the middle of the night. I spent the next three days hovering over him and carrying things around because he wasn't allowed to lift anything at all (and couldn't have even if he'd tried). Then on Saturday, at the bartender's insistance, I finally left for my long planned trip to England which I had resigned myself already that I was going to miss, sending a text message to newbie postponing our date until June in the cab on the way to O'Hare.

So yeah. Sorry about the long break from blogging. I WAS BUSY.

You Can't Get There From Here

2011-04-19T20:07:00.004-05:00

When I woke up yesterday, the 18th of April, and I looked out the window and saw that it had snowed two inches in the early morning hours of April the 18th, and my sleep fogged brain realized that it was snowing, and it was April, I have to say I was pretty fucking pissed off. I stomped off to work and spent the day complaining about the fact that it was cold, and it was snowing, and it was April. Even so, I was relatively certain that it would be the worst morning of my week, what with the snowing and the April, and on the whole I think I took it in stride.

I spent a lot of time thinking wistfully about yesterday morning during the two and a half hour clusterfuck that served as my commute this morning.

It started out well enough. I timed the leaving of my house in a such a way that I would largely miss the rain on my 1/2 mile walk to the train, thereby allowing me to leave my umbrella at home and saving me from having to buy yet another umbrella since I almost invariably forget I have one with me and leave it on the train. A train pulled into the station in due course, and I stepped onto it and found a seat, which is always a bit of a victory. I finished the sudoku while we traveled a few stops. In between Paulina and Southport we stood on the tracks for an unusually long amount of time. I finished the crossword puzzle. The conductor told us there was some trouble with a train that had "broken" ahead of us and that we would be standing "momentarily". I still wasn't alarmed as this happens frequently and we are usually moving again inside of five minutes. Fifteen minutes later we still hadn't moved.

By now I had read the entire paper (to be fair it's the free morning paper and there's not a whole lot to it once you skip all the celebrity gossip and stories about a new bar that won't be open long enough for you to check it out). The conductor came back on to give us the exact same announcement which seemed superfluous as the situation hadn't changed and no one had gotten on or off the train since the last announcement. After another ten minutes he did make a new announcement: the broken train was fairly well fucked. It would not be going anywhere for a while and neither would we. And further to that, when we did go somewhere, it would be to the Southport stop, where we would need to get off and get onto a shuttle bus which would take us to Fullerton where we could get back on a train having bypassed several miles of track to which they had cut power. We had some time to think about our individual game plans though as we couldn't pull into Southport until the train that was already there was able to get onto the northbound tracks and out of our way. Even at this point I was remaining calm. Sometimes things break and it's nobody's fault and there's little you can do about it but soldier on. I called my office and explained the situation and that I didn't know what time I would be in. Then I remembered I had Peggle on my phone and started playing it.

Eventually we pulled into Southport, where we were told there were shuttle buses waiting for us downstairs to take us to Fullerton. Out on the street I did indeed see two buses and also a man in an orange vest with a clipboard who seemed to be directing things. Everything appeared to be under control. It fucking wasn't. There was firstly a problem of physics and the inability to condense the volume of humans that fit into eight train cars into the space of two buses. There was additionally the problem that trains were continuing to come into the station and drop off their human cargo. For me personally, there was the problem that it was 40 degrees outside and that it had started pissing down ice cold rain and I hadn't brought an umbrella. A very lovely Asian girl with an enormous Cubs umbrella offered me a space beneath it - don't ever try to tell me that Cubs fans are assholes, it simply isn't true. The first batch of buses were full up and left without us. I managed to wedge myself on to one of the second set of buses and we took off in rush hour traffic on a circumlocutory route designed to pick up, per orange vest guy, "as many people as possible" from the other three train stops between the one we were at and the one we were headed for. It was possible for us to fit exactly zero other passengers on our clown car of a bus, and we drove past the other stranded CTA customers feeling a mixture of relief and survivor's guilt.

Upon our eventual arrival at Fullerton, we filed into the station like a horde of spawning salmon and headed, logically we collectively believed, to the southbound platform in order that we might catch a southbound train. After allowing us to stand there for ten minutes in the freezing rain and wind, we were disabused of this ridiculous notion by a man on the loudspeaker who told us in a tone dripping with irritation at our stupidity that it was obvious we needed to catch a southbound train on the northbound tracks. As we headed back down the stairs to get to the other platform the woman next to me summed up the feelings of all of us by saying "I've never wanted to get to work so much in my entire life." Almost immediately after the last of us had reached the northbound platform, a brown line train pulled up to the southbound platform we had just vacated. It was followed in about two minutes time by a red line train pulling up to the southbound platform. Those of us who chose not to run back to the other side like the proverbial chicken stood there dumbfounded for the fifteen minutes it took for a train to pull up to the platform to which we had been directed.

By now I was soaked to the core and shivering, having lost my umbrella buddy in the shuffle, and I stepped on the train with no small measure of relief, pleased as punch to find a seat available and for once not caring that there was a mother holding a screaming infant in the seat just in front of me (I also ignored that she was speaking fucking French). About this time, the same announcer who had chastised us earlier began to tell us in the same exasperated tone as before that we were NOT to go to the northbound platform, that southbound trains must obviously be boarded from the southbound platform. He didn't actually finish with "you fucking idiots" but we all heard it. I was already on a train, and had been informed by the conductor that it was a southbound train to the loop, and also I was sitting and starting to dry - I was not, under any circumstances, getting up to go back where I had been in the first place. I continued to sit there for the half hour it took that train to finally close its doors and pull away towards the oasis of downtown. I finally arrived in the office around 11 a.m. at nearly the same time as the person who had flown in that morning from Boston in less time than it had taken me to commute from Lakeview.

And to think, only yesterday I had woken to the sight of beautiful, pristine, non-public transit interrupting April snow. Sigh...

And Get The Hell Out Of My Bed Too.

2011-04-01T14:31:00.000-05:00

H-town: lol karen carpenter
*goes to hell*

me: credit to [the bartender] for that one

H-town: i hate feeling that sick
when i got strep this winter it was the worst i've been sick in a decade, too
i thought i was dying, too

me: yeah, strep is a pretty bad one

H-town: i feel ya - moving 2 feet felt like i was climbing mt. everest
thankfully i wasn't hurling
i had a nasty 24 bug last fall though
i can't imagine hurling for more than 24 hrs

me: i was only hurling for about one day, but i had no appetite at all for four
I don't think I ate as much as 500 calories a day for four days straight

H-town: isn't weird when even eating takes too much energy?
bodyFAIL

me: i know right?

H-town: your brain's all, yeah - eating would give me energy and help me, but fuck that noise
then it goes into hibernate mode

me: then some mooching bitch comes in and eats all your porridge

H-town: hahaha

me: LEARN HOW TO COOK WHORE

H-town: HAHAHAHA

Learn From My Fail

2011-04-01T13:10:00.000-05:00

Every year, my boss asks me if I'm getting the flu shot, and every year I scoff at him. I have an immune system made of steel and I haven't had the flu in well over a decade. I don't need a flu shot because I'm not going to get the flu, I reason, and as such I'll just skip it and keep the $30 for myself thank you very much. Historically this method has always worked. Unfortunately, what this method doesn't take into account is that extreme stress, such as the unbelievable work and relationship related stress I've been dealing with since the beginning of the year, can and will weaken your immune system. My steel defenses have become more similar to swiss cheese defenses so far this year - through mid March I had already gone through three colds and/or sinus infections. A week and a half after the last one I finally succumbed to the flu.

I didn't even see it coming. I'd been in very good form on Saturday. I got up early, took the cat to the vet, picked up a prescription, put some boxes in storage, dropped off my laundry, bought an Easter dress and did a 45 minute workout all before 2:00 pm. The bartender ordered pizza for dinner and we ate it watching two brilliant college basketball games which both had piss poor outcomes. Shortly after 9:00 pm, I very suddenly became completely exhausted. Because unlike a cold that starts with the sniffles and builds into a full blown illness, the flu prefers to just sneak up on you and clobber you over the head with everything it's got.

"Imma fuck you up."

