Entries from December 2003 ↓

Right now Liz Phair is warbling her way through “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” on Conan O’Brien.
It’s painful. It’s so goddamn horrible.

If I could interview Liz Phair I think I would start with this question: “What happened to you that you forgot you can’t sing?”

I know how you get down.

I know how you eat with your hands and sleep with your boots on and pinch your eyelids in the mornings when it’s all new light and no one else. I know you’ve got that postcard on the bathroom door still. I know you hate the whole world for what it did to you, and frankly, you have a point. You get to scream at your mother. You are allowed to punch your bed very hard.

I know your name, but I can’t say it fits you at all. I know you meant it and that you thought it would happen, but turns out, we were both crazy. I never heard your voice crackle through a telephone wire. I never saw you scratch an itch.

I know you lie wondering as the time ticks by beside you, wondering how things can go so fast when these minutes are heavy and so fucking endless. I know you hold your breath to feel yourself on the inside.

I see that every time you manage to laugh that your face and your eyes crave a good cry.

I just thought you should know that I know.

Work is seriously sucking. Today’s shift will be Day 3 out of 5, and if you know me at all, that is an uncharacteristic run. Fact is, I make enough money bartending that I can afford to work just 30 hours a week or so and still keep up with my bills. This is my trap. I hate my job, but I can sort of stand to do it 3-4 days a week. I am looking hard for work, but I just can’t bring myself to get a new job at a different restaurant. And real, living-wage-type jobs are scarce as shit. A few promising leads lately, but I lack enough experience in administrative settings. Very, very frustrating.

Meanwhile, at the restaurant job, I’m given the same amount of respect as those that were TEN YEARS OLD when I first began my employment there. I was basically called a liar by one of my superiors, because he refused to admit that he was-gasp!-wrong about something. I find it increasingly difficult to work at this place, and if I could only tell you all the thousands of reasons why without getting good and fired (okay, that would not so bad, but still…).

Promise you this: Soon as I find something new, I’m gonna break it down for y’all. The real deal skinny. I’ve got six years of pent up frustration, and when I finally don’t have to worry about my bosses stumbling onto my web site there will be a deluge of vitriol so fierce you’ll likely slap whoever’s nearest you.

I would be going to the “office” Christmas party tonight had I not been scheduled to CLOSE after overhearing my manager explain that only newer people would be working late. No one’s asked me if I’m going, but I’m not. Me and the VCB are going to party like rock stars in my apartment. Just us and Conan O’Brien. It’s the late-nite soiree of the season, yo.

Am having sushi with my sweetie friend Amy at 1 this afternoon. I’ve been thinking about crunchy shrimp rolls since last night. I dreamed sweet raw fish dreams all night, until those dreams turned frantic and anxiety-inducing. I dreamed my landlord was barging in with someone to show my apartment and there was wax everywhere. I’d left some candles burning and they’d all melted intot he carpet and the walls and oh my god, I slept naked.

When I finally woke I was pleased to discover there was no wax, no landlord, no prospective renter. Just a towering pile of dirty laundry and a few hours before mmmmmmmmm, crunchy shrimp rolls.

(NOW WITH MULLET PICTURE!)

In the 4th grade, when I was the new kid in school, I signed my own yearbook. As in, I forged a bunch of signatures from real people who weren’t really my friends. Probably had something to do with the mullet.

Those Capri-Sun juice bags contain only enough to really piss me off.

But occasionally, I buy them because nothing is as fun as blowing into that teeny straw, sending fruit punch-flavored sugar water streaming back up and into your mouth.

She’s got an ass like you’ve never seen.

Round, hard, high. She wears high heels every day of her life. High-heeled boots if it’s winter. She always wears the same pair of black, velvet, skin-tight pants, though I’m beginning to think she owns at least two identical pairs.

He manages the hotel where she works the front desk and the telephones. He’s tall with a small paunch; got a boy’s face that laughs too easily. He’s worked at that hotel for years–well, for the that chain of them, at least. He’s been moved around a lot since he was first hired. He thinks it is because he is too weak, but most everyone knows it was because he is always banging the girl with the phenomenal ass.

