Tales of a Post-Grad Nothing

Back in Business

2010-04-22T04:46:00.000-04:00

I'm not exactly positive about why, but somehow this blog still gets daily hits despite the fact that it's been defunct for several years. While I'm pretty sure the hits are coming from bots, in case my fantasy of a small contingency of really die-hard fans exist, take heart. I'm taking my business over here now. Thanks for your patronage.

---Chris

Hey! I'm Not Dead!

2008-09-20T23:42:00.017-04:00

In fact I'm the exact opposite of dead! I am living life at such a ridiculously breakneck speed now that I haven't had time to sit down and get good n broody in several months. In the past few months I've:

* Traveled to six different countries where I did everything from shooting a crossbow in a castle in Prague to getting a nude massage (in a semi-public place) by a mustacioed woman in Hungary. It was awesome! And embarrassing!

* Absolutely fell in love with the current boyfriend. Not only because he's adventurous and likes to dance and takes me on red-hot dates to places like a science supply store and loves to spend Sunday afternoons curled up eating Dreamsicles and watching documentaries with me, but also because he is the most honest and kind human being I've ever met. I don't think I've ever felt this at peace in my life.

* Went to Lollapalooza where, during a Rage Against the Machine show, the woman beside yelled, "Hey! I'm coppin a squat!" and then proceeded to urinate (and potentially more) in the middle of a crowd of several thousand. I am pretty sure the aforementioned boyfriend and I were later pushed into that woman's urine. Though the incident happened a month or so ago, that thought makes me feel uncomfortable to this day.

* Continued to stay enamored with Chicago. That is reinforced every time I meet someone awesome as this guy or participate in something as delightfully absurd as this. In the past few months, I've gotten to visit a group that hosts a live-action vampire-themed role playing game, trap feral cats in crack houses, and discuss the future of broadcasting with a guy who could potentially replace human news anchors with cartoon ones. Sometimes I believe this place was built just for me.

* Was given tickets to see Bon Jovi, or rather the back of Bon Jovi's head, thanks to my nephew. While you might think that the best part of that show was seeing Jon Bon's feathered hair waft gently to a live performance of Livin On a Prayer, you'd be wrong. The best part was standing in a parking lot after the show, watching a woman so drunk she couldn't stand up try to convince a lot attendant that some Hispanic lady also coming out of the show was being sexually trafficked.

* Learned to cook...sort of. The majority of the things I've made have been so-so; however, I did make a pretty badass almond cake with creme anglaise and blueberry compote. I am not exaggerating at all when I say that I was more proud the day I made that cake than I was the day I graduated from high school. Don't tell my mom I said that.

* Had my first book published. This one specifically which is the sole reason that I've been so negligent on this here internet thingy.

I'm pretty pumped about this for a few reasons:

#1) Now I can go to a Barnes and Noble (in Virginia), point to that book, and tell strangers who don't care, "I wrote that" in a haughty voice. I haven't done that yet, but I have taken cell phone pictures of myself standing in front of the book on display. Don't judge me.

#2) This is the first step in a very specific life plan I have to write a bunch of books on financial aid, establish accompanying scholarship programs designed for single parents, and help as many economically disadvantaged students as I can connect with aid programs that will help them earn a college degree. Though there are any number of good reasons to focus on this cause - education is one of the factors proven to break the cycle of poverty; students with a college degree are statistically more likely to start businesses, volunteer, stay out of jail, give back to their community, and raise kids that do the same; those with a four-year degree earn an average of $1 million more in their lifetime than those who don't; etc. - the real reason is that my sister and I were both lucky enough to have a mom who made college an expectation, even when it was economically tough on her. Knowing what I know about financial aid now, it could have been less tough. Had we been aware of the thousands upon thousands of aid programs out there, we probably could have had financial help but frankly, we were all uneducated about the process like most families are.

If possible, I'd like to change that or at least start changing that. I think the book will help and in order to get that project off the ground, I'm pretty sure I will have to shut this one down. As a friend recently said, "Nobody's going to take you seriously if they know you sometimes photograph people's cracks." Check and mate.

So while Post-gradnothing.com has been a fantastic experience and I've met some amazingly wonderful people from it, I'm going to have to hang up writing about my own awkwardness in favor of a project way bigger than this.

Thanks for being so awesome for the past four years,

Chris

P.S. We finally got a goat!

Richmond, I'm Not Angry, I'm Just Disappointed

2008-05-22T00:07:00.002-04:00

New York Times, May 22, 2008:

"On campuses nationwide, professors and administrators have passionately debated whether their universities should accept money for research from tobacco companies. But not at Virginia Commonwealth University, a public institution in Richmond, Va.

That is largely because hardly any faculty members or students there know that there is something to debate — a contract with extremely restrictive terms that the university signed in 2006 to do research for Philip Morris USA, the nation’s largest tobacco company and a unit of Altria Group.

The contract bars professors from publishing the results of their studies, or even talking about them, without Philip Morris’s permission. If 'a third party,' including news organizations, asks about the agreement, university officials have to decline to comment and tell the company. Nearly all patent and other intellectual property rights go to the company, not the university or its professors..."

Full article here.

Up Yours Ben Franklin

2008-05-21T17:11:00.005-04:00

Last week I had a dream that every boy I've ever had a crush on was marching in a straight line to Canada to get cheapo Lasik surgery and thus ditching their hottie mchothot glasses forever. In the middle of the dream Ben Franklin kind of floated up from nowhere and said with a smug grin, "I'm Ben Franklin. I invented the bifocal and even I'm going to Canada for Lasik." And then he laughed. That motherfuckin forefather laughed directly in my face. I had the same dream again last night and both times I woke up with my jaw clenched in anger at both Canada and Ben Franklin. As far as I can tell, boys in glasses are our nation's number one natural resource.

Taking a Page from Queserasera.org

2008-05-19T22:06:00.002-04:00

Text Messages Saved in My Phone:

* Veronica Mars would be proud of you (and so am I).

* I rust [sic] an all Austrian dance circle to the song "Word Up." This is getting out of hand.

* I just did the robot...shit just got real...

* Remember when we saw that awesome Magic Flute play, and that lady behind us was like "I still have that bag of jelly the psychic told me to carry around?" That was the best part of the play.

* I'm no damn good for you. I'm a lone wolf. And this eagle must fly free.

* When you come down here, we're forming the world's greatest gator wrastlin [sic again] tag team! I pity those gator fools.

* I just wanna be dancin. Dirty, dirty, dirty dancin.

* Your yo-face is soft. I know hard baby. I'm from Short Pump and I'm staying at my mom's house.

* I'm sorry I was snoring all night, but it is actually a sign of affection. Really loud and unattractive affection.

* Put on your dancing shoes. I just boarded the funky train to Pleasuretown.

* Girl, I would take you to a fine restaurant that would treat you like the Nobel laureate that you are. Then I would take you back to your place where you could casually unpack while I strike suggestive poses. Then I would show you a poorly acted film that will make you feel like a real woman. And then when you are feeling that way, I will lay you down by the fire and show you the real power of love.

* I want to stab my balls right now.

* I should have given you my temporary tattoo. It has flowers! (not gay)

* I think I just heard a dude yell "Shitty titties" at a girl. Awesome.

* I just accidentally ate someone's food while sitting at a bar. I thought it was common snacks. I hope your day is as surprising.

* I'm in the front center. Look for the guy that looks like He-man, but sexier.

* I may or may not have just spent the past 15 minutes rage singing in front of my computer to musicals. I thought you would appreciate that.

* Newsflash: Vin Diesel movie marathon Sunday on USA Network.

The Great Mustache Experiment Wrap Up

2008-05-16T00:50:00.009-04:00

Sometimes I get all bogged down with work and doing other awesome-type stuff and I forget that I have a web site that does more than just link to other more interesting web sites. Though you wouldn't know it from looking at the past, I don't know, couple of years, it is possible, theoretically, to leave actual content on this site that doesn't pertain to broody relationship lamentations, pictures of robots and/or unicorns and/or robots riding unicorns, or stories about my awkwardness. Theoretically.

After finding this today, I suddenly realized that I never followed up on this idea which is a shame because it has a CLIMACTIC CONCLUSION of an ending.

Last July, I made a worldwide call for anyone willing to grow a burly mustache and then let me interview them about the power of the stache. Surprisingly, I got a good bit of response. As a whole, you people who read the web are pretty pumped about your ability to grow facial hair and you are not afraid to tell strangers from the internet all about it. At the end of the day, I didn't have to choose exactly who would be the best mustache candidate. One quite literally showed up at my door:

This is my friend David. Last summer David visited for a few days and showed up bearing the gift of a fully grown surprise stache which he kept for the entire length of the trip, giving me the chance to test drive the stashe for myself, see how it performed on the open road. And oh how it performed. For the four days Dave and I combed the streets of Chicago, heads were turned, eyebrows were raised, sly glances were exchanged between people on the street. When leaving the Signature Room one night, we actually heard some guy burst into full-on laughter and say to his buddy "Dude! Did you SEE that guy's mustache?!" The reaction was subtle, but significant and I think my roommate summed it up best: "It's like...I don't know...It's like it's alive or something. I just can't. stop. staring." The whole weekend felt like rolling with a D-list celebrity, specifically a D-list celebrity you might feel uncomfortable leaving your children around.

But mustaches on men under 40 are by nature creepy. That reaction is to be expected. What surprised me more than other people's reactions was my own. It's kind of an amazing thing when someone is willing to walk around looking like a sketchwad just because they know it will make you laugh. It's weirdly flattering and every time I looked over at that terrible, terrible tuft of hair, I kept thinking someone made THAT for me. Every time a stranger on the street reveled in the stashe's full comedic glory, I felt this surprising tiny swell of pride. Oh that? That little piece of hilarity was made to make me smile. In a bizarre way, it felt like getting a really personal birthday present.

This summer is 180 degrees different from last. I'm officially settled in a city I'm simply crazy for. My job is going fantastically well, I have a new boyfriend who kicks more ass than a team of highly trained ass-kicking ninjas, and I've got some amazing adventures planned, one of which involves making a pilgrimage to a 160-pound statue of Michael Jackson made entirely from white chocolate...seriously. I am happier than I have ever been and I attribute a big portion of that to the people who loved me enough to sacrifice their time, patience, and facial real estate in the name of making my life a little bit better. As silly as it is to say Dave, that stashe kind of meant the world to me.

Deal Breaker

2008-04-21T19:56:00.002-04:00

Someone asked me today if I were an animal and I knew that I would be turned into something edible, would I rather be a McDonald's hamburger or a meat hat? I'm not sure I could be friends with someone who said hamburger.

There Aren't A Lot of Things That Make Me Speechless

2008-04-11T15:57:00.002-04:00

This one does.

Tell Me Honestly

2008-04-10T03:25:00.002-04:00

Is there anything sadder in this world than a toe ring on a grown-ass woman? Yesterday I saw a toe ring sandwiched between a callous and a rhinestone-studded flip flop, just riding the subway all casual-like. All I could do was look at the tribal symbol-inscribed thing like it was a homicide scene, shake my head silently, and think What the hell happened here?