I was startled at how tired I suddenly was, which is to say I was tired enough to get in bed at 9:30 on a Saturday night. At which point, I immediately realized I was starting to run a fever. And that I had a terrible chest rattling cough. And that I was in for something serious. Because from that moment until this morning, I have only gotten out of bed to pee and throw up*.

I have never, EVER been this ill before as an adult. At some point during the week, I called the comic in a fever delirium to explain that I wouldn't being seeing him in May because I was bound for death in a few short hours. He congratulated me on being sensible enough to stay home from work. Normally I'm not and will force myself to get up get things done, as per the American way. I wasn't being sensible this time either, I simply couldn't move. To go from the couch to my bed was a monumental undertaking. Making it to the kitchen was out of the question. I couldn't have gone to work even if I'd wanted to because there wasn't strength enough in my body to turn a doorknob so as to get out of the house.

I am upright and mobile now, finally, after 6 days. Sort of anyway. I still can't stand for longer than 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I get winded walking across a room. The cough still hasn't abated and my lungs feel like they're on fire. I lost 6 pounds in four days time and I look like Karen Carpenter. I never really grasped before that the flu is something thousands of people actually die from every year, but I get it now. The flu does not fuck around.

Let this be a lesson to you: just get the fucking flu shot.

*Except for the one time I got out of bed to take a shower, which did not go well. I should have taken a bath, but I'd been lying down for three days and I thought I would try being upright for a while. It lasted long enough for me to get shampoo in my hair and then I was overwhelmed. I finished my shower sitting on the bottom of the tub, dried my hair sitting on the bathroom floor, and crawled - literally - back to my bed.

Chain Restaurants Simplified

2011-03-31T10:03:00.000-05:00

After seeing a commercial for the Tilted Kilt that used the Dropkick Murphy's "Shipping Up To Boston" yesterday

The bartender (walking past me and grumbling): More stupid suburban bullshit.

Me: I went to the Tilted Kilt with Fish once. It's just a plaid Hooters.

Amber And Heather Ruin All Your Fantasies

2011-03-22T16:07:00.002-05:00

H-Town: i like your fake About Me section
i laughed at the secret sex dungeon part
out loud
a chortle
COL

me: some day, heather. some day...

H-town: we all have dreams
background music swells up
well-choreographed song and dance routine happens

me: it has a round bed in it and shackles on the wall

H-town: does the bed spin?

me: well it does now

Heather: hahaha
you know, speaking of interesting rooms, i remember seeing a Cribs episode where they went through Tommy Lee's house
besides being afraid that there'd be herpes EVERYWHERE, i was a fan of his shower set up

me: does he have a separate bed for his wang to sleep on?

H-town: you could see the shower from his bed
so whatever ladies he had over, you could see a little of them in the shower
trashy, but I liked it

me: oh i like that too, great idea

H-town: it wasn't totally clear glass
so now you have a spinning bed and a nearby see-thru shower
he also had a sex swing in his bedroom
not surprising

me: i don't really get those, but maybe that's because i've never really seen one live

H-town: yeah, same here
they look dangerous
i'd most certainly end up seriously injuring myself

me: pretty sure i'd forget all about the sex if i had a swing though. i'd be like WHEEE!!!!!

H-town: hahaha
SEX? who cares!
PUSH ME!
no, not with that
use your hands!

me: wind it up so i can spin! and then i throw up on everything. party's over

H-town: haha

me: off to the visible shower

H-town: less exciting now

me: sex dungeons can be perilous for all the wrong reasons sometimes

What's All This Then?

2011-03-22T09:27:00.002-05:00

After more than six years of the same old same old, I've made some changes/upgrades to Bizzybiz (obviously) that I've been meaning to do for a long time. For one thing, I have now gone through all the archives and added labels to all the posts, so now if you want to see everything I've ever written about spiders all at once (my research is extensive after all, everything you need to know is here somewhere) you just need to click on the "spiders" label.

I've also added some tabs at the top, an About Me page that is filled with lies, and a page of links to things that I often read when I'm not writing on Bizzybiz or checking the corners of the room and the ceiling for spiders, as well as the websites for the podcasts I frequently mention. That same page also has a link to my Twitter account, so if you want you can follow me and find out if I am as clever when I don't have infinite space to go on and on and on about things (probably not).

I am still working on tweaking the template, so if you have any suggestions or complaints like "What the fuck? I can't even read this!" let me know and I'll do my best to fix it. I also intend to add more links on the Linkylinks page - those were just the things I thought of off the top of my head last night when I was working on this - so check back for more and send me your suggestions.

Bizzybiz 2.0 - now with more ridiculousness.

The Relative Value of Los Angeles

2011-03-21T15:32:00.000-05:00

I'm confused about how Battle: Los Angeles made it to number one at the box office. Now in all fairness, I haven't actually seen the movie nor do I have any plans to see it because it looks pretty stupid. But based on the trailers for it, I'm pretty sure it's just a remake of Independence Day, and Independence Day fucking sucked. Right? Aliens are invading our planet to get our resources and are systematically wiping us out. That's the same plot as Independence Day, isn't it? I've already seen Battle: Los Angeles then and it isn't any good.

Now, granted, it's possible that maybe they've improved on Independence Day. Certainly there was a ton of room for improvement: Bill Pullman is possibly the least convincing person to ever play the President (seriously, once you've played Lone Star in Spaceballs, you've pretty much typecast yourself as "not the President"), Jeff Goldblum has played the exact same character in every single movie he's ever starred in, and the dialogue is so terrible the only line in the whole thing I even bothered to remember was Will Smith punching the alien in the face and saying "Welcome to Earth." But even if you fix all those things, you're still left with a stale plot of alien invasion, humanity is woefully outnumbered, at the eleventh hour someone comes up with a brilliantly unorthodox plan and (presumably) sacrifices him or herself which saves the day and everyone is happy because it's a movie and therefore easy to ignore the devastating aftermath that would certainly follow a protracted war with a hostile extra terrestrial invasion force. In other words, it looks dumb.

At least they put out more trailers than just the first one I saw, because they provided some clarification I desperately needed. The first trailer made it look, to me anyway, like the aliens were invading Los Angeles only, and with all due respect to any friends I have who live there, my immediate reaction was "Who fucking cares?" Because, come on. Aliens are planning an invasion and the target they settle on is Los Angeles and that's it? A couple things come to mind. 1. These aliens are not terribly bright, unless the resources they're looking for are film reels and silicone (if so then good job aliens, you have chosen wisely). 2. All they want is Los Angeles and they'll leave the rest of us alone? GREAT! Give it to them! I'm happy to turn over Los Angeles if it means nothing changes for the rest of the Earth, other than having a new sort of weird neighbor, and we have plenty of those already, life won't be all that different. We don't need Los Angeles. Los Angeles is pretty much jewelery: it's pretty and sparkly and meant to show off our wealth, but it's not really that important and when the money runs out we should pawn that first. I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. Let them have it. After seeing subsequent trailers though, the plot made a little more sense. Apparently, they are attacking all over the place and in fact most of the major cities of the Earth have already been overrun. Los Angeles is not the focal point of the attack, it's simply where mankind has chosen to make its last stand. Which is an entirely different story and far more plausible. If Los Angeles is all we have left, then yes, I agree, defend it with everything you've got. If it's our last toehold and holds the key to our continued existence as a species then it is certainly important enough of a place to serve as the setting of an alien invasion movie.

But it still looks dumb.

More Hatiness

2011-03-17T14:10:00.001-05:00

Still sick and really hopped up on whatever it is I'm taking. I've been acting like I'm on speed all day long, and have just overwhelmed the accountant with a conversation in the kitchen that included diagonal air vents, aliens, ethnic heritage, things that are green, the fact that all the Bourne movies taken together are one extremely long chase scene, the relative value of Los Angeles and a half a dozen other things that I've already forgotten. Which is not the point. In reality I probably would have been somewhat better off not coming to work. However, it is bar night tonight AND it is St. Pat's AND the NCAA tourney started this morning AND I'm still feeling hostile, so I want to go to Tai's tonight in my "Fuck You" etc. t-shirt and argue with people. But in my head there's an "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" kind of thing going on where I feel like if I think I'm too sick to go to work, I must then also be too sick to go to the bar. So I had to go to work. Which also isn't the point. The entire paragraph is to introduce the fact that I still feel like I did yesterday and offer that up as an explanation of why I am ranting about another commercial that I hate. Which I told you would probably happen. OK? Good.