She’s 19. She usually dates athletes, but he plays a lot of video game basketball and plays actual golf, so that’ll do. He brushes her flat belly with his hand as he passes her in the corridors. Blatantly. In front of housekeeping and the kitchen staff. She smiles, her teeth short and ivory white, everytime he touches her.

He’ll be moved again soon. Somewhere outside of Baltimore this time, and he won’t take her with him. Without saying goodbye, he’ll sell the CDs she left at his house for a small bag of coke and will fly all the way to Maryland in his Tempo.

I’m using the community computers at the coffee house down the street to write this post. Since my landlord is showing my apartment to a prospective renter right now. This will be the first of many showings of the place until I move out of it at the end of the month.

Yep, the same day I punched out the window I got a knock on the door from my landlord. I was mistaken about when our arrangement for a month-to-month lease was over, and it wasn’t the end of February like I thought, but right now.

Luckily, I’m a total nomad and have very few belongings–which is how I like it. I could gather up all my stuff in my knotted comforter and carry it on my back, save my computer. Until it shit the bed*, my 19″ monitor was the biggest thing I owned except for my mattresses. Which live on the floor.

So. After my landlord informed me my stay was abbreviated, I did the only thing I knew to do: I told the VCB, who was hiding in the bathroom, “Suprise! I’m moving in!”

[*Dana says “shit the bed.” Doesn’t that make you just love her?]
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I’ve narrowed the proposed taglines to a slender ten after reviewing all 74 comments(!). I really liked most of what was entered but found myself unable to choose most of them for one significant reason. Because they weren’t just right. Even if I found an entry funny or incredibly clever it may be that the entry simply didn’t go in the direction I wanted to take the new tagline.

I’ll tally the votes in two days time, say midnight on Wednesday*, and the tagline with the most votes gets a seat on the top of the page. And a new color scheme in which to live. That tagline will stay until I grow bored of it, at which time I’ll implement a scripted rotating one. The winner gets a prominent, fancy link on the sideblog until it comes down. Sound cool?

ADDENDUM: The other, first poll was a bust. I’ve got my fingers crossed that this one will work okay. If you were able to vote before, please do so again. Everyone else: Get to it.

*Now Thursday, midnight.

VOTING NOW CLOSED–YOU ARE TOO LATE
Big ups to all those who participated.

Just a moment ago, frustrated by the ongoing construction outside my studio apartment, I banged my fist on the window and shook my finger disapprovingly at the men in trucks below.

Immediately the beeps stopped beeping, the trucks turned off their engines and the shoveling and jackhammering totally subsided.  It was dead quiet.

For about five minutes, that is, until they started right back up.  They were grinding the gravel with their huge trucks, paving the street again with that stinky, black muck.  But for about five minutes I felt like maybe I had some secret super power or something.  All is took was the rap of my hand and a stern look and all the noise I’d heard for days was gone.

So I tried it again.  I went to the window and rapped not too forcefully, believing that maybe I had somehow gained the ability to hush construction crews with a single touch of my hand, at which time my fist went right through the glass.

Seems those with super powers hide under the covers and squeal, "I’m in so much trouble!" when they accidentally punch out a window.

While it has done me good and proud, I think it best to lay my current tagline to rest. “Like the Star Wars kid, but on purpose” still makes me laugh, but I’m itching for a new label.

And a contest.

I’ve thunk up ten new taglines, and woe is me, my little girl mind can’t decide. Looks like I’ll need some help.

I will list the ten taglines I wrote below and to compete you just vote on your favorite in the comments section and/or add a new tagline of your own. In one week’s time I will restructure a new list of 15–a selection of mine and those other’s wrote–at which time there will be a final vote. Say, 48 hours later.

The winner, if there is one chosen (as one of my own taglines may get the most votes, nyah), will receive the sparkling satisfaction of a job best done. And a prominent link to his or her own site with a big fat thank-you in the side column. Shit for prize, you say? You speak the truth. So don’t go losing any sleep over your entry.

My ten submissions:

Sparkwood & 21

You won’t need directions

All lying, all the time

100% cursing

Like 50 Cent, but harder

Watch me brain-fuck you

Buy two, get a free opinion

May induce infirmness

Get your feet on the couch!

Fondling your funny bone since before yesterday

Now it’s creamed-corn scented!

See? Surely you can do better than that.