No Title Necessary

2008-04-09T03:29:00.000-04:00

"Couch, sometimes you alone are the target audience."
~My friend Steve

Record Breaker

2008-04-08T01:13:00.029-04:00

Internet - let me teeeeeeelllllllll you, this weekend was what my friend James:

would describe as "a star-spangled rocket of awesome." On Friday I had a "fancy date," which was badass because I got to put on a dress a friend once described as "very boob-centric" and head out to a restaurant where waiters in piratey pants continually circle the room offering

SIXTEEN KINDS OF MEAT ALL SERVED ON SWORDS.

There are not enough programming tricks in the world to emphasize how thrilling that is. Several of the aforementioned meats are also wrapped in bacon. I don't have to tell you how excited meat wrapped in other meat served on a weapon makes me. I'm not sure if you have ever had the meat-meat-sword combo plate, but if you haven't it's what I would imagine riding a rainbow feels like...only you can eat this rainbow...and it tastes like bacon making love to a steak.

Saturday there were bliss cakes and dog beaches and laptop orchestras and Ba'hai temples to be seen and afterwards, in the words of Biggie "my whole crew was loungin.*" The weekend was absolutely perfect and while spending the afternoon out in the sunshine, watching my dog awkwardly sniff other dogs and then immediately turn and run away like Oh me? I was over here the whole time totally not sniffing your ass at all, it occurred to me that it had been a while since I did anything head-turningly awkward. At least a week. No! More than a week! Probably about 10 days. Did you see those words? 10 FULL DAYS OF SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR, MAYBE MORE BECAUSE I GOT SO EXCITED AT DAY 8 THAT I KIND OF LOST COUNT.

That is a record. Hell, if I can make it ten full days without turning red in public or palm-sweating through a pair of mittens, I can probably also make it rain chocolate eclairs or stop time with my mind. I was already feeling like this when my nephew:

called with the perfect way to end an already perfect weekend - free tickets to see Vampire Weekend.

If there's one thing Indecent Proposal has taught me, it's that doing it on a big pile of money is probably pretty hot and there's no such thing as free. Ever. My nephew is a ticket broker and in exchange for two free tickets to a sold-out show, I'd have to sell five more. No big deal. That's why God made Craigslist. I listed the tickets, they sold in less than an hour, and Boomtown baby, we were ready to roll. All I had to do was meet some dude 30 minutes before the show, trade the tickets for some dolla-dolla billz, and enjoy an evening of V-neck sweater-filled rock. What I didn't count on was the barrage of questions this guy had. How long had I been a scalper? How much money did I usually make? What kind of office hours do I hold? Could he get REM tickets in May? It was incessant and the more I tried to explain that I really don't scalp tickets for a living, the more questions he asked. When the deal was over, he tied up the transaction by asking "What other shady things do you do? Do you have heroin(e) in your pocket too?" "No," I said, letting out an exasperated sigh. "I keep that stuff hidden...in a balloon...neatly tucked in my asshole."

And just like that the record was broken.

-----------------------------------

* although due to our middle class backgrounds, we were not "celebrate every day no more public housin." Sorry Notorious.

Confession

2008-04-04T02:44:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I see things like this and wonder how my life would be different if I had spent more of my 6th year of life learning awesome things instead of devising new ways to give myself nosebleeds so I wouldn't have to go to Brownie meetings.

It Was Bound to Happen Eventually

2008-04-03T12:29:00.004-04:00

Today I gave a homeless man $1 just because I was impressed by his manners. And with that I've officially morphed into my mother. Who needs a cardigan from Talbots? More specifically, is there anyone here who doesn't need a cardigan from Talbots? I didn't think so.

Project Badass Part V: Have Faith

2008-04-02T02:36:00.012-04:00

I'm back! After a whirlwind three weeks that included winning an award, traveling 800 miles to claim it, then returning to Chicago only to immediately total my car and kick off what's bound to be a very long and torrid relationship with an auto insurance agent named Christine, I'm actually beginning to settle back into my otherwise uneventful life of eating ice cream and telling the dog she's pretty*. One of the biggest changes that's happened in the past few months is that I started seeing this dude who seems to fit my description of the Ultimate Dating Champion:

* Cooks: Check
* Dances: Check
* Can fight with nunchucks: Check
* Owns and plays the keytar: Check
* Described himself apropos of nothing on our first date as "a guy who's into engineering and punk rock and X-men:" Check times a million oh my god swoooooooon
* Looked me directly in the eye and said "You are fantastic" after I played him Blue 38 by this group: Check

Basically, we can skip everything above the last one. Nunchuck knowledge or not, any time you play a song whose chorus involves the words "finger" and "doodyhole" and your date doesn't immediately walk out, you can pack things up. You've found yourself a winner.

The dating thing - scratch that - the trusting thing is exciting and terrifying at the same time. When the boyfriend of 9 years split, I felt like this enormous part of me somehow rotted and fell off. Not the part that loves, the part that knows that as painful as the ending of the last thing was, it was worth it. The whole damn thing. And opening up all over again is also worth it, even if everyone involved gives it their all and it still shatters into 1 million painful shards, leaving both parties with a box full of pictures they can't look at and CDs that make them viscerally ill. Even then, maybe especially then, the whole thing was worth it. I don't know what you call that part, faith? If so, it's not faith in a new person as much as faith in the grander scheme - that even the tiniest step towards peacefully letting go and leaping blindly into an unknown future is more powerful than all of the epic break-ups in all of the world. That kind of faith is bigger than any boy.

So while the new guy does make me giggle and blush every time he says things like "I would like to take you on a date to the museum of surgery and medical oddity," a huge part of my recent happiness is just knowing that I'm still able to turn pink and laugh wildly, having no idea how this adventure will turn out.

--------------------------------

* Ok fine, not just pretty, beautiful. Like a beautiful, furry-footed princess**.
** I only call her a furry-footed princess sometimes***.
*** That sometimes is more frequent than I would like to admit.

Some Links! Huzzah!

2008-03-11T02:12:00.007-04:00

Your morning dose of uncomfortable.

Cheerio Internet!

Resolution For the Day

2008-03-10T02:28:00.000-04:00

I'm never getting hitched unless I can find someone who will make married life feel like this.

Photo credit: Tyler Nixon
Full gallery available here.
Link found through The Lisa Show.

They May Not Be the Best Spellers, But Those Who Use the Air Dryer in the Restroom of My Favorite Coffee Shop Are, If Nothing Else, Hilarious

2008-03-06T16:08:00.000-05:00

Overheard in Chicago

2008-03-03T12:43:00.002-05:00

[My tiny, sweaty pseudo-coworker talking to 2 drunk ladies in a karaoke bar]

"No, no. I DO believe in magic, I just don't think I should have to read all 7 Harry Potter books to get it."

Overheard in Chicago

2008-02-26T17:14:00.002-05:00

[Setting: Saturday night, Outside of the Neofuturarium theatre, Foster and Ashland]

Dude with a fantastic novelty mustache that faded beautifully into a full beard: "Whoa, your gay-dar is great. If this were the Wild West and gay people were water, you'd be really handy."

Jan Von Holleben Does Beautiful Work

2008-02-25T05:08:00.000-05:00

Dreams of Flying gallery available here. Full portfolio available here.

I Choo-Choo-Choose You

2008-02-23T16:51:00.000-05:00

When I read this story, I cannot help but think that Nick, 15 must be the real-life Ralph Wiggum.

Because I Needed One More Way to Connect With Reality TV Stars

2008-02-22T16:43:00.008-05:00

Um, this was announced today. Where are the other three horsemen of the apocalypse?

FOLLOW UP:

I also found this, which is great because it contains what may be my new favorite quote of all time:

"'We’re financing [the album] ourselves on a shoestring budget,' Pratt tells People. 'It’s so organic. And this is just the warm-up. We’re just heating up the water in the bathtub. It’s gonna get hot!'”

I wish that this quote had continued because I'm pretty sure it would say something like, "And then it might burn you because it's so friggin hot. I mean...I mean...this is crazy hot like a forest fire or some shit. No, it's hot like a volfuckingcano...or the sun...whoa, bro, get this...are you ready?...this shit is hot like a volcano that shoots pieces of the sun...yeah, that's right [insert knowing nod here]. Spencey P. just blew your mind."

Someone Please Buy Me This:

2008-02-21T04:29:00.002-05:00

action figure of the Prince of Peace riding a bull (of sin?). In fact, I'd be happy with anything from here.

Project Badass Part IV: Party Like a Rockstar (Or How I Met Slash)

2008-02-17T01:00:00.008-05:00

As a woman who spends the vast majority of her time sitting around in her underwear, reading geek books and wishing that she owned one of these*, I don't do a lot of shoulder-rubbing with the party elite. One of the major goals of Project Badass is to break out of my comfort zone, so I thought that maybe learning to mingle might come in handy.

The Sundance Film Festival was my opportunity to party my face right off. I'm not sure how much of the trip I'm allowed to divulge, but I will say this - my nephew is a ticket broker who happened to do the right deal for the right people and that's how four kids from Virginia found themselves trading movie tickets for access to celebrity VIP parties. After a day of shooting a non-Lego version of this, my crew headed to Park City where we attended the Sundance opening party. While the opening party to one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world sounds like a sexy, sexy affair, it's not unless you're a lady who loves nothing more in this world than to eat. In that case, it's a totally bitchin affair because they had ENTIRE ROOMS FILLED WITH CUPCAKES. Rooms...plural. I've never been to heaven, but I imagine it too has cupcakes as far as the eye can see.

For the next three nights, we attended various parties at a very exclusive club packed with people who looked like this:

They were sincerely the most beautiful and most angry-looking people I've ever seen. Nothing - not oversized aviators indoors at night, not dresses that towed the fine line between party girl and prostitute, not a smattering of celebrities that filled the place - made anyone at any of these parties crack a smile even for a second. In fact all of those things seemed to make them even more serious. I tried to capture the elusive serious, sexy dance faces in action; however, I decided that pictures would be overkill when I saw a man pull out a camera and then get immediately tossed out of the club by his hair. You can trust me though, it was full-on, professional dance faces everywhere, the likes of which can only be rivaled by these guys.

In situations like that, where you just know from the bottom of your heart that both you and your Juniors-section H&M circa 2004 clothing will never ever fit in, I think the best way to handle things is to rock ever harder than you would otherwise. We made up our minds to talk to as many people as we possibly could and sometime during a VIP 50 Cent concert when I found myself saying "Yeah, I'm pretty into robots myself" to one of the world's leading young jazz musicians, I knew that it had paid off. What I did not know was that said jazz musician would be endeared enough by my smooth robot talk to invite my nephew, his girlfriend, and I to a 50 Cent afterparty where I sipped cocktails laced with 50 Cent flavored vitamin water and discussed whether a pterodactyl or Robocop would win in a fight with the guitarist for Ghostface Killah. As sad/telling as it is, the main thing I was enamored with at that party was the fact that there was a private chef cooking personalized breakfasts at 2AM complete with...wait for it...

TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF BACON

Two. As in, party attendants had more than one type of bacon to choose from. Despite the fact that there were numerous musicians, fashion designers, rap artists, and professional socialites at that party, the highlight of the evening (for me) was spending a solid 30 minutes discussing meat smoking techniques with the chef. That and when some dude came up to me on the makeshift dance floor and said "you got some Black in those hips girl." That was a highlight too.

When we left the 50 Cent bacon party at 5:30AM (and after I fell over in the snow from exhaustion/elation/intoxication), I was convinced that I had had my rockstar experience. I could come home, write an inexcusably belated post about it, and then officially cross that one off of Project Badass. Mission accomplished. But Sundance was not through with us and neither were the people who needed my nephew's precious excess movie tickets. After a good amount of wheeling and dealing the next day, the four of us found ourselves gladly handing over all of our movie tickets in exchange for access to an exclusive Velvet Revolver concert hosted by Paris Hilton where I definitely stood next to Josh Harnett while some dude from Collective Soul purchased blueberry vodka-themed drinks for me?!?!?!?! It was amazing. I am pretty sure that my face never once changed from this expression all night:

After the show, I received a text message that simply said "Come to this address, say 'the chimp' at the door." When I showed up, I said the code word, slipped passed the line, and saw my nephew on one side of a very tiny cocktail party and this guy on the other:

With eyes as big as saucers, my nephew whispered, "Is this rockstar enough for you?"
And I was too star struck to say "Yeah, I think this will suffice."

-------------------------------------
* Seriously, how sweet are those?

2008-02-14T01:46:00.000-05:00

With love and squalor,

---Chris---

In Lieu of a Real Post

2008-02-11T01:42:00.001-05:00

Crazy busy with work right now kiddies. In lieu of real writing, here are some novelties:

* Sarah Silverman is fantastic

* That's What Friends Are For

* Psycho Potato

* Sexy time

Happy Monday kids.

8 Things People Have Sent Me Along With the Phrase "I Saw This and Immediately Thought of You"

2008-02-01T16:06:00.000-05:00

#1:

#2:

#3:

#4:

#5:

#6:

#7:

#8:

I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to be the girl associated with Zombie Girl Car Wash.

Conversation With a 9 Year Old

2008-01-31T01:33:00.001-05:00

Me: Jules, what on earth are you wearing?

My niece: Grandmommy put this on me.

Me: Why?

Julia: I don't have any clothes here and she said that I needed to stay warm, so she put this on.

Me: Why didn't she give you a sweatshirt? You look like a child laborer. I have to take a picture of this. Make your best "suppressed by corrupt regimes and hopeless economic circumstance" face.

Julia: What does that look like?

Me: It's the same face you would make if you found out that Zach Efron liked boys and recess was canceled forever.

Jules: Like this:

Yeah, that's perfect.

2008-01-29T18:38:00.000-05:00

I can't finish writing about Utah until I have pictures from my nephew (ahem! Chad!). In the mean time, I can write about this - last night I met this dude for the first time and somehow in between eating Vietnamese soup in what is easily the tackiest Asian eatery I have ever frequented (D describes it well here) and walking to one of the top five reasons I live in Chicago, we also ended up running into this lady and seeing the play with her. It felt kind of like having people from other sitcoms guest star on the television show of my life. Here's a note about voyeuristically reading about someone's life online and then actually running into them on the street - It's awkward and there's absolutely no way to get around that. If you openly acknowledge the situation and say something like "Oh hey, I...uh...read about your life online, by the way how's your cat? Can he really sit up straight like that or do you pose him?," you automatically sound like you're as socially coordinated as a level 6 Dungeon Master. If you ignore the situation and don't say anything at all, you'll probably still accidentally creep said person out by giving them a perplexed stare and walking away. Luckily, Megs is cool enough not to be deterred by a freakish small woman gawking at her from outside a restaurant and when we all ran into each other inside Barrel's tiny theatre, she sat next to us as if the three of us...you know...had met each other prior to that night.

After the play D and I drank liquor and talked about crack whores and I ended up feeling out of breath from laughing so hard. Throughout the night, I kept getting the same feeling I used to get in high school when a friend and I would have secret Saturday 10AM phone dates to discuss our English teacher's unbelievably craggy face and the latest plot development in X-Men the Animated Series. I remember thinking then By all laws of logic, this shouldn't be awesome AND YET IT IS. In case you're wondering, THAT is how meeting someone from the internet for the first time and then haphazardly picking up someone else from the internet feels - unexpectedly and slightly shamefully awesome.

I got home around midnight, kind of high off of the extreme amount of pho, musical numbers, laughter, mayhem, and general absurdity that had ensued over the past few hours. When I walked in, my roommate asked where I was all night on a Monday. "Hot date?" he asked. "Not exactly," I said. "It was a much better adventure than that."

Thanks for being wicked cool kids.

Project Badass Part III: Fire a Gun

2008-01-27T13:41:00.000-05:00

I don't know how to begin to explain the adventure I had in Utah over the past week, so I'm just going to break it down into a series of stories. I think that will work better than doing what I did with my real-life friends and telling the whole thing in one giant monologue, turning red-faced in the process and punctuating it with giant hand gestures simply because I couldn't find words that could capture the right level of excitement. Just to give some idea of how much adventure was involved, I was in Utah for 5 days, and pulled not one, but two 48-hour, sleep-is-for-suckahs marathons. It made me feel like a punk rock allstar.

I knew that the Utah trip would be awesome the minute I left the house. After working all night to get ready for the trip, I dragged my backpack o' fun to ye olde subway station at 4:30AM, passing by this sign in the process:

I'm not sure if it was the lack of sleep or the excitement about going on a trip, but I do remember thinking that anytime vegetables with novelty facial hair are directly asking me if I'm ready for adventure, that has to be a good sign.

And it was a good sign, a very good sign in fact. The minute I landed in Salt Lake City, I met up with my friend Shaun and my nephew:

and his lovely girlfriend:

You can't see it in this picture, but Jan looks a bit like Scarlett Johansson and she knows about things like eyelash curlers and volumizers that are completely foreign to me and sometimes she smells like wildflowers. If she weren't dating my nephew, I would totally want her to be my slightly older, way prettier Sweet Valley High-reading sister who will trade knowledge of how to be a girl for help on trig homework. These are the kinds of things I think about when alone.

After meeting up with our swarthy cast of characters, Shaun said, "hey, I need to make a pit stop," by which he meant, I need to go to the hospital to make sure I don't have an aneurysm. Whereas a potential aneurysm may have caused worry for some people (me, me, me, me, me), Shaun didn't seem to think it was that big a deal. The three of us dropped him off then took our sweet-ass Chevy Cobalt through Salt Lake where we stumbled upon this:

That is a gun range called Get Some located in a strip mall in the most Mormon state on Earth. Hungry for Adventure indeed. After Shaun's tests had checked out as clear, we mentioned Get Some and he looked me straight in the eye and said, "Dude, let's go shoot a gun."

A brief word on my relationship with guns. I'm not a big fan, mainly because I'm scared of them due to ignorance about how they work. Also they're anticlimactic. Click, boom, dead. Boooooooor-ring. That's not nearly as cool as being lowered (with "balls-aching slowness" as one reviewer described) into a vat of molten metal or getting unexpectedly hit with a chimney. For the record, when I die, I want it to be because I was in a bitter snake fight or Patrick Swayze ripped my throat out with his bare fist. Anything but a lame-ass gun wound.

Despite, all badasses know how to use a gun. They may not own one or carry one around, but they have at least a cursory knowledge of how guns work and so in my quest to be a badass, I guess I need that too. We went into Get Some and after a brief lesson in how to safely load and fire a pistol, I worked up the nerve to ask the one question we were all wondering: What is the largest gun you will let me fire? The answer to that is an M16:

That gun is worth $17,000 which is approximately $16,000 more than my soul is worth.

Here's the thing about firing a gun, particularly a big gun - remember this scene in American Beauty:

Firing an M16 in real life feels nothing like that. For me, it was the exact opposite. Though Shaun and I unloaded 4 boxes of ammo (and he looked pretty badass while doing it):

I never fully succumbed to the charm of the automatic weapon and spent the majority of our time at Get Some making faces like this:

Nevertheless, it was an adventure! and when I left the shooting range to find this man casually perusing the big-ass weapons section with his puppy:

I smiled in spite of myself. It was a good day to be a badass.

I'll Be Back

2008-01-20T17:22:00.000-05:00

I am out on an adventure right now of epic proportions! I don't want to give anything away but it involves celebrities! And deceit! And guns! Big ones! And bacon! I will be back on Wednesday. Go have lots of adventures in the mean time.

The New Roommate

2008-01-17T02:27:00.000-05:00

While I was in Virginia, big big changes were made back here in Chicago. The bars went smoke-free, Christmas-themed karaoke happened without me, and my house got another roommate. For those who don't know, let me explain a little bit about my living situation. I came to Chicago in March, gave myself 48 hours to find housing, and at the last minute happened to stumble upon a fully furnished room in a gorgeous three story house in the northern part of the city, all for significantly less than I paid for my apartment in Richmond. And it comes with a maid service. I mention that only because when I was informed that a monthly maid service was included in my rent, it felt just like that scene in Beauty and the Beast when the entire kitchen comes to life and starts dancing. Some women fall for jewelry and flowers. This woman falls for the idea of not having to clean anyone's pubes out of the shower.

Falling in love with the roommates came just as easily as falling in love with the house. I moved in with two roommates - one boy and one girl - both of whom are funny and immensely laid back and seem to appreciate my awkwardness. The three of us instantaneously got along and in the 8 months I've been here, there hasn't been a single dispute, not even a minor PMS-driven one, over anything. It's kind of like living in The Waltons, but, you know, less poor and stuff.

When the boy roommate informed me that another boy would be moving in, I was a bit wary that perhaps the easy-going dynamic of the house would be thrown off. When I learned that the new boy also worked from home, I was even more wary that if it didn't work out, not only would my housing be screwed, but my job environment as well. The new guy moved in two weeks before I got back. The morning of the day after I drove into town, I woke up expecting to see a tall, bald Italian dude across the hall. Instead I saw this:

You can't really tell from this grainy picture, but that's definitely a framed poster of a boldly mustachioed Mike Ditka surrounded by the fadey faces of prominent American heroes in the background. It's hanging just outside of the new guy's door and is currently the only piece of art gracing the second story of our humble abode. When the new guy caught me in my snowflake-themed pajamas staring at the new art at 9:30 in the morning, he skipped salutations entirely and simply said, "Can you believe I found that thing IN A DUMPSTER?!?!?! What kind of crazy asshole would throw that away?"

"Hi, I'm Chris," I said shaking his hand. "We're going to get along just fine."