There was one commercial I forgot to mention yesterday which I also hate right now, which is the latest offering from 5 Hour Energy. Apparently, they are trying to gain market share now by going after the morning wake up market in addition to the stay-up-all-night crowd and the man-that-was-a-long-day crowd by attacking coffee. Specifically, by pointing out how enormously difficult and taxing it is to brew it and have to add cream and sugar to it, or what a travesty it is to have to wait in line to buy it if you don't want to make it yourself. It is the classic ploy of creating a problem that doesn't actually exist and then providing a solution that nobody needs. Listen to me: making coffee is not that hard. It isn't. It just isn't. You don't want to wait in line at this Starbucks? NO PROBLEM. There's bound to be five other ones across the street. You make yours at home but you don't want to have to wait for it to brew? NO PROBLEM. Most coffee makers these days have timers set on them so you can program when you want it to start brewing and then when you get up there will be a fresh pot of coffee waiting for you as if by magic. It's so much work to stir in a little cream? Actually, I can't really help you here. If you can't handle the thought of having to put cream in your coffee there is no hope for you anyway. Fuck off and drink it black then. NO ONE IS CHALLENGED BY COFFEE*. And if you are sitting in your kitchen staring at the empty coffee pot thinking "You mean I have to turn on a machine and wait for it to brew and pour it into a cup and put things in it and lift the cup to my lips and take a sip and swallow this coffee all by myself? Why must I be made to suffer this gross injustice day in and day out?" then maybe you better re-evaluate your life and whether or not it should be allowed to continue because you are the most useless human being on the entire planet and an asshole on top of it. No, 5 hour energy needs to stick with what it's good at, which is sending college students to an early grave due to massive amounts of alternating stimulants and depressants.

*Generally. Strictly speaking, this is not always true. When I went to visit the comic the first time he asked me to make him a cup of coffee and I have to admit I was stymied by it at first. This is because in England they all drink instant coffee, not brewed coffee, and I was unfamiliar. "You just put a spoonful of crystals into the water and stir it," he explained. It seemed like it was almost too easy and I was worried that it might be a trap. But I tried it and it worked and nothing bad happened at all, if you don't count the comic drinking a really shitty cup of coffee. Which I don't because he is English and doesn't know any better.

Commercials I Hate

2011-03-16T18:47:00.004-05:00

Right, listen. I'm running a fever and I hate having a fever with the hatiest of hates. So fair warning: this post will be nit-picky, overly critical and full of vitriol. This will also be your only warning, so heed it. I am hostile.

With brilliant commercials like the Old Spice Guy, The Most Interesting Man in the World, all the Jameson ones and of course the long running and fabulous SportsCenter promos, it is obvious that there is a lot of talent out there in the advertising world. Why is it then, that there are so many flat out fucking shitty commercials still being made? There's just no excuse for that.

For as good as the SportsCenter series has been for years, I saw an ESPN promo today that was completely off the mark. It was for NASCAR. Now, I get that you have to really talk up NASCAR if you want people to watch it because NASCAR is dumb. But I think it is taking things a bit far to tell people that watching a NASCAR race is exciting because "there's uncertainty around every turn". What? No there isn't. Have you even seen NASCAR? It's a bunch of greasy hilljacks (plus one bow-legged overly dramatic woman) driving in circles. There's nothing that is uncertain here. I assure you, the only thing that is going to happen around every turn is that they're all going to make a left. Well whoopidy-do, assholes. NASCAR still sucks. Fuck off.

Also, what is with the Xfinity commercials (for that matter, what is with the name "Xfinity"? That's not a word. It's not even a portmanteau. You suck.)? That bundle of wires crawling around is fucking creepy. Congratulations, you've somehow managed to make electrical components look gross. Right now Xfinity is promoting their baseball package. They went for the American heritage angle, which is ok, but they go and ruin it by telling you that baseball is "America's first space program". Sorry, I believe the organization you're looking for was called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Hitting a baseball is not the same thing as going to space. No one has ever actually hit a baseball into space. If someone had we'd know about it because he'd have to be a fucking mutant. Baseball has nothing to do with space. Shut up.

Then there are the commercials for Windows Cloud. These are not all bad. The one in the airport makes sense - the flight is delayed, they're stuck there, might as well watch some television. I'll just overlook the fact that the show they chose to watch was called Celebrity Rehab because I'm magnanimous like that. It's pretty neat when you think about it. Who would have thought back in the 80's, when televisions were less of an appliance and more of a piece of furniture, and computers were ginormous and had no hard drives, that someday we'd be watching television on a computer small enough to carry around with you and that you wouldn't have to plug it into anything? No, the one I'm on about is the one with the mom who is editing the family photo. Again, no problem with that per se - I'm all for retouching your photos, no one wants to see Pam's stretch marks in Playboy. The problem I have is with the two lines she has at the end. I'll take each in turn:

"There! A photo I can share without ridicule." Are you serious? You just dressed your entire family in the exact same god-awful blue flannel shirt, you most certainly are going to get ridiculed. Here, I'll do it right now: you look like a bunch of fucking tools dressed like that. Are you high? You know your kids are going to get the shit beaten out of them at school if anyone ever sees this don't you? Actually, maybe that was the plan all along because the next line is
"Cloud gives me the family that nature never could." Wow. Thanks, June Cleaver. Way to make your husband and kids feel like failures. Seriously, how bad could they be? They did all dress up in that hideous fucking shirt that may yet get them killed in an effort to make you happy, I think that's pretty nice of them. I sure as hell wouldn't do it. Your impossible standards are going to leave you a lonely bitter woman after your kids cut you out of their lives (after years of therapy from how you fucked them up) and your husband leaves you for his secretary because at least she doesn't criticize every. single. thing. he. does. You seem like a bitch. I don't want to use any products that you use, Cloud is tainted now.

Like I said, fever. Stuck on the couch. I'm sure there will be more so stay turned.

I Need New Hobbies, I Think.

2011-03-15T15:13:00.000-05:00

I have no use for St. Pat's on the whole because I am not Irish and I am not Catholic and therefore it doesn't apply to me. The thing is I'm kind of torn about it because one thing I do enjoy having an occasion for is day drinking. The city of Chicago, where I live and dream, always celebrates St. Pat's on the preceding Saturday. The claim is that it's so children can see the river dyed green and the parade rather than holding those events on a school day. I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that and advance my own theory that this is how Chicagoans justify day drinking twice in one week, once on the sanctioned Saturday and then again on the actual holiday, in the hope that it will tide them over to the next made up holiday Cinco De Mayo.

For the past few years I've split the difference between my opposing views by going out day drinking with wrongly colored hair and a t-shirt that reads "Fuck you, you're Irish". But after being awakened just after 6 a.m. this Saturday by ALREADY drunk dickwads with presumably little or no Irish ancestry walking down my street and yelling, I decided that this year I would skip the jackassery and stay home by myself (the bartender not having the option to stay home because, well, he's a bartender). So I did.

What I did not do was to pair that decision with another one to also skip the day drinking. It is a designated day drinking day in Chicago, after all, and there is a mostly untouched handle of Captain sitting forlornly in my kitchen crying "Drink me, please, so I can fulfill my destiny". So I got with the pouring and sat down to watch WWII in Color on the Military Channel for reasons I can't explain even to myself. I was drunk by 2:30, which is right around the time I decided to e-mail the comic.

The comic and I have a storied history of drunk communication. He has a peculiar habit of calling me when he's on vacation and then putting someone else on the phone. On my end, since drunk dialing from here would normally wake him up because he's in the future, I've taken to drunk e-mailing. The thing is, I can barely spell when I'm stone cold sober and combined with drunk typing, most of my messages end up being incoherent. He finds the e-mails highly amusing and pulls his favorite phrases out of them to use against me on Facebook (such as the time I wrote "HOLTY FUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!" for who knows what reason, which became his response to everything I posted for the next three days). Here is the message I sent him on Saturday:

"Im drun k. Im going to dfrunk work out and then drunk bake cookies becauase it's daydsrinking dau in chiACBGO. i can't find my cat. national lampoons christmas vcacation is on becausr thaT makes sense in march. OOOO CAT IS HERE!!!!! bye"

to which he responded "chiACBGO is the best spelling of Chicago I have ever seen".

Little known fact: there is a stage in my drunkenness that comes before the one where I am Loud that I call Ambition. Ambition is the time when I have the sudden urge to do things that my drunk brain considers constructive. And sometimes they are, such as when I decide to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS! (by the way, if you're not reading Hyperbole and a Half I suggest you start doing so immediately). It is little known because it's usually short lived and I'm rarely in a position to do anything about it ("I should totally reupholster the dining room chairs right now!" I'll say to myself when I'm drunk in a different country from the one that has my chairs). In this case, the Ambition told me I should work out and then bake cookies, which in hindsight seems totally counterproductive. I did end up doing both of these things, plus a sink full of dishes. But the Ambition can only take you so far, and it did not take me far enough to actually put on workout clothes, or in fact any clothes. My workout attire was panties and a pair of socks with kitties on them. I'm sure it was very attractive. I did at least think to put some clothes on before I started baking. You can tell because if I hadn't, right now you'd most likely be reading a blog post about how I managed to get burn marks on my nipples from naked cookie making and that I'm so much more hardcore than the stupid Girl Scouts. I'm not, by the way, I'm just far more accident prone.

The Highest Level Of Laziness

2011-03-08T16:23:00.000-06:00

BrownsFan: Did you like that link I sent you?

Me: Yes. So I tweeted it and said "That's my dinner sorted." At least it would be, if I ever left the house.

BrownsFan: You want to be slutty but you're too lazy?

Me: Exactly. Why can't I just be slutty from the couch?

PROOF!

2011-03-07T12:08:00.001-06:00

I was talking to BrownsFan last week, because I would spontaneously combust if I didn't talk to her every day, and she showed me an article she found on the interwebs she thought I'd be interested in. This one. She also kindly covered up the photograph so I could read the article without having a nervous breakdown.

That's right people: 52,000 cars are being recalled on account of an obviously coordinated attack by the spider nation's Arachni-terrorist division, and I have one thing to say about it.

I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO.

One type of car? Just the one? And I'm supposed to believe that this is some sort of accident of fate? This is no accident, this is the work of a CREATURE WHO SCHEMES. And these creatures are scheming to GET ME.

"But amberance," I hear you asking, "if the spiders were out to get YOU specifically, wouldn't they be building webs in the exhaust systems of MINI Coopers, such as the one you yourself drive?"

Oh you poor, naive little things. Of course not. That would be too obvious. Don't you see how a direct attack would create too much risk of me just going out and buying a different kind of car? No, no, children, they are way to cunning for that. No, they are building them in Mazdas for a reason. You know who drives a Mazda? MrSteve. A Mazda I've been in a number of times, such as when we used to go for long drives on gorgeous summer afternoons, enjoying the weather, relaxing, my guard completely down...yeah. Do you see it now? The creepy bastards are trying to get to me through my friends, and their efforts have escalated now to a pinpointed attack on Mazdas because I hang around with one. What will these foul creatures think of next? Hiding in the rims of beer kegs so they can get to me through the bartender? Gathering their forces inside bags of cat food so as to ambush me when I go to feed my kitty (she's evil too. I need to be on guard for this plan, she may cut a deal with them.)? Massing inside the floatation devices of planes used for international flights so they can jump out and devour me on my way to England (it worked for the snakes)?

One thing is for sure: they are coming for me. The proof is in the Mazdas.

Northwestern Here I Come

2011-03-07T11:52:00.000-06:00

So, just to be sure I have all the facts straight...

A group of 100 ADULT college students who CHOSE to take a course in human sexuality witnessed a sex act during an OPTIONAL after class session between two people who were in a committed relationship, and it caused such outrage that the university is investigating, the professor has been forced to apologize and people are threatening to pull their (again, adult) children who weren't even involved in the incident out of school?

This is SHOCKING. It is obvious that something needs to be done.

Such as me going back to school.

Seriously, did you see the size of that homemade drilldo? That thing is fucking impressive.

Breaking News: Amberance Went Somewhere

2011-03-01T12:04:00.008-06:00

There have been no updates to the blog lately, mainly because there is nothing at all of substance going on in my life. I go to work, I come home, I watch Tosh.0 and imagine having rough sex with the host (I don't know, the guy just looks dirty to me), I go to bed. Sometimes I work out or try to cross-stitch (which is made difficult by a cat who thinks any and all thread in the home must be attacked and destroyed), but for the most part there simply hasn't been anything to write about. Over the weekend I attempted to rectify six week's worth of lameness by cramming my entire social life into three days.

On Friday, the great Jon from Total Talk Nonsense, the greatest podcast anywhere, was playing a gig out in the suburbs with his new band, The Toxic Crayons. I had originally planned on attending as a participant - the lead singer had been asking me to sing with their various bands for years, and we'd finally nailed down some actual songs to work on rather than just the vague idea that "you should sing with us". Side note: I find the request for me to sing with the band completely hilarious, given that none of them, including Jon, have ever actually heard me sing. They're basing this decision solely on the fact that I told them I could sing, which they've taken at face value and assumed that I'm brilliant. Which I am, but they have no way of actually knowing that. For all they know I could just be saying I can sing when I really sound like Roseanne Barr. Anywhore, the plans fell through when I never went to band practice because various members may or may not have learned the songs. For my own part, I would have been nervous anyway - I know I am capable of singing "Heartbreaker", I just don't think I'm nearly cool enough to pull off getting on stage and looking like I have any business singing Pat Benatar. Besides, boy who doesn't call was supposed to be there and despite the fact that I want to lick him, singing in front of him gives me pause. It didn't matter, because he wasn't there and I didn't sing anyway. I knew I was in the suburbs when I walked into the bar and was immediately surrounded by children. Not college kids on a binge, actual children. Because in the suburbs, you can take your kids to the pub for dinner and not worry that they might see someone getting fingerbanged in full view of the public. The show went pretty well for the most part, despite half the band being sick and one song that completely disintegrated. They made up for it by playing some Stray Cats. In the meantime, I got a round of applause from the band wives and other fans sitting near me for getting carded, which I attributed to my green hair but Mrs. Jon insisted had more to do with my "young face".

I left there and drove Alistair back to the city to leave at the bar for the bartender to run errands after work ("I want you to promise me you'll be very careful," said the Crayon's bass player while bear hugging me goodbye, "because it is snowing and everyone else on the road is drunk, and you're adorable."). Then I went into the bar to let the bartender know where the car was. Mistake. There were too many friends there to just walk in and walk back out again, and I wound up hanging around for an hour and a half, listening to 90's hip hop (yes, I still know all the words to "The Humpy Dance" AND "Poison" by Bel Biv DeVoe, thanks for asking) and chatting with Hellbilly about various concerts and, unfortunately, UFC fighting. By chatting I mean nodding, Hellbilly needs no partner to carry on a conversation because he never ever ever shuts up.

I eventually got home from Tai's some time after 3 a.m. and spend another 45 minutes stalking people on Facebook and eating pretzels before I went to bed. My plans for Saturday had involved a lot of errand running and some weight lifting, all of which fell apart when I didn't get out of bed until 5 in the afternoon (this was not all my fault - I woke up at 3, but was immediately trapped under a cuddly cat who growled and hissed every time I tried to ease her off of me). Instead I spent the evening watching Chicago and deciding that Velma Kelly is the roll for me and that Queen Latifa is actually pretty fucking sexy.