First Adventure in 2008: A Photo Essay

2008-01-16T01:34:00.000-05:00

The drive from Richmond, VA to Chicago, IL with this:

in the car takes approximately 14 hours. Most of the trip looks like this:

Although my mom is convinced that I'm going to encounter at least one drugged-up trucker, rabid animal, natural disaster, or Hell's Angel bent on feasting on nubile girl meat while on the road, I can tell you from experience that the most dangerous part of the trip is the sheer boredom. That's why God invented places like Hurricane, West Virginia. I'm not really sure how to describe the town other than to say that when I Googled the town name, this is what came up:

and that's pretty spot-on. Located approximately 5 hours and 22 minutes from Richmond (~7 hours, 58 minutes from Chicago), Hurricane, WV is this haven of everything that is good and right in this world. There are American flags flying from trucks. There are crustaches lurking behind every corner. There are gas stations that will sell you tiny statues of big-eyed children with angel wings all covered in glitter right beside a rack of trucker hats that feature cartoon boys pissing on various racing numbers. There is also Tudor's Biscuit World,:

home to approximately 40 different types of biscuit-themed sandwiches, all of which you can purchase either in person or through the convenient biscuit drive-through. It's like heaven. Beyond simply serving one's biscuity needs, Tudor's also features this on their dinner menu:

I don't know a thing about cabbage rolls and cannot attest to their deliciousness factor, but I can tell you that that picture alone is worth the 5 dollars and 69 cents. If biscuits aren't your thing,* you can always go to Gino's Pizza and Spaghetti House:

which is located in the same building and features the same semi-surly, semi-smiley cast of employees wearing different hats. After getting food, you can either head to the pawn shop/gun store located next door or you can take your personal pizza to the gas station on the other side of Tudor's and eat it from the hood of your car while simultaneously pumping gas. If the image of a young woman with one hand on the gas pump and the other shoving cheese covered dough into her mouth while watching sauce drip down her v-neck American Eagle circa 1996 sweatshirt doesn't sound sexy, you should tell that to the two high school kids who drove by and yelled "YOU ARE HOT, OWWWWWW!" at me from the passenger's side of their Dad's 1986 sedan. While Wade and Ray-Ray didn't give me a chance to say thank you, the sentiment was appreciated.

Full of pizza, biscuits, compliments/possible harassment, gasoline, and bitchin sunglasses:

(I found those treasures in a gas station next to a shelf of dream catchers), it was time to put my dog in the back, crank up the Johnny Cash, and drive with the windows down through the mountains of WV. Hurricane - Thanks for rockin me just as hard as your name implies.

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* then get the hell out of town you city-lovin swine

Do Me a Solid

2008-01-15T13:28:00.000-05:00

My friend Shaun is currently a finalist in an eBay video contest here. His is the one in the Seller category that's clearly way better than everyone else's. Voting is on every day from now until the 28th of January with 5 large* on the line. Let's make it happen internet, for the children...specifically for Mr. and Ms. Irving's child.

* I think that 5 large means $5,000, but I'm really not sure since all of my knowledge of street talk comes from watching Walker Texas Ranger.

At Least Someone Got It Right

2008-01-14T13:24:00.000-05:00

People who believe that graffiti isn't art clearly haven't seen the Sturdy Station 2 located in the bathroom on the right inside Argo Tea:

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't giggle at that for at least a full minute.

Open Letter

2008-01-13T05:41:00.000-05:00

Dear Emily:

I'm pretty sure I started my embarrassing internet girl crush on you the day I learned that you name your photographs after spam subject headers, spelling errors included. To be perfectly frank, I don't really want to be friends with anyone that doesn't find this amusing and the fact that you just went ahead and put it out there made for very fertile girl crush ground. The crush progressed when we began our not-always-sober e-mail exchanges, but I'm pretty sure you moved directly into the elite category of Women I Would Probably Be Pretty Cool With Marrying If I Were Into Lay-Days And We Both Had To Marry People We Had Never Met In Real Life Before when you sent me an e-mail that contained absolutely nothing except for this:

Now all I want to do is drink a lot of Wild Turkey and watch that video on repeat while eating Taco Bell off of my own stomach until I pass out my own desk chair all covered in lettuce shreds and medium salsa, basking in awesomely awful goodness. I know that's a strange way to say I think you're cool, but I don't really know how to say it any better. Thanks for turning the rock up to 11.

---Chris---

Oh Hai

2008-01-12T03:59:00.003-05:00

Hey Internet:

We haven't talked for a very long time. So long in fact, that I kind of have that inevitable awkward feeling one has when you run into someone you haven't seen for a good ten years and conversation has to start out with something like "So...what have you been up to in the last...I don't know...decade or so?" I've thought about calling you or sending you a flirty text message about 8 million times in the past 5 weeks, but these days I'm getting easily distracted and frankly, other things had to take a higher priority. I do want you to know that I had a very good reason, several good reasons in fact, the top one being that my grandmother passed away and the experience of watching her slowly disintegrate and then eventually just stop existing made me feel like I had been flipped inside out and God himself was prodding my innards with hot pokers. I don't really know what to say about it - mainly because I'm not sure I even have the vernacular to accurately describe it. You know those nature documentaries that show icebergs falling apart in massive, perfectly dusty frozen chunks? It felt like that. It felt exactly like that.

2007 was a Band-Aid year for me and I think for my family too to a lesser extent. We buried the remaining members of an entire generation of our family. We buried major relationships, lifelong fears, shitty friends, shittier apartments, towns and jobs and lovers and projects that simply couldn't offer what we needed anymore. In fact the whole year was a Whitman's sampler of experiences - some the best of my life, some really, really OH MY GOD I FEEL LIKE I'M BEING SAWED IN HALF painful - that simply needed doing in order to become the kind of kickass lady worthy to succeed other kickass ladies like my grandmother.

After it was all over, after presents were opened and ornaments were removed and a woman I love was sealed in a box the color of storm clouds, my whole body just shut down and demanded a full week to rebuild itself from the inside out. And while missing a karaoke and champagne-themed party to nurse a fever of 1-0-fuckin-2 on New Year's Eve seemed like a final middle finger from 2007 at the time, in retrospect, welcoming in 2008: The Year of Adventure by watching movies with the two people who love me most in this world while my own flesh burns the remaining toxins from the previous year out cell by cell seems like a very, very good sign. When I got back to Chicago this past Tuesday, I had a batch of Christmas cards waiting on my desk. My favorite featured red foil peppermint spirals on a white glitter snow background: "Here's to a new year filled with ridiculous stories, tawdry hook-ups, ambiguously gay friends, and lots of herbal tea." Here's to that and to oh so very much more.

I hope your 2008 is and continues to be nothing short of magnificent.

Because Ice Breakers are Lame to Begin With

2007-12-06T02:57:00.000-05:00

I just received an e-mail containing this photograph:

and nothing else. No caption, no explanation, nothing. When I meet people for the first time, instead of describing myself I may just hand them a printout of that photo, give them the wink/single fingergun combo, and say in a hearty voice, "Yep, that about sums it up."

Snapshot

2007-12-05T01:26:00.000-05:00

It's 1:30AM here in Chicago. It's snowing and lovely. Today I worked then went to a punk rock hair salon where they serve you beer and a healthy dose of Ozzy while they style you up. Right now my house is decorated for Christmas. We have 26 stockings hung for my roommate's enormo family and I've made my housemates listen to Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas more times than they can count. Right this second my dog is snoring loudly on her red, white, and bones-themed bed by my side. When I go to my bed that I'm too lazy to properly fit with sheets so I just kind of lay on top of a pile of them in a mangled mess, she'll come jump into the pile too because I have little regard for what her trainer told me to do. Just before I go to sleep, I'll say "Goodnight Pumpkin Pie" and she'll lick my cheek before settling down and I will go to sleep feeling lucky right down to my spine.

That probably won't happen for another few hours. For now, I'm working from my home office which faces our backyard where every tree is covered in ice. We have a tiny wishing well behind my house and it's still got scrape marks on it from earlier in the day when a friend and I went outside and made snowballs from the ice on top, throwing them at the dog while she leapt in the air to eat them. My house smells like a mixture of brownies, burnt popcorn, and apple-mint tea leftover from the spontaneous Tuesday Hong Kong-themed movie night that just wrapped up here. This kind of thing happens frequently and when I talk to friends about why I'm happier with this city than I have been anywhere else, it's hard to describe exactly why little things like ice scrapes and dog snores and temporary tattoos my salon hands out and watching Project Runway each week huddled under blankets with friends make all the difference. They just do. While it's quickly approaching soul deadening cold-level winter, I feel warmer than I ever have before. Chicago, you've treated me far better than I deserve.

I Gotta Say It Was a Good Day

2007-11-29T02:49:00.000-05:00

My roommate just let me name one of her fish Mitt Gromney. Other name choices included Oliver Gromwell, St. Gromas Aquinas, Pope Grom Paul II, Gromstantine the Great, and Viggo Mortgromson. In other news, I have no life and Michael Jackson II is no longer constipated.

Greatest Excuse Ever

2007-11-28T00:22:00.000-05:00

My roommate just told me that she can't go to the science supply store with me tonight because her fish, Michael Jackson II, is constipated. Of the three of us, I'm not sure who's the sadder party.

E-mail Received From My Friend David. He is 26.

2007-11-27T00:26:00.000-05:00

"Hey, I need a favor since you're a part of the media and have a blog capable of attaining critical mass for the cause. I really think she could use our prayers...or, yours and your friends' prayers 'cause, mine are clearly labeled as spam. At this time of year when Hallmark tells us to be thankful for stuff, we might want to remind ourselves of the unfortunate and how lucky we are. Hope you're having fun being awesome."

Open Letter

2007-11-20T18:21:00.000-05:00

Dear Internet:

Sometimes when I do something awkward

like accidentally yelling the f-word in the middle of my yoga class

or comparing someone's real life relationship issues to that time in the X-Men cartoon series where Wolverine thinks Dr. Jean Grey is dead only to have her return for a while and he all puts his heart out on the table until she goes nuts and thinks she's a Victorian aristocrat,

both of which have happened this week,

I think to myself, "Holy shit, I'm awkward."

Like really, inexcusably awkward.

The kind of awkward that would be punishable by public stoning in certain cultures.

But you're always there,

providing me with work from people who may very well also be awkward

but in a totally badass kind of way.

So thanks for that.

If you ever need anything, I owe you one.

Keep well. Say hi to your mom for me.

XOXOX,

Chris

More here. Link found through Superdeens.

The Ultimate Mood Killer

2007-11-18T03:16:00.000-05:00

While in a pet shop buying a new chew toy for the dog, I turned down an aisle and saw a rear shot of some dude unloading boxes. The following inner monologue took place:

Why helllllllllo there hot box boy. Nice biceps. Nice butt. Extra nice single trickle of sweat pouring down the back of your box-handling neck. Isn't this the opening to an episode of The Red Shoe Diaries? Shouldn't I be shopping for something phallic and whispering things people never say in real life like 'I have a box that could use some handling?' Hey sexy box guy, that's an extra heavy one over there. You're going to have to really roll up your sleeves and flex those biceps to handle that one. Oh my gosh, he's slowly turning around. Let's get a good look at your face...hot sideburns...strong jaw line...clean shaven...holy shit he's mentally retarded.

And just like that I understood exactly what it feels like to go from normal to predatory asshole in 0.2 seconds.