On Sunday, the bartender and I headed over to the Congress to see Against Me! and the Dropkick Murphys. The Congress is one of my favorite venues to see music in Chicago. Unfortunately it is run by idiots. We had bought tickets online, or thought we had. After standing in line to get in for five minutes, we were told that anyone with paper tickets had to go stand in line at Will Call and trade them in for real tickets, which if I have to stand in line for them, it largely defeats the point of buying them online. While standing in the cold and rain waiting in line and shivering, we saw a group of girls who were not exactly dressed ~~for the weather~~ much at all which happily has inspired the name of my new all girl band - Daddy Issues. Our first single will be called "Get In Line" and is about running a train (Google it if you don't know, just don't watch the videos. Or watch them, I don't know your preferences). The line moved more slowly than it needed to - Will Call has but one door for both ingress and egress because clearly these people are geniuses. Once we got to the front of the line, they took our pieces of paper and issued us our tickets: basically little red tickets you would use for a raffle that I could have bought a roll of 1000 of for $5 at the party store. Then we got back in the first line, where they didn't even bother to take my little raffle ticket anyway, so I'm mystified why they made me stand in line to get one. Once inside we met up with the loquacious Hellbilly and a friend of his and settled in to the side of the main crowd because we are old people and also it's closer to the beer.

The Dropkick Murphys draw an interesting crowd. It's a mix of punks and people who think they're Irish, and everyone is drunk before they even get there. One girl was clearly on Ecstasy and had no idea she was not at a rave. The Dropkick Murphys were brilliant as always, one of their roadies proposed to his girlfriend on stage (she said "HOLY SHIT" which the crowd took as a yes) and they brought Chris Pisani on stage during "I'm Shipping Up To Boston", who Blackhawks fans will know as "That guy who dances to the Dropkick Murphys song at every Blackhawks game". All the while, Hellbilly was trying to kill us with Jameson, which I eventually had to start discreetly setting on the floor and knocking over to avoid a trip to the ER. The show had started very late due to Against Me! getting stuck in traffic driving up from Houston and the Dropkick Murphys having attended the Blackhawks game which went to shootouts. Consequently, there were many disappointed 12 year olds who didn't get flashed during "Kiss me I'm Shitfaced" (which my friend Tanyas participated in at the Saturday night show and then stole a set list) because they left before the encore, and I didn't get home until after 1 a.m. on a school night and paid for dearly the next day.

I am a party animal.

Everything's Perfectly All Right Now. We're Fine. We're All Fine Here Now, Thank You. How Are You?

2011-02-07T12:12:00.000-06:00

Everything's under control. Situation normal. Thanks for asking. In case you somehow managed to not get clobbered over the head by the media last week, Chicago and in a fact a very large swath of the entire country got hammered by a blizzard last Tuesday and Wednesday. I was not one of the poor souls who got trapped in their cars on Lake Shore Drive all night long last Tuesday, mainly because when meteorologists nationwide all say "There is going to be a big fuck off storm, stay inside" and the local meteorologists say "The big fuck off storm is going to be worst near the shoreline of Lake Michigan, don't use Lake Shore Drive", I assume that they probably know more than I do and I STAY INSIDE, far, far away from Lake Shore Drive. Morons.

I woke up Wednesday morning to find that it looked like Hoth outside and a renewed interesting in buying this. Now, I don't attend a lot of sleep overs these days and when I do they rarely involve my having to sleep on the floor because my friends are grown ups with spare bedrooms or at least a couch. But I think we can all agree this sleeping bag should be filed under "Need" rather than under "Want".

I also experienced that most elusive of all storms - thundersnow. I'm sure there's a very good scientific reason why it almost never thunders during a snowstorm and that H-town or the bartender can tell you all about it while you pretend to be paying attention during their nerdgasm (speaking of nerdgams, Chicagoans, was anyone else concerned that Tom Skilling might rip his clothes off from his overwhelming excitement over this severe weather? Because I was happy for him and everything but, seriously, no one needs to see that). All I know is, thunder during a snow storm is awesomely rare and now that I've experienced it I'm merely one tornado away from being ready to die.

The only other severe blizzard I've lived through nearly killed me (and it actually DID kill 70 other people). The Great Blizzard of 1978 barrelled into Cleveland on January 25th of that year. I was two weeks old. My parents were noobs at the whole parenting thing, what with me being their first child and all, and they were totally unprepared for the apocalypse that completely buried every door to the house. They were trapped. Then they ran out of baby formula for me. Big thanks to the Middleburg Heights police department for answering my parents' call for help by going to the store, buying me formula, and then digging a tunnel to our front door in order to deliver said formula (which they refused to let my parents pay for, bless) and keep me from starving to death. When I told that story to the CEO he said "Oh, so THAT'S what's wrong with you." It's one of the things.

I Hate You, Mentos

2011-01-25T20:21:00.006-06:00

Remember the Mentos freshmaker commercials from the 90's? The ones that were so infectious the Foo Fighters parodied them in their video back when bands other than OK Go made videos? They were excellent. I would go so far as to say they were fresh and full of life even. I've always had a soft spot for Mentos because of their clever advertising. Until.

Have you guys seen it yet? Have you? Have you seen the new commercial where a fucking spider BEATS THE SHIT out of some dude who tries to squash him? Seriously, it's like they climbed into my brain, filmed my very worst nightmare and then deliberately ambushed me in my waking moments with it while I'm minding my own business watching TV. There are close ups. Close up on the spider crawling across the room. Close up on the battered spider reaching up and grabbing the guy by the finger and slamming him repeatedly into a wall with the super human strength I knew they'd been hiding all along. Malice! Vengeance! Purpose! Everything that fucking terrifies me about these demon spawn, on my television, and presented to me at completely unpredictable intervals. Which is the final insult: the premise of the commercial is that it's always better to know what's coming. Yes, Mentos, it is. It's always better to know that I can turn on my television and not be besieged by horrors. But no, now I can't trust my television anymore because I don't know when this commercial is going to come on.

FUCK YOU MENTOS. FUCK. YOU.

The Post That Is More Of The "Holy Fuck It's Finally My Birthday" Variety

2011-01-10T15:39:00.000-06:00

The holidays are officially over and that can only mean one thing: it's about to be my muthafuckin' birthday, y'all. In fact, it's Wednesday, but feel free to start getting your drink on RIGHT NOW. As Supreme Ruler of the month of January (because that's when my birthday is) I officially give you permission and encourage you to start celebrating my birthday right this minute, as well as retroactively back to the beginning of this year, and for the duration of this entire month.

As crazy as I normally am about my birthday, and as many of you know about my birthday celebrating, you can't stop me, you can only hope to contain me, this year I have been particularly looking forward to it ever since June. Why June? Because that's when my beloved Chicago Blackhawks won their first Stanley Cup title in 50 years, and almost immediately after that I made the decision to build my own confectionery Stanley Cup out of cake for my birthday (really it was almost immediately. Toews hoisted the cup, and passed it to Hossa, who shares my birthday like the fucking rockstar he is, and I looked at my birthday twin holding the cup over his head and thought, "I'm fucking eating that on my birthday." I don't know how my brain works, I only know that it does.)

Since then I've been doing a lot of research. The actual Stanley Cup is approximately a foot and a half wide at its base and about 3 feet tall. Duff made a full size replica Stanley Cup cake for a wedding on whatever the fuck cake making show he's on (I don't watch it, I just found a clip of it when I googled "how to make a Stanley Cup cake". They had the actual Stanley Cup brought into the bakery to use as a reference which is flat out fucking unfair, in my opinion) and was expecting it to serve 300 people. I don't actually know 300 people, nor do I have the kind of resources to make that huge of a cake (I had to buy a tiara and a princess wand so everyone would know it was my birthday, after all - I'm not fucking made of money people) so I had to scale it down. My cake will be 9 inches wide and about a foot and a half tall and I expect it to take 5-7 boxes of cake to complete. By the way, don't even think about getting up my ass about using boxed cake for this. I'm making the frosting from scratch because I make the best fucking frosting in the world and also, I'M BUILDING THE STANLEY CUP OUT OF CAKE which is a lot of work as it is, and I am not going to also make cake batter from scratch because believe it or not I have other shit to do, such as my job. Besides, boxed cake is moist and delicious and spongy and I have absolutely no reason to be ashamed.

Even scaled down that much, there's no way I can transport that tall of a cake from my third floor dwelling to Tai's and have it stay in one piece, so I'll have the additional challenge of having to assemble, ice and decorate most of it sitting at the bar. I've also had to work out a great deal of structural engineering for support, because anyone who bakes tiered cakes knows, if you don't secure them with cardboard and sticks on the inside, it will either start to resemble the leaning tower of Pisa or collapse in on itself like so many legendary Vegas casinos torn down in the interest of newer, shinier Vegas casinos. Keep it tuned here for photos, kids - this cake is going to be legendary, regardless of whether it turns out to be my greatest triumph or most soul crushing failure (it won't be - it's my birthday, and on my birthday there is no failure, only magic and rainbows and kittens).

But enough about cake - let's talk about the other things that make my birthday the most awesome day on the calendar. Such as the tea party I'm having at work on my birthday. BrownsFan suggested it jokingly when I mentioned I didn't want to make a cake for work because I am making such an enormous one for the bar. "You know, with scones. And cucumber sandwiches," she teased. She really ought to know better, because instead of being all "haha motherfucker", I gasped with joy and immediately began making plans to subject my co-workers to tiny cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I will also be eating crab legs for dinner on Wednesday because that's what the bartender and I have for dinner any time it's one of our birthdays (or half birthdays. Or if we just found some money lying around. Or if one of us goes to Costco on a Saturday. We like crab legs, ok?).

And then there's the presents. The comic has had some sort of stroke or something and decided a birthday gift was in order, which I am suspicious of, because he rarely buys people things that aren't booze and it is obvious he's up to something. Also, the bartender keeps hinting at a gift that is going to trump my Christmas gifts (many of which actually were booze because my roommate totally gets me). As for myself, I've bought an ensemble of frilly red things, the aforementioned tiara and princess wand so everyone will know it's my birthday (the bartender: "Right. Because there's any possibility that people aren't going to know whose birthday it is.") and I am going to the toy store on my way home tomorrow for a new toy (or seven, you can never have enough toys). I will NOT be buying myself another 3000 piece puzzle, possibly ever again, because I can't build them anymore - the cat steals pieces out of the box and hides them and also she likes to knock the parts I've completed onto the floor as if to say "That's what you get. Now get your shit off my table." Even the TV executives wanted to get me something nice: tomorrow, on my birthday eve, Comedy Central starts airing new episodes of the brilliant Tosh.0 and it is totally because they KNEW it was my birthday and they wanted me to be happy (that is also why the new Social Distortion album comes out next week. For real). Fuckin' A.

I'll keep you guys updated on the progress of the greatest birthday cake of all time and about how awesome the next few days are going to be as time allows. I don't know if you heard, but it's my birthday and there will be too much awesome happening to really be online much. But don't worry, you'll be too busy celebrating my birthday to really notice.

Amberance: Nerdtastic

2011-01-06T16:22:00.000-06:00

I just got off the phone with MrSteve. He was checking on the plans for my birthday party, seeing as how it's almost my birthday (there is another post coming which will be more of the HOLY FUCK IT'S FINALLY MY BIRTHDAY variety, don't worry). MrSteve has crossed over to the dark side into Grownupdom, what with his house and his family and his job having nonsense, and every time he calls I needle him about it because it amuses the crap out of me. While reminding him how hilarious it is that he does grown up stuff like commuting and lawn care, the conversation took a turn for the geek.

Me: Speaking of being an adult, 33 is the coming-of-age age for a hobbit, so according the the hobbits I'm going to be a grown up now.

MrSteve (with horror and disdain): Oh my god. I mean, [the actress] and I joke around about which one of us is the bigger nerd, but you are just...wow.

Me: Well I think it's because I have a variety of nerdery. I'm not just a sci-fi nerd, or just a iPad nerd. I have a lot of different nerd interests.

MrSteve: You're a broad ranging nerd.

Me: Yes. It's important to be a multi-faceted nerd. In increases your chances of meeting someone you don't actually want to date.

Being Healthy is Rotting Away My Brain

2011-01-06T14:27:00.000-06:00

I've been avoiding writing this next post because I don't want to admit to you all that I broke down and joined a gym (I've been avoiding writing any posts at all because my parents bought me an iPad for Christmas and I cannot. Put. It. Down.). After all my anti-gym sentiment about how if people were really motivated they could exercise at home for free, and that gym people are obsessive weirdos who can't talk about anything except how many reps they did when they blasted their pecs that morning, and how spin class sounds to me like a real olfactory horror show O my brothers, it seemed like blogging "Omigod you guys, I totes joined the gym wheeee!" was an invitation for ridicule. The truth is, I still feel basically the same about the gym, but I joined one anyway because I was afraid I'd fall off the fitness wagon if I stopped my walking regimen and I'm way too much of a pussy to go outside during a Chicago winter for anything other than what is strictly necessary for basic survival. So I joined the gym in the building where I work, which is handy as I don't have to go outside even to get there and I don't have to motivate myself to get up and go to the gym in the wee hours of the morning or convince myself to do it at the end of the day - I can just swing by there at lunch when I would have just been sitting at my desk trolling Facebook anyway.

I remembered immediately one of the biggest reasons why I hate the gym: women. The gym has handy little tvs on every piece of equipment so as to distract you from the fact that you're doing something you absolutely hate. Because of this I can tell you with a high degree of accuracy the gender of the person who was on the machine before me. Sportscenter or the financial news? Dude (or BrownsFan, who throws off my calculations because she is glorious). One Life to Live or anything involving a Kardashian? Fuckin broad.

The locker room is even worse, because in the locker room the sound is on and it's loud enough for me to hear it in the shower so it can't be ignored. I've been subjected to Tabatha's Salon Takeover, staring a bitchy Australian woman who bosses around salon owners and their stylists with a level of assholeness that approaches Gordon Ramsey; Judge Joe Brown and his band of mouth breathing idiots who have the nerve to be surprised when the losers they date turn out to be losers and steal from them; a number of different soap operas that have been running since the dawn of time with the same twelve characters having the same set of problems that aren't actual problems ("But Danny's threatening to take the kids away because I'm having an affair!" It never occurs to them to just *stop* having an affair); some weird cooking with celebrities show where Matthew McConaughey taught me how to make a salad; and perhaps most disturbingly, Celebrity Plastic Surgery: Did They or Didn't They? which was too appalling for me to even describe. I know, I know, that this is NOT what is being watched in the men's locker room. They've got ESPN on in there, I can feel it, and it makes me want to go around and ask all the guys in the place if any of them would mind if I switched locker rooms. Even when BrownsFan managed to get Sportcenter on in our locker room, by the time I got done with my workout it had reverted back to Fashion Emergency! or something equally vapid. The only good thing about it is that it gets me in and out of the shower and back at my desk at an amazing speed.

WOMEN OF THE GYM: I have nothing profound to say here. Just please, please STOP.

The Legendary Night Of Christmas Eve Eve

2010-12-23T23:55:00.002-06:00

Today is Festivus, a time for the Airing of the Grievances and the Feats of Strength, or, if you don't know what I'm talking about, a time to go watch probably the best episode of Seinfeld ever.

Before it was Festivus, today was what I used to call Christmas Eve Eve, which in my family was the last shopping day before Christmas because our festival of holidays lasted three days from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, after which time we'd eaten so much no one could move.

Christmas Eve Eve holds a special place in my memory because it is the anniversary of the first time I was ever drunk. I was a late bloomer as far as the whole drinking thing (I suppose I had to be a late bloomer at something to make up for my early and enthusiastic adoption of the sex, but I digress). My high school friends weren't big drinkers. I mean, they weren't tee totalers or anything, but most of us were more occupied with playing sports or music or both, and all of us would have been killed and eaten by our parents if we didn't keep up our universally excellent grades. College is where most of the group finally took to the sauce - I've heard stories of my brother running down the road barefoot wearing a flag as a cape his freshman year and I know I was drunk dialed more than once by Kelly and TupperDoug. It was not so for me. In a misguided attempt to please my family, I had started dating and subsequently got engaged to a bible thumping deliberate virgin, and under no circumstances would there be any pre-marital sex or drinking of any kind (the biggest fight we ever had is when some of the guys on his floor were watching porn and I was like "OOO! PORN!" and then found out that The Lord would smite me if I even thought about enjoying porn.) (oh also, even though I was only with him because I thought he was the kind of guy my family wanted me to be with, I found out later that they all hated him because he was an annoying know-it-all and they were all relieved when I broke up with him. So, gigantic waste of time then, except that it came in handy a couple of weeks ago at trivia when I knew who had the highest lifetime batting average in the MLB because he was a walking sports almanac and made me memorize that sort of thing. It was Ty Cobb, by the way, .367.) So that collegiate right of passage was ruined for me. Eventually I broke up with him because SERIOUSLY WHAT THE HELL?, but by then I had graduated and gone back to Cleveland, two years early because I had plenty of time on my hands for studying and going to class since I wasn't drinking or having any sex, and all my friends were still away at school having a normal and more awesome experience.