Project Badass Part II: Find the Strangest Thing You Have Ever Seen

2007-11-16T02:48:00.000-05:00

It's a strange feeling to have really planned for something big to happen in your life, like a momentous occasion, and then for whatever reason it doesn't happen and your life is filled with anticlimax...anticlimax being a totally acceptable noun for the purposes of this blog entry. For me, October 20th was that day. It would have been my 10 year anniversary and maybe, possibly, potentially the day I would have gotten engaged had a number of things not gone belly-up over the past two years. But they did go belly-up for valid reasons, and while it's probably to everyone's ultimate benefit experiencing a non-anniversary is pure emotional displacement. Anticipating the inevitable Whitman's sampler of emotions that would accompany this day, I wanted to spend it amongst friends seeing something so absolutely bizarre that it would (hopefully) absorb all of my attention.

Instead of celebrating on October 20th, I drove to rural Indiana to a church located in a former warehouse located across the street from a strip mall*. The thing that makes this particular church located in a former warehouse located across the street from a strip mall special is that it's home to the first (and to my knowledge only) church-sponsored backyard wrestling event.

The next thing I'm about to say may be the most honest thing I've ever said in my entire life - If you ever, ever, ever need to take your mind off of something, NOTHING will do that more than seeing one grown-ass man in a speedo fake kicking another grown-ass man in a cape all in the name of the son of God. Nothing. You can just click that link and scroll down to see the flier featuring a guy who's kind of dressed like he came from an oil tycoon's wedding (minus the bolo) with some girl that you just know has a hyphenated name that ends in Lynn standing near but not necessarily noticing the dude who looks like he's from The Tick channeling fury through his paws of might and know - from the bottom of your heart - that whatever burdens you carried into FirePro Wrestling, you most assuredly will not be taking out. Being a natural born weird magnet, I've seen a lot of strange things in my time but the moment I saw Pastor "Diehard" Steve step into the ring (which also doubles as the platform where he preaches the following Sunday morning...seriously), it honestly felt like Jesus himself personally handing me the most awesomely strange gift heaven could conjure up.

From the PG-rated trash talk (spewing from both the wrestlers and the audience) to the surplus of unitards to the uber-dramatic storylines, FirePro Wrestling is, no contest, the single most fascinating thing I've ever seen in my life. Events are approximately three hours** long and feature about 20 wrestlers who range from maybe-if-I-was-drunk-and-it-was-Halloween-I-would-think-you-were-a-small-time-athlete to hey-that's-just-a-fat-guy-in-a-mask. There are dropkicks. There are stage names like "Hoss," "Hotbod," and "Devon Fury."*** There are tag team events catalyzed by carefully constructed soap opera-like vendettas. There are crustaches and supportive ring girls and surprise betrayals and empty I'm-gonna-hit-you-with-this-chair threats. More interesting than what's actually there is what isn't - namely the sex, drugs, and rock n roll aspect that's become the hallmark of the modern WWF.

Take out the bikinis, explicit music, realistic violence, token drunks, and potty words and you're left with a family-friendly Disney version of a live wrestling show - one that attracts a bizarre cross-section of families, church-goers, wrestling fans, amateur athletes, and freak-seekers like myself. I think the thing that struck me as the most strange was that it is a surprisingly warm community of people that are hungry for church-sanctioned fake violence. I came prepared for bodyslams, but not for hugs and friendly catch-up conversations between grandmas and spandex-clad men before and after matches. Everyone knew each other. Everyone supported each other even amidst the trash talking - the event I attended was put on to raise money for a local missionary who will soon head to Uganda with his wife to work in a camp designed to help children forced to be soldiers...that missionary is also one of the ring refs as well as the dude who sold me a hotdog during intermission...natch.

In a weird way, it was kind of like being with my own family - they might yell and fight and have an affinity for drama, but the bottom line is that we're built off of something much stronger than what we show on the outside. And while God himself wasn't there taking it from the top rope,**** there was a definite human warmth that was there in that unlikely arena. At intermission, the largest wrestler of all humbly laid down and allowed each and every child in the audience***** to come stand on his chest and hold the heavy-weight championship belt over their tiny heads to "make them feel like a champion," a feeling which seems to be one of the underlying goals of religion anyway. Right then and there I thought Yeah, maybe John 3:16 and Austin 3:16 can coexist after all.

--------------------------------

* This doesn't say much in the way of location. Almost everything in rural Indiana is located across the street from a strip mall.

** Oh my God, it was three hours long.

*** Some of these names kind of creeped me out because they sound like the names of dudes my dad hangs out with and as I've mentioned here before, an unfortunate number of the dudes my dad hangs out with have been stabbed.

**** But seriously, how sweet would that be?

***** And me

Now That's Resolve

2007-11-15T01:07:00.000-05:00

This isn't filed under "I Need A Hero" because of the guy dancing. It's because his mother is clearly the kind of woman who breaks her knitting stride for no man, not even the Hammer.

Thanks Shaun.

We're Back!

2007-11-02T02:55:00.000-04:00

Hey, this site is back up. I had to take the site down for a few days for work, but now we're back up and all of you lovely lovelies who sent me kind/concerned e-mails can look forward to a daily dose of awkwardness once again. In fact, here's a photo essay to kick things back into gear. Enjoy! Or don't! Choose your own adventure!

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you a buttload of corn, make the world's largest corn maze. Last Saturday, I drove an hour and a half outside of Chicago to the aforementioned corn maze with some pretty kickass dude buddies where we truly did have an A-Maze-ing Time as the sign encouraged us to do:

Here's a fact about a corn maze. It doesn't really matter that it looks like this from the air:

It looks like this from inside no matter where you go:

In fact, once you've run out of corn-themed puns,* the cold begins to get to you and you'll realize that a corn maze is actually pretty lame, no matter how cheerleader-shaped or filled with high school kids the maze may be. Therefore, it's essential that you bring people who aren't opposed to smuggling a bottle of champagne in:

And then maybe rockin it out with a spontaneous corn dance party to The Karate Kid soundtrack:

And cooling it down by slow dancing to Glory of Love:

And wrapping the whole thing up by re-enacting some battles with corn stalks:

It also helps if one of them is dressed as Patrick Swayze from Ghost:

And if you top off the whole experience up by going to the diviest bar you can find and dancing to Poison songs. I guess a corn maze could be super fun if you're into reading maps at night in the cold. I, however, am way more into sipping some bubbly and dancing my heart out. If corn rock were a real thing, I'd be all up in that. Maybe that's a goal for next year.

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* My favorites included "Hey Couch, let's make a cornographic film," "I hope there aren't any Anacorndas in here," and "How close are we to Wiscornsin?"

Overheard in Chicago

2007-10-23T03:17:00.000-04:00

Ridiculously thin gay man talking on a cell phone coming out of a bar in Boystown at 9:30:

"No, I SAID I'm going home...I mean it, I am so going home...Why? Because I'm too fat to go out tonight. There, that's my final answer bitch."

Confession

2007-10-22T13:17:00.000-04:00

About once a week my roommate makes a heaping plate of bacon to go with breakfast. When he's finished eating and has cleaned up the kitchen, I always say, "Thanks for being a good roommate." I'm pretty sure he thinks I say that because of his mad crazy cleaning skillz, but I'm really thanking him for making bacon in the first place since it makes our house smell fantastic all day long and working from home makes me feel like I'm being hugged by the most delicious meat on earth. I'm not sure what heaven's like, but if it doesn't involve frequent meaty bacon hugs*, I want no part of it.

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* Meaty Bacon Hug also a good band name, bar name, urban dictionary entry, vagina euphemism.

And Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Snark

2007-10-20T03:32:00.000-04:00

Link stolen from My Pet Virus.

Project Badass or How I Met My Sister

2007-10-19T18:10:00.000-04:00

I'm back from Virginia, I'm officially settled in Chicago, and after a monstrously good three days* with a friend from the other side of the globe, I feel strong enough to destroy an entire city with my fists, but jovial enough to have a hearty laugh instead. Feeling awesome has become a crucial part of my life plan for the next, I don't know, bunch of years ahead. In fact, it's become so crucial that last month I decided to launch a new initiative:

PROJECT BADASS**

Project Badass basically goes like this - I've spent a disproportionate amount of brooding in the past two years which really isn't cool. What is cool is becoming a Badass. Capital B. I'm just going to spend the next calendar year doing badassey stuff. Since any good initiative needs to start with flow chart or Venn diagram or some visual aid, I made a list of everything I think a Badass would do and slowly throughout the next calendar year, I'm going to cross them out and write about them. So far, it's going pretty well.

Project Badass Step One:
Hike Up Your Skirt, Grab Your Balls, and Do the Thing You're Most Terrified Of

Since I don't live anywhere near a gator-wrestling farm or Neverland Ranch,*** conquering the top 2 things I'm afraid of were out. That left number three - track down that secret sister I didn't know existed until about eight years ago. Basically the story goes like this - my father had a child about ten years before I was born but didn't really bother to tell anyone about it. I say that he didn't tell anyone, but the truth is that somehow word got out to basically everyone in my family knew except for me. I found out she existed when I was 18 and my father drunken/haphazardly mentioned "I've had five beautiful children by three beautiful ladies" and I could only count four beautiful children by two beautiful ladies.

At the time, I didn't really think anything of it since my father sort of tossed out that information in the same way that one might casually throw out "you know only ten percent of all birds mate for life?"****, as if news of my newfound sibling carried the same level of importance as the Illinois state motto or the secret ingredient in Arbecue sauce. In fact, I had dismissed the comment almost entirely until I casually mentioned it to my mother and watched her face flash from shock to devastation to hatred to concern in 0.2 seconds and thus kicked off a very long series of talks about a sibling I never knew existed.

Let me take pause here to say that finding out you have a secret sister is a strange feeling, mainly because of how little it affects your everyday life. I had never met this woman, never heard her name mentioned, never seen a picture, wasn't even sure if she was living or not, and frankly didn't really think any of that until one day 7 years later when I found her name and phone number lying around my father's retirement condo. (I wrote about it a bit here.) Knowing that someone somewhere on earth happens to share your bloodline is one thing. Knowing that a living, breathing human being...one that comes with a name and a job and ideas and apparently a phone number she's written in purple pen on a post-it note...lives 3 hours from your house makes it all eerily real. In April, I took the number, but didn't do anything about it believing, at the time, that I would warm up to the idea of a secret sister and then one day when I was good and ready make the phone call.

That day did not come. What did come, months later, was a day when I fell to pieces over the ex boyfriend so hard that a 20 minute drive from a friend's house turned into a multi-hour, crying on the side of the road, dry heaving kind of affair...the sexiest kind of affair. That's when I decided, covered in snot and sweat and tears and dirt and maybe even some vomit, that I needed to make radical changes, so I did the most radical thing I could think of at the time. I'm honestly ashamed of that last paragraph. I'm pretty sure if I was not me, I would read that and think all of the following:

A) Quit bitchsquealing over a dumb boy and do something with your life.
B) The most radical thing you can think of is making a phone call? Get this lady a Nobel Prize.
C) This post is way too long for a blog. I've got a lot of Spider Solitaire to play this afternoon dude.