We would make it a point to get together over breaks. One year on Christmas Eve Eve, I believe in 1999, TupperDoug, Kelly and I realized we all had a little last minute shopping we needed to take care of. Kelly had only just gotten home so our plan was that she would have dinner with her parents and her sister and then she would call us when they were finished and we would go pick her up and head to the McMall. TupperDoug came over to my house where we hung out waiting for the call from Kelly. We waited. And waited. And waited. A number of hours went by and TupperDoug and I were getting a little bit pissy. Finally we called her and this is what she had to say. "I'm sooo sorry you guys, we totally lost track of time. See, we had a bottle of wine with dinner, and then we got to talking and we had another bottle of wine and......... listen, my whole family's drunk. Do you want to just come over here instead?" Obviously we did, so we hopped in the Tuppermobile and headed over, stopping along the way to pick up some beer or something from the liquor store. By the time we got there, a few other friends and neighbors had been called and were sitting around the table with Kelly, Simmy and their parents and they were all drinking toasts to, well, anything really. "Doug and Amber are here YYYYEEEEAAAA!" they shouted, raising their glasses to us and gulping down some wine. "Oh look and they brought beer YYYEEEAAAA!" they shouted, raising their glasses to us and gulping down more wine. TupperDoug and I got right to it. Someone poured me a glass of red and we joined in on what had basically become a "cheers to everything" drinking game. This continued for a long time, as more friends and neighbors kept showing up, because apparently they had called everyone in the address book and said "come drink".

And then the shots started. I specifically remember vodka and moonshine, which Kelly and Simmy's dad had been given by someone for a reason I never cared to find out. There may have been some tequila. Hell, there may have been anything really, I was already half plowed before the shots even started. Despite being the oldest and most experienced drinkers, and also being English, the parents (who are also my pretend aunt and uncle, though for some reason I've been calling them "Mum and Dad" for the better part of 20 years) were already annihilated (the several hour head start probably didn't help matters). So when Simmy's date that night showed up to take her out, her Dad immediately started pouring the guy a shot. What followed was a several minute struggle between the two parents, with Simmy's mother yelling "Stop that! HE'S DRIVING YOUR DAUGHTER!" while trying to pour the shots back into the bottle, even as Simmy's dad was tipping the bottle sideways and pouring even more shots. They bathed the table in spilled vodka.

In the meantime, I had completely lost control of myself. The alcohol hit me hard and also all at once, so I went from interesting conversationalist to totally incoherent in the space of one sentence.

Let's take a break from that and talk about family traits for a moment. You know how sometimes you can look at a family and every has the same nose or the same smile? In my family, we all seem to have the same set of personality traits. For instance, everyone in my family allegedly makes the same face when we are trying to make a point. This was christened "The [My family name] Stare" by the comic when we were visiting Cap and Mrs. Sizemore in St. Louis. Despite not knowing the term because he had only just made it up, Mrs. Sizemore instantly knew what he was talking about and the two of them collapsed into conspiratorial laughter. So there's that one. There's also another one: when we have been drinking we get Loud. My suspicion is that this is due to our collective thinly disguised feeling of smug superiority. When we've had to much to drink, we dispense with the disguise entirely, and because we believe what we have to say is really PROFOUND and IMPORTANT, we all very suddenly go to eleven.

This being the first time I'd ever been drunk we were all about to find this out. The moment I realized I was impaired, I was struck by the desire to inform everyone of the momentousness of the occasion. "YOU GUYS!" I screamed. "I am SUPERDRUNK! You can't let me drink ANY MORE. I AM CUT OFF! DO you hear me? CUT! OFF!" And then I poured myself some more wine and repeated this at top volume throughout the evening.

The "cheers to everything" drinking game was still going on, but now it had evolved (or maybe devolved) into "cheers to drunk dialing". It worked like this: Mum would call someone, the rest of us didn't know who (she may not have either) and then she would say some random thing and the rest of us would erupt with screams and cheering. Everyone would take a drink, mum would hang up, and we'd start the whole process over again. We were having a good time with this until she made one call that started with "Hello! We're all DRUNK!" A mighty roar erupted from the crowd, but then she continued with "So I just wanted to let you guys know that Amber probably won't be coming home tonight." She'd just drunk dialed my parents and then ratted me out. I was too drunk to be furious but had no problem being Loudly Incredulous per the family tradition.

The rest of the night I remember in patches, as drunks are wont to do. At one point my pseudo-uncle was sitting on the kitchen floor mumbling to himself, "Turn your head and cough!" and we have a lovely photo somewhere of my pseudo-aunt standing next to the table covered in empty bottles where she looks for all the world like a spree killer who just happened upon a herd of fresh prostitutes. As for myself, I learned another important lesson that night about me and drinking, which is that when I hit the wall I don't just run into it, I plow through it like the Kool-Aid man yelling "OH YEAH!" while bricks rain down on me. One minute I was fine, the next minute I had passed out on the couch and managed to vomit gallons of red wine onto my white sweater while remaining passed out. When they found me they did the only thing they could - pull my shirt off me, carry my ass to the bathroom and lay me on the floor. This would prove to be the start of something golden. To this day, if the stories told the next day don't end up with me sleeping on the bathroom floor, then I wasn't really that drunk. Kelly did her best to get me to sleep in a bed and also to put a shirt on, but I wasn't having it. I liked the floor and I wasn't moving, so instead she laid a clean shirt on top of me like a blanket and left me there to sleep it off. Around 7:00 a.m. I was awoken by TupperDoug, who had come to collect me before sneaking out.

It was now Christmas Eve, and by tradition we were all expected at my (real) aunt and uncle's place mid-afternoon for a ham dinner and to sing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus (really) before heading off to church (another fond childhood memory - before church started they would hand out little white candles for us to light and hold up at the end of the service when everyone sang Christmas hymns by candlelight. All the kids in my family would spend the entire church service warming the candles in our hands and between our knees to soften them up so we could bend them into odd shapes. One time my cousin Bryan managed to tie his candle in a knot). Upon arrival the five of us who'd been involved in the prior evening's festivities looked one another over and I have to tell you, we looked like shit. We felt even worse and the idea of ham or food of any kind was simply nauseating. But as much as we all wanted to die, there was a sparkle in the eyes of all of us as co-conspirators of what would become the Legendary Night of Christmas Eve Eve.

KELLY, DOUG, SIMONE and anyone else who was there and happens to read this: PLEASE leave your memories of this night in the comments. I know we will never be able to give a complete picture of the awesomeness to anyone who wasn't there but damn it, we can try.

Nostalgia And Shit Like That.

2010-12-23T13:10:00.002-06:00

When I was growing up, my family liked to play board games at Christmas. It started out with the adults while us kids were busy having a wrestling match with cheap-ass plastic and its tag-team partner gravity. When we outgrew that frustration we joined them. The first one I remember playing is Pictionary, which I hated because to this day I can barely color inside the lines, let alone draw something freehand and have it be recognizable. I also remember quite a bit of Trivial Pursuit, although in my family there was nothing trivial about it - we were pretty fucking serious about wanting to win, and by "win" I mean beat my dad.