So I picked up the phone, dialed the numbers, and in a mousey voice mumbled, "Hi, my name is Chris. I think you might be my sister." I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't the line "I was hoping you'd call." After a couple of phone conversations, I drove to meet my secret sister at a restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland where we poured over creepily identical baby pictures, exchanged stories, and basically caught each other up on our entire respective existences. I told her about growing up with my father, the night I learned she existed, the circumstances surrounding why I made contact, and how much awkwardness I had anticipated. She told me about meeting my father for the first time (she was 21), introducing him to her daughter (who's now 13), and how it feels to know that you're being kept a secret from your father's "real family."

Through the whole experience, what surprised me the most was how very normal this woman is, you know, for having been the family secret for 28 years. Going in, I expected her to be a wreck, the kind of person that's so rightfully consumed with bitterness that the phrase "she's been through a lot" inevitably pops up when she enters a room. But she's not that girl at all. My secret sister is confident and genuinely forgiving. She's got a dry, sarcastic sense of humor and this distinctive laugh that fills up a room. After three full hours of splattering our hearts out on the table, this woman who shares my nose and cheekbones hugged me for what seemed like a full half-hour and I felt this surreal mixture of relief and deep, deep gratitude and unexpected serenity. Those things are much better alternatives to bellyaching and dry heaving. Maybe the Badasses had it right all along.

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* How good was the weekend? We spent a full day seeing sharks and then rolling on our backs down the grassy hills in front of the largest indoor aquarium in the world. THAT is how good it was.

** I just learned the command that makes letters blink. Please bear with me until the novelty is out of my system.

*** Ba-zing.

**** That's totally true.

Highlight of the Day

2007-10-12T19:32:00.001-04:00

Today I found an article entitled:

UGANDA: SHOULD WE SACRIFICE BABIES ON THE ALTAR OF CAREER?

Clearly we should if for no other reason than, really, how often are you asked about baby sacrifice? That has got to be the most overly dramatic headline ever written. I've also decided that the sacrifice/altar of motif should be used more in conversation. Just now I asked my roommate if she would sacrifice getting up early tomorrow to the altar of rockin out tonight. I have a feeling this is the first in a long, long line of blank stares to come.

Conversations From Yesterday

2007-10-11T13:15:00.000-04:00

Friend: What are you going as for Halloween?

Me: I'm probably going to go as Babraham Lincoln. I love the idea of taking something as unsexy as a dead president and slutting it right up.

Friend: Are you going to go beard and everything?

Me: I have to. There's nothing sexier than a tiny bearded woman in a pre-Civil War jacket and sorority boots. What are you going as?

Friend: I love the idea of things dressed as other things, so I think I'm going as a squirrel dressed as Zorro. Anyone can be just Zorro.

Me: But it takes a real man to dress as a woodland creature dressed as a fictitious hero?

Friend: That's right.

Me: I can see this will be a high concept holiday for both of us.

Friend: Indeed.

Things That Have Made Me Smile Today

2007-10-09T21:12:00.000-04:00

1. Listening to Voxtrot. I caught their tsunami of rock last Thursday at the Metro and I cannot stop listening to their EP. Oh man I dig this band as well as the accompanying blog. In my version of heaven, the lead singer thinks I'm totally cute even when I wear my glasses and we hold hands a lot. Also in my version of heaven, robot servants do my bidding, lightning tastes like candy, and I ride a dinosaur to work everyday. If you're going to dream, dream big.

2. This guy's tie

3. This drawing a friend made and sent earlier today:

4. Receiving an e-mail that contained the following:

"I just found out from my mother that when I was little, I saw my dad pee standing up. Since I didn't have the right 'equipment,' my mother found me peeing, standing up, with a toilet paper tube attached to my lady parts. Hope that brought a smile onto your face."

Rest assured it did.

Overheard in Chicago

2007-10-08T02:24:00.000-04:00

[Setting: Walking through a friend's neighborhood Saturday night]

Girl at Some Backyard Party: "...yeah and he was almost EXACTLY like that guy Huckleberry Finn except I'd fuck him."

Open Letter

2007-10-06T03:27:00.000-04:00

Dear Internet:

Six weeks or so ago I got a new camera phone which is great because all the pictures I take on my real camera look like they were shot in a someone's torture basement. The new camera phone is fanflippintastic news because I can now take pictures of all the wonderfully eccentric things I see all the time, like this:

and this custom-painted spare tire holder I spotted in Virginia:

and this:

The above picture is a skull sculpture I happened to stumble upon one day when I was trying to go to a gameboy rock concert and accidentally walked into a tango orchestra show instead. That last sentence is the exact reason why I live in Chicago. Without a mobile camera, I'd never be able to capture a guy reading P.G. Wodehouse to his girlfriend in an English accent on the subway at 2AM on a Friday:

or my dog kind of looking like a supermodel filled with sex glow after doing it with a rockstar on perfectly white high thread count sheets:

or really nice things some benevolent stranger has scrawled on the street:

or how beautiful the skyline near my house is:

or the exact moment months ago when I realize I'm not actually on a date and am instead on a platonic hang-out session:

Those moments are exactly what give life texture and as silly as it is, I'm thankful to have the technology to document it. Hey internet, I hope your day leaves you feeling like this:

Take care and take pictures.

Your pal,

Chris

I'm Back!

2007-10-05T17:00:00.000-04:00

I'm back in Chicago and boy howdy, this place is just as fantastically ridiculous as when I left. Here's a confession internet - I was a bit apprehensive about returning to Chicago since Virginia was filled with a disproportionate number of adventures. When I actually permanently lived in "the big V-A" as Timbaland* calls it, I had an adventure once every six or so months, but in my short 3 week trip, I had probably 10 adventures, all of which are worth blogging about. I'm saving those for another time though, mainly because I need a few days to turn over said adventures in my head and make some sense of them first.

After saying goodbye to my family, the drive back to Chicago was boring. I got lost in Tennessee** and wound up missing what would have been a perfect first date with Bunny McIntosh and her husband at a tattoo parlor in Louisville, Kentucky. I pulled into Chicago at 3AM, driving through a fog so thick I sincerely wondered if I had died and just not noticed it. I was beginning to wonder if Chicago was as awesome as I remembered it, then a couple of things happened:

1) I had dinner with some ridiculously fun kids.
2) I saw the pilot episode to Bionic Woman. That deserves a blog entry in and of itself, but I will let you know this - it changed my life, even more than the Shins.
3) My roommate looked at me and said "Hey, it's Wednesday. Want to party?"

By that she meant "Hey, it's Wednesday. Do you want to put on an En Vogue's greatest hits album then I'll teach you how to lasso things like a cowboy and then maybe we can eat dreamsicles and watch a documentary on air guitar?" Roomie, that's the ONLY way I like to party. So we did...and when I think about my life 20 years from now, I hope I think about standing in my living room in a 1950's-style sundress, giggling uncontrollably while trying desperately to lasso an armchair as Hold On plays in the background. I am very happy here and very thankful to be back.

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* Note: That is literally the only picture I could find of Timbaland where he doesn't look like he's ready to cut a bitch. Most of his pictures look like this. I'm making it my new goal to look harder on a daily basis.

** The geographically gifted types will note that there is no reason to be driving through the Volunteer State*** when traveling from Virginia to Chicago at all. I beg those geographically gifted types not to judge my directional ineptitude and instead focus on my wicked slant rhyming skillz.

*** The exceptionally gifted will note that The Volunteer State is a pretty lame state motto. You may as well call it "Tennessee: It Could Be Worse?" or "Tennessee: Hey, It's Not Idaho!" or "Tennessee: Even Lamer Than the Arrested Development Song of the Same Name."

Update From The South

2007-09-24T12:22:00.001-04:00

Greetings! I'm in Virginia on business. I have been for the past two weeks and frankly it's been a complete whirlwind packed to the gills with adventures. In the past two weeks I've forged relationships and officially shut down others, moved three different people out of their apartments, attended a hairbanger's ball, met the sister I didn’t know existed until I was 18, went to a wedding reception where there was a slip-n-slide, went down said slip-n-slide in my dress, received multiple high fives and a few disapproving looks because of the aforementioned formal slip-n-slide incident of ought 7, waited six hours to see this DJ and danced until 2AM at some club outside of the University of Virginia (it was totally 100% worth the wait), had a number of awkward interactions with boys in glasses (one of whom actually told me, “I went as Google Maps for Halloween last year. I bought a globe and I made this shirt that has layers of maps on it. Like you look at it and you see a huge map of the US, then you pull up one layer and it's just a map of Virginia and another layer and it's a closer map. I went as a viral internet video the year before.” I thought that surely the sprinkler systems would go off from all the verbal hotness in the room.), fell in love with pumpkin steamers from Starbucks despite the fact that they sound like dirty sexual maneuvers, sold all of my dead aunt’s things...it was tremendously sad, saw a tiny Statue of Liberty replica that looks like the kind of thing one would only erect if the original SOL was destroyed in a world war and humanity needed a saddening reminder that we once had a strong nation with reality TV and freedom fries, connected with friends I haven’t seen in years, had seedy TMI-themed conversations with several family members, cried, laughed, screamed, fallen apart, put myself back together, fallen apart again, read some science fiction, and did a lot of healing. It’s been insanely hard and insanely healthy all at the same time. When I said that last line to a friend in Chicago during a long catch-up conversation last night, she replied with “like a vitamin-filled enema?” Life of late has been like a vitamin-filled enema. I think that was the original tagline to Forrest Gump.

Stories from Virginia adventures will have to come later. For the time being, I have limited internet access and a mountain of work on my plate. In the meantime, go have a few adventures yourself internet, write them all down, and fill my inbox with tales of triumphs and tears. As Vin Diesel says in xXx, “I live for this shit.”

Overheard in Chicago

2007-09-05T02:50:00.000-04:00

[Setting: Belmont Red Line Station]

Kid With Awful Emo Hair: "...yeah, but instead of adding water we added KY and it became this weird lubey cheesecake thing."

I don't know who that kid is, but I do know that I want to party with him.

Team Plan B

2007-09-04T15:11:00.000-04:00

I take movies very seriously. Not really movies themselves, but the experience of going to see a movie. The previews, the smooshy seats, the smell of air conditioning mixed with stale popcorn - I love all of it from the bottom of my heart. The ex and I used to go to see movies all the time. He was my favorite person in the world to see a movie with because he's perfectly warm and sitting beside him in the dark made me feel invincible. We would see movies all the time in Paris and I remember glancing over at him during Hitchcock matinees and absolutely falling in love with his profile outlined by the flickering screen. If there's one thing I took from Paris, it's the memory of sitting in a tiny, cheap theater, looking over at that profile, and feeling like the safest girl in the entire world.

I think the hardest part of a major break up is losing that sense of security, the realization that your team, the one you had planned on playing on for the rest of your life, really is being divided and its players traded to other teams. I think that when you find yourself without a team, it's crucial to create a Plan B Team, to organize friends and relatives and hobbies to fill up the time you would normally allot to making your former team stronger and to getting laid. For me, coming to Chicago has been a really crucial part of creating that Team Plan B. I was in a relationship for nearly nine years and when that ended, I sincerely thought I would never have another team, at least, not one that would stick with me in spite of my flaws.

The silver lining to what was previously considered an earth-shattering break up is the realization that I do have a team...in fact, I have a Plan B Team that just may be much bigger and stronger than Team Plan A ever was. I have a fantastic team of incredibly selfless people that have been right there while I've gained and lost weight, cried to the point of shaking, gone crazy with retracing all of my steps in the past nine years, moved to a different city, finished the biggest and riskiest work project of my life, called at 3AM routinely because I saw the wrong picture or heard the wrong song, rehashed every shard of my previous relationship, not once but routinely in an effort to try to figure out what the fuck went wrong, and beaten myself into the ground trying to figure out how to make things work again. They've canceled evening plans to run to my house for an emergency cry/girly movie nights. They've hopped on planes to come visit. They've moved me from apartment to apartment, given me a place to stay when my heat and water accidentally got cut off last winter, taken time off work to trounce with me through The Big Apple, made me comfort food when I was sick, hugged me for an inappropriately long amount of time when I just needed someone to hold on to, and listened endlessly, endlessly, endlessly without judgment. One even spent a full month growing a mustache just because it would make me smile (more to come on that later). The upside to losing love is the opportunity to find it elsewhere, in freely offered acts of kindness and novelty facial hair.

After what could quite easily be classified as the worst weekend I've had in nearly a year, my sweet, wonderful Team Plan B was there, listening with the patience of something that has twice the patience of a saint. On Saturday, I spent the evening sitting in the dark with the Chicago-based leg of Team Plan B, watching a movie that involves unicorn battles and airships and gay pirates. Midway through the movie, when I glanced at their silvery profiles, I felt a perfect warmth and more taken care of than I have in my entire life.

Thank you Mom, Steph, Leah, Maura, Steve, Dan, Justin, and David for being the greatest Team Plan B on earth.

Confession

2007-09-01T19:43:00.000-04:00

Sometimes on Sundays I like to get all sauced up on green tea and George Orwell, put on a dress, and go to a movie by myself at this vintage theatre where the tickets are $3 and the seats are velvety and uncomfortable at the same time. I don't usually tell people that's what I'm doing because it's hard to explain why going to a movie by yourself feels good and by the time I get home, I kind of feel like I've gotten away with something. On those Sundays, I'm struck by the fact that things are much more pleasurable when you feel like you're not supposed to do them and then a life of crime seems more appealing than ever. Chris Couch: Illegal Exotic Animal Tradesman has a nice ring.

In Memoriam

2007-08-30T23:17:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago my ancient aunt Edna passed away. I miss her and I think about her a lot, but it wasn't sad. If anything, it was a relief for both her and our family. She was 95 and for the past five years, my aunt made a rapid decline towards human vegetable status. When she was coherent enough to know who you were, she'd openly talk about how she wanted to die, specifically to be with her husband who passed away eight years prior. But this isn't a story about death. It's a story about a funeral. There is nothing like a funeral in the small town South. It's easy to think of Virginia as being quite a long ways from the Great American South, but travel just three hours outside of Richmond and watch how they put someone into the ground. It's hard to deny that it's an entirely different world when you're surrounded by people with names Eula and Noreen (pronounced No-Reen) who sport big hats and oscillate between harmonizing the funeral dirges and wondering when it became acceptable for their grandsons to marry Mexican women.

My aunt was a Primitive Baptist. Her funeral was conducted by two Elders. The service was like listening to a religious version of Mad Libs with my aunt's name shoved in the blanks. Maybe that's just how Primitive Baptists roll, but there was nothing personal about it. None of her friends or family spoke. The Elders barely mentioned anything about who she was as a person. In fact, my aunt didn't really have to be there at all, but she was, hanging out her casket looking better than she has in the past decade and far better than many of the live ones who attended her funeral. I'm not sure if it was the embalming or the make up or simply the act of finally escaping years of declining health but whatever force it was, my aunt looked wholly content and while the Elders were ranting about Jesus and sin, I imagined her sitting next to the man himself, having a quiet chuckle at the expense of the living below.

She was buried in a family plot on a hill, which sounds quite scenic until you realize that it happens to be located across a highway from a tractor dealership and I definitely saw a couple purchase a new John Deere as they put my aunt into the ground. My grandmother was there. My aunt was her last surviving sibling out of six and of anyone in our family, my grandmother is the one impacted the most. More than seeing the body or even saying goodbye, what impacted me the most was watching my grandmother do that thing that people do when they're devastated beyond the point of feeling and are just going through the motions of life. She didn't cry or speak much, but there was a very visible frailty and as she walked from her sister's fresh grave to her brother's grave to her husband's grave and eventually to her own empty plot my heart broke into 8,000 jagged pieces, none of which were comforted by the successful tractor sale across the street.

When I think about my aunt now, I like to think that she's around for all of the best parts of my life she missed in the nursing home. I think about her when I'm singing awful Meat Loaf songs at the top of my lungs in the shower. I think about her when I go to see matinee movies alone on rainy days. I think about her when I call my grandmother on Sundays to hear her intimately discuss the lives of characters from The Bold and the Beautiful as if they're real people. And every time I smile at one of life's subtlely charming moments, I think to myself, "Can I get a high five Edna? This is what makes everything else worthwhile."

Conversations From Today

2007-08-29T20:24:00.000-04:00

Homeless Guy: Hey young lady, my car is broken down and I need some change to get home to my wife. She's dying of cancer and I really need to get home. Do you have any change?

Me: Sure. [hands over $0.32]

HG: I see you're not wearing a ring.

Me: Um...no

HG: You're not married?

Me: No

HG: Girl, what's your address? I'd like to come visit you sometime.

Me: What about your "wife?*"

[Really long pause, at least two full minutes. The longer silence went on, the longer stood there just for spite.]

HG: Well...she act like my wife, but we're not really...um...besides, she'll be dead soon anyway.

And they say good men are hard to find.

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* This was the first time in months that I had an excuse to use finger quotes. I don't have to tell you how exciting that was.

Conversations From Today

2007-08-28T19:54:00.000-04:00

Me: I have to go back to Richmond for a few months for work, but I kind of want to keep a place here and start splitting my time between here and there.

Steve: Did you ask your roommate if you could keep your apartment even though you won't be here?

Me: Yeah, we talked about it. He said that I could keep renting.

Steve: At full price?

Me: I don't know, he said that "something could be arranged."

Steve: Be careful. He probably means that something could be arranged between his penis and your face.

Me: I hate it when they put that clause in a lease.

Confession

2007-08-26T19:40:00.000-04:00

Sometimes when I feel down, I listen to AC/DC to remind myself to think of my thighs as "American" rather than "pasty/bulbous."

Random Thought

2007-08-25T03:22:00.000-04:00

Of all the fonts, I think that Baskerville looks the most cool and collected. I told Justin yesterday that I think Baskerville is the kind of font that would max out its retirement account every year and have placemats that accented the picture frames in its house. Second to that is American Typewriter. Whenever I use it I feel like I should be writing a seedy mystery novel instead of whatever mundane thing I'm actually doing. It's sad when you think "my job simply isn't cool enough for this font."

For Those Who Wish to be Tickled Silly

2007-08-24T17:50:00.000-04:00

A friend sent me this this morning along with caption, "There's no question in my mind as to why they call it Hotlanta." Enjoy your weekend internet.

Ghost Rider Is Not A Good Movie For You Or Anyone Else You Know

2007-08-23T18:48:00.000-04:00

Last night I saw Ghost Rider because...well...look at the movie poster:

It features the worst actor on earth with half of his head on fire. The feeling that I get from seeing that poster is the same thing I would imagine angel tears falling on your face would feel like. That is simply spectacular. What isn't so spectacular is the actual film. Ghost Rider suffers from whatever you call it when the sum of something is far, far, far less than it's parts.

You would think that Terrible Actor + Motorcycle + All the Fury of Hell + The Undead + Eternal Curse + Sam Elliott + Copious Amounts of Fire + Flaming Chain Whip + That Guy That Was All Deep and Broody in American Beauty + Eva Mendes' boobs would = The Greatest Night of Your Movie-Watching Life, but it doesn't. Instead it gave me the same feeling I once got in high school when I had a pseudo-crush on this boy for probably two years and then after I went to college, I was suddenly cool enough to hang out with him, so we went to see a movie once and I realized that despite his lip piercing, he was the most boring soul on this poor planet. Oh...this isn't what I thought it would be at all. Ghost Rider has that same disappointment-bordering-on-pity aftertaste mainly because the film breaks several cardinal rules of awesomely awful film-making. Those being:

#1) The film either has to take itself completely seriously (see: Drumline, An American Werewolf in Texas, Slugs, Boa vs. Python) or not seriously at all (see: Army of Darkness, Snakes on a Plane). Anything in between (see: Ghost Rider) just comes across as awkward.

#2) Pack your film full of ridiculous one-liners. Viewers NEEEEEEEEEED righteously awful dialogue to get them through. It's our brain meat. We need to hear dialogue like the following:

Yelena: Do you know what a wire transfer is?
Xander Cage: Is she for real. Sweetheart is there anything else you need to do, let us big boys have a conversation.
Yelena: Conversation. A word with four syllables. Do you want some ice before your brain overheats.
Xander Cage: Ice. Yeah, you could chisel some off your heart, if you could find it.

Genius. I need to be inspired to turn to the person next to me and say "AWWWWWW SHIT!!!!!!!" at least five times before the end credits roll. Ghost Rider had ample opportunity to do this, what with the film being based on a part-man, part-demon who rides a firecycle through town, but didn't deliver. I did; however, appreciate the line, "Lucky don't cover it. I've got a dog named Lucky - he's got one eye and no nuts. You got an angel looking after you." I'm making it my mission to seamlessly squeeze that into conversation.

#3) A washed up actor would be nice. Someone who used to be on the A-list who now aspires to do VH1 reality shows does wonders. Throw Tootie from The Facts of Life or that guy from Empty Nest in and you're setting yourself up to take home awesomely awful gold.

I also really wanted to see more things on fire. Ideally, there would have been a scene where Ghost Rider walks in slow motion away from an entire town he has just set ablaze while some wicked metal song about bargaining with the devil plays in the background, but none of that is to be had. Instead, you get a PG-13 movie that stops way short of taking the concept of a hog-riding vigilante from hell to it's full awesomely awful potential. Director Mark Steven Johnson, when you are ready to make big boy movies, I will be happy to see them intoxicated and whisper/say at full volume inappropriate things to whoever is sitting next to me. I'm waiting...

Chuck Ragan Is a Rock Star (And Matt Skiba Is Pretty Good Too)

2007-08-16T17:13:00.000-04:00

I love Chicago. I mean, I love love Chicago in the same way that people who move to New York from the Midwest all of a sudden become hyper-New Yorkians even before they've unpacked their boxes and gotten jobs. The only people in New York who wear the t-shirts are people who were not born there. The only people who walk around Chicago perma-smiling are idiots like myself who are enamored with sketch comedy shows and cheap double feature movies and turtle-racing bars (?!)