By far the most popular game we ever played and the one that dominates my memories was Crack the Case. My parents got it for my brother as a gift one year and the entire extended family decided to test it out after dinner. We were instantly hooked. Nevermind that we didn't even play it right. Almost immediately we stopped keeping score and just played it until we felt like stopping, no small feat considering the disturbing amount of competitive spirit that myself, my father AND my brother all carry around to this day (remind me to tell you how I'm "winning" at sex right now). Crack the Case worked like this: one person would pick a card out of a pile. There were three piles to choose from: Easy, Medium, and Hard. Over time as we got good at it we started disregarding the Easy cards almost entirely. On the front of the card would be a "case" - some mystery, usually a suspicious dead body, and a handful of details about the environment or circumstances the body was found in. The back of the card had all the details about what had happened. The goal was to solve the case: Who killed this person, how and why? The more difficult cards had either less initial information, or the information given was misleading. I remember one time spending several hours and no small amount of frustration on a case where the card read, "A woman has died. On the ground is a puddle of water and a hat. Who killed her, how did they do it and what was the reason?"* The trick to the thing was that you were only allowed to ask the person reading the card yes or no questions. It was like do-it-yourself CSI before there was any such show as CSI. Everybody stayed at the table and played. If sitting around playing board games as a family sounds completely dorktastic, that's because it is. Except that it wasn't. The game has been out of print for years, so good luck finding it, but if you do, I defy you to sit down with your family and play this game without thinking it is the most fun and addictive thing you've ever done with your family (unless your family sits around having "family heroin time", which would be more addictive, though I dare say it's probably not nearly as fun, at least after a while).

I made the decision several years ago not to spend any more holidays with my family and I can't say I regret it. I've grown very attached to the freedom of not having anything expected of me. I don't have anywhere I'm supposed to be at any certain time. There is no dress code. I don't have to get dressed at all if I want. If I wake up that morning and decide "You know what? Fuck ham. I don't feel like cooking. Imma eat candy all fucking day and no one can stop me", I can sit there with a massive bowl of M&Ms in my paint splatter sweatpants watching "A Christmas Story" 16 times in a row and never take a shower. Of course I would never actually do that because OHMIGOD YOU GUYS, Christmas is so TOTALLY, like, my FAVORITE as by now you all know (and if somehow you've missed this piece of information about me, I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you that my living room is currently a forest of Christmas trees. Seven of them). Also, ham is awesome.When people ask "What are you doing for Christmas?" I have to restrain myself from saying "WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT! SUCK ON THAT, BITCH!" and making their trip to rural Indiana to see their crazy aunt that farts at the table and their racist grandparents seem like purgatory. But the one thing that I do always miss this time of year is that time right after dessert when someone would go to the cupboard and pull out Crack the Case.

*Cap, Bry, Simmy and Kelly: Who remembers this case? We seriously spent like two hours on it. Bonus points for the first person to comment with the answer.

They Came Through!

2010-12-07T16:29:00.000-06:00

So this ought to be a challenging post, because I'm super excited about something that happened at work today and I can't wait to tell you about it, but I have to be a lil sneaky and talk around a couple things to avoid breaches of confidentiality about where I work, what I do, and whom we do business with, partly because it might be in violation of the company privacy policy (I have perhaps ill-advisedly given the address to this blog to our compliance maven, but I had to - she's my best friend here and also she's on it a lot. OK, fine, it's BrownsFan) but mostly because I love you guys, but only in an anonymous internety sort of way and don't want to provide anyone with enough details to track me down in real life.

ANYWAY, long story even longer, the pistachios are here (BrownsFan, where the hell are you? The pistachios are here!). And I know you're thinking "Yeah, big deal" and normally you would be right, but no, this time you are wrong. Way wrong. These are special pistachios. They come from a company that does things related to what my company does and they send them out every year in a big tin as a holiday gift. If you know or think you may have guessed what I do and you work at a company that does a similar thing and does business with this company, then you already know the exact tin of pistachios I am talking about because they are legendary. Also they are magical. They are gigantic by the standards of a normal pistachio and more importantly THERE ARE NEVER ANY BAD ONES. You know the bad ones: they look like a normal pistachio but when you eat them your face goes all Emperor Palpatine because they taste like all of nature just died inside your mouth. There's a few in every package, it's part of the pistachio eating experience. Pistachio roulette if you will. Well, in the whole history of getting these specific pistachios (nigh going on nine years now because we also got them at the place I worked in Cleveland) I have never had a bad one or even heard of anyone else having a bad one. Each and every pistachio is pristine of flavor (and massive). They are grown on trees made of gold in a land of perpetual rainbows and picked by angels Victoria's Secret could never hope to surpass in beauty or quality of underwear. And I am eating them right now.

I was concerned that maybe they weren't coming this year. Last week I had marched into BrownsFan's office demanding to know "Where the fuck are the pistachios?" (or more likely a similar question with less of the word "fuck" but an equal amount of inappropriateness) and she had pointed out that the big leader guy was going through some personal Scariness and sending out pistachios may not be at the top of his to do list, and also there's that whole thing where the economy is maybe not so good right now. I went away and sulked. But then! Today at precisely 3:24 p.m. Central Standard Time, Parent Company Accountant messaged me with one concise and glorious word: "pistachios!" and all the pieces of my life fell back into place.

Welcome back, magic pistachios. Please make yourself at home in my mouth.

Amber And Jenny Know How To Party

2010-12-06T11:39:00.001-06:00

Mrs. Sizemore: Also, wanna home depot trip sometime this eel for a diy project?

Me: lol. eel

Mrs. Sizemore: Haha I meant week, no idea where eel came from

Me: best sentence of the day. then we can go to home depot and be like "where are your eels?" and they'll be like what? and we'll be like "the EELS! WHERE ARE THE EELS?" and then we'll get thrown out

Mrs. Sizemore: Hahahaha Let's

Me: it's a plan

In Which Amberance Has Opinions About Sports

2010-12-02T18:53:00.000-06:00

College football - It is not Cam Newton's fault that his father is a douchebag.
NBA basketball - I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I suddenly care about the NBA or that I've ever been a Cavaliers fan. That said, I am veeerrrry interested to see what goes down tonight when LeBron returns to Cleveland. A heard a clip from a talk show earlier where a caller said that Cleveland fans need to be given credit for being civilized human beings at heart. I'm pretty sure this man has never been to or met anyone from Cleveland. I've seen people throw Monopoly money on the field at Albert Belle. I've seen the Cleveland Browns have to surround an opposing team and walk them off the field to protect them from the fans. Jim Thome still gets booed every time he sets foot on the field. And those were at relatively low levels of collective pissed-offedness. Are we really expecting there to be no incidents tonight? Because I don't care how much "security" you have, angry-ass people are creative at smuggling and as I discussed with BrownsFan earlier today, there's only one figure in all of sports that Cleveland fans hate more than LeBron James, and that man hasn't set foot in the city since the day he stole our football team for fear of actual bodily harm or possible assassination. Just sayin'.
Sunday Night Football - Ben Roethlisberger has a broken foot. SWEEP THE LEG!*

*Just to clarify, this statement is not meant as any kind of support for the Ravens. I'm just saying there's an opportunity here to take this missing link out for the remainder of the season and it would be a shame to pass on that. <----This is what I'm talking about. Cleveland sports fans clearly are animals.

Suck It, Fondant

2010-11-23T10:08:00.000-06:00

I've outdone myself. Most likely I've outdone you. I know that sounds arrogant, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

If you are a fan of the show Sons of Anarchy (and you should be) you will most likely recognize this as the top rocker and reaper logo from the Sons colors (motorcycle jacket for those that don't watch the show or Gangland on the History Channel):

Looks an awful lot like a leather jacket, no?

I drew that myself.

IN FROSTING.

Cake (not a leather jacket)

BUTTERCREAM FROSTING.

I'm better than you. Na na na boo boo, stick your head in doo doo.

The frosting of the moment is fondant. Its consistency makes it the favorite for detail work in current cake decorating trends. It is also a bitch to work with, tastes like chemicals and won't adhere to your cake on its own meaning that you still have to make buttercream frosting to decorate a cake with fondant. Fondant loyalists will try to tell you you will never get the kind of precision with buttercream that you can get with fondant. I point to the above cake as definitive evidence to the contrary. My cake is pretty AND delicious, and I defy you to repeat the detail work of the reaper's bony hands and bloody scythe with friggin' fondant.