One of the main reasons I like Chicago is that there is the sheer number of unexpectedly awesome things. A week ago I went to see Chuck Ragan (from Hot Water Music) and Matt Skiba (from Alkaline Trio) play a face-meltingly sweet show. I don't see a lot of shows, mainly on account of the fact that I'm not cool at all and spend a disproportionate amount of time listening to Meat Loaf and watching reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger (a fantastically awful clip of which can be found here. Warning: Contains red-hot Western showdown action and some pretty sweet slowmo shots of Norris' behatted man mane).

Going into the aforementioned show, I was pretty skeptical about the whole thing since:

A) I hate Chuck Ragan's former band as well as the book of the same name. If I had to list THINGS I WOULD THROW IN A CANYON IF GIVEN THE CHANCE, both the band and the book would be on that list. Thankfully I don't live near any canyons or else my semi cross-eyed second grade teacher and whoever canceled Arrested Development would find themselves in a heap o' trouble.

and B) The opening band was this whiny acoustic trio and as soon as they came out, the lead singer closed his eyes and half-whispered into the mic "This is a song about a long winter." Songs about sad long winters populated by quiet depressed people who probably own a lot of cats and turtlenecks and smoke cigarettes from holders just make me want to break things. All I could think was Jesus, why don't we all just start menstruating and go home to eat chocolate and watch Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants? I'm an insensitive jerk.

Bukowski and bodily functions aside, Chuck Ragan is, as the subject header would indicate, a rock star. The show was awesome. I don't mean awesome in the way that high school kids who smell like Axe body spray use to describe their really "awesome" demo tape they made in their Mom's garage (high five bro!)*. I mean awe-inspiring, awesome in the way that one would describe a volcano or a time machine or a giant squid. Chuck Ragan sounds a lot like Henry Rollins (swoon!) to me and when paired with an acoustic guitar, his music comes across as sounding gravelly and beautiful. It's the kind of music that would be the appropriate soundtrack if you were a coal miner who had lost his wife and kids in a fire and were dead set on drowning your sorrow in gritty man verse and whisk[e]y. Chuck Ragan's music sounds like he's got nothing left in this world but a bindle full of regrets he's hauling down a slow road to hell. I can get behind that kind of depression.

Tonight I'm headed to a Moroccan restaurant then maybe to a karaoke bar. This weekend there are plans in the works for art institute-age and frenzied plays performed at warp speed and maybe a bar that features midget wrestling although the poor reviews make me skeptical. There are also Elvis impersonators and gameboy rockstars and a bar that features "Live Manimals" to be seen. Sometimes when I think about the fact that right this very second Angelina Jolie AND people who describe themselves as Manimals are running around the place where I live, I get the same feeling my friend Newman gets when he drinks too much and goes around the room telling each person exactly how much he loves them. Chicago, you're a dreamboat.

I promise that this will be the last overly gushy post about the windy city. Your regularly scheduled dose of cynicism and angst will resume tomorrow.

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* I make fun because I tried and failed to date every single one of those kids when I was in high school.

Midwestern 101

2007-08-15T03:43:00.000-04:00

Today someone found this site by Googling "sex sodey." My very first thought was Here they call it sex POP ok?

I'm Not Saying They're Demons, But I'm Not Entirely Unconvinced That They're Not Demons Either

2007-08-13T01:42:00.000-04:00

The Olson Twins scare the shit out of me.

Confession

2007-08-10T02:57:00.000-04:00

Hey Maura:

I'll see your confession and raise you this:

In the seventh grade I made up a boyfriend named Roger because, you know, Roger is a really contemporary name for my generation. Roger was in high school and drove a motorcycle and was really into making out and buying me Hello Kitty pencil cases. Roger was especially hot because he was not into looking at Stacy Hawk's big dumb boobs unlike my sixth grade boyfriend. I spent the majority of that year drawing ROGER IS MY BOYFRIEND AND NOT YOURS on my shoes and carefully crafting steamy details about our relationship that included things like "Roger likes to kiss me with his hot face" and "Roger and I sometimes read books and then French." Sometimes I think that Roger and I's relationship was one of the healthiest I've ever had.

Your turn internet. Leave deliciously guilty confessions in the comments or e-mail me the extra seedy ones.

Brain Flutters vs. Stomach Butterflies

2007-08-09T17:40:00.000-04:00

People say that the best part of meeting someone new is the stomach butterflies, but that’s not true. The best part is the brain flutters. Brain flutters are what you get when you’re not immediately attracted to someone, but they happen to say something so perfect that it turns your cerebellum from an articulate fully functioning brain into a ticker machine that can only spit out commands like BLUSH -- GIGGLE -- SAY SOMETHING DUMB -- FALL OVER -- MAKE A REFERENCE NOBODY WILL UNDERSTAND -- LAUGH TO YOURSELF BECAUSE IT REALLY IS CLEVER AND IF THE PERSON YOU WERE TALKING TO JUST KNEW WHO NIELS BOHR WAS THEY WOULD THINK IT WAS FUNNY TOO -- TRY TO EXPLAIN WHO NIELS BOHR WAS -- GET TOO EMBARASSED TO FINISH EXPLANATION AND FADE TO AN INDECIPHERABLE MUMBLE -- DRINK TO PREVENT YOURSELF FROM TALKING ANY MORE -- FALL OVER AGAIN -- DIE INSIDE. Those are the commands that my brain spits out at least.

I love the brain flutters. I live for the brain flutters. For the past three weeks I’ve been getting a very serious case of the brain flutters thanks to an ongoing e-mail correspondence with a boy who lives literally on the other side of the planet. When I have something in my inbox that says “You know I can recite the first 20 elements from the periodic table right?” or "The weather here is shocking. It's really putting a damper on things...get it?...DAMPer?" I have no choice but to giggle girlishly and fall over sighing. E-mailed brain flutters are the best because you have the power to edit things and because it takes forever to figure out that someone’s really an ass over e-mail. You have weeks of selfishly imagining that said person is charming and witty and generally a decent person before realizing that they have a weird Drakkar Noir/mothball smell or they hate fat people for no reason or they really want a girl that’s just like their mother. Also, I’m better with crafting charming e-mails than with navigating through the sweaty-palmed world of hanging out in person. With the mighty power of editing, I can hide the fact that I have no social skills. They can hide their character flaws. We can both be content in delightful best-foot-forward pseudo-anonymity. Most days, I’m much more excited to just have a charming e-mail sitting in my inbox than actual dates on my calendar.

This morning I woke up and after turning various shades of purple while reading three full pages on how extraordinary the Saturn V rocket really is, I unfortunately made it this part:

“…it costs a $68 entry fee to see the Saturn V which I'm more than fine with, but serves as a spiked barrier to the jews i'm traveling with…”

Classy. I’m not sure if I’m more disappointed that my brain flutter is the kind of kid who makes casual ethnic slurs or that he’s grammatically too lazy to capitalize them. Either way, the fantasy is over which is sad because I was way more in love with the clever, quirky, collected, cool-sounding chick in the e-mails than the anxious, awkward, insecure one who spent an embarrassing amount of time writing them. But that’s why pseudo-anonymous brain flutters are much more dangerous than real live stomach butterflies. It’s not the blissful idea of a perfect someone. It’s the blissful idea of a perfect you which is infinitely harder to say goodbye to than a well-dressed, physics-lovin, deliciously-accented man geek from across the sea. It was really nice while it lasted.

Bringing Sexy Back One Floor Covering At a Time

2007-08-08T03:05:00.000-04:00

This is a rug that's for sale near my house:

Whenever I pass by and see it's exoticism staring me in the face, I try to imagine a context...any context...where that particular gem of a household accessory would fit in. The only image I can ever conjure up involves someone whispering "I love your musk" and a lot of Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares" playing in the background. Also this guy plays a pretty prominent role:

Every time I pass by that rug, I'm left with the overwhelming conclusion that my life isn't nearly decadent enough.

Item #7186 on the Thank God I'm Kind of Broke Since Any Money I Gets Me Paws On Would Definitely Be Squandered on Items Like This List

2007-08-06T03:49:00.000-04:00

This is on sale in my neighborhood:

It's too ridiculous to even be snarky about. Rappin With Jesus is like looking glory right in the eye.

Conversations From Friday

2007-08-05T03:44:00.000-04:00

Setting: Subway, 5:50-ish PM

My friend Steve: Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to cast a spell?

Me: What?

Steve: What do you think it would feel like to have magic come out of your fingers? Like do you think it would tingle to have stars and powder and stuff come out of your hands? Couch, if you were a wizard and did fingerguns, you could have real smoke come out.

Me: I'd want cartoon flags to come out of my magic fingerguns. I think you'd probably be able to feel magic if it were coming out of your hands. You can feel sweat on your hands.

Steve: Which is like magic...sweaty gland magic.

Me: You can feel static electricity. That's what I think it would feel like, only more star-shaped.

Steve: Do you think wizards have holes in their fingers, you know, where the magic comes from?

Me: Like big wizardy finger pores?

Steve: Wizard pores gross me out.

Me: I'm going to put all of this on the internet when I get home.

Steve: Yeah, I know.

A Short List of People I'd Like to Know

2007-08-04T17:10:00.000-04:00

1. Whoever designed this site.

2. This girl.

3. The guy who created this. I'm pretty much enamored by anyone who can inspire a discussion about whether Munch's Make Believe Band is racist. Bonus footage here.

4. This guy, but mainly just to see how high on the creepiness scale he ranks.

5. Sting.

James Lee Burke is the New Dan Brown

2007-08-03T15:40:00.000-04:00

I love everything about this subway ad:

* Presence of extra manly cowboy hat: Check
* Author who looks like the kind of guy who'd give hearty handshakes and say ridiculous things like "I knows my way around some barbecue now:" Check
* Blurb from Entertainment Weekly that compares cowboy-hatted author to someone I've never heard of: Check
* Book that is as giant as the author's entire torso: Check
* Tagline that's impossible to read without hearing the movie trailer guy voice in your head, adding an extra dun, dun, duuuuuuuuuuuun! at the end in place of the elipses: Check

Also, isn't mentioning the real post-Katrina storm while we're still in the middle of cleaning up the New Orleans area kind of like telling Holocaust victims "you haven't seen the real tragedy yet [dun, dun, duuuuuuuuuun]?" My favorite part of the ad, which you can't really see from my grainy cell phone camera work there, is the cover of the book which features a man playing saxophone with what looks like a burst of flames behind him. Awesome. Play on man, even if the Titanic sinks and the entire town burns to the ground behind you. Play on.

Confession

2007-08-02T02:41:00.001-04:00

I know it's juvenile, but I keep a copy of this picture:

in my wallet just behind my subway pass and every time I have to go somewhere, I'm kind of surprised by the fact that a hilariously screaming child is staring back at me and I laugh out loud to myself, sometimes for a good 30 seconds. I'm almost 100% sure that the woman who works at my subway stop thinks I'm mentally retarded and she gives me this look of confusion and pity every time I come through. I never say anything because explaining that not only do I carry around a picture of a terrified child receiving a "You're Adopted!" message via a cat bursting forth from a birthday cake, but I also routinely forget that it's there and laugh with delight every single time I rediscover it, makes me sound even more disturbed than just being the kid that laughs for no reason at subway stops. It's a really sad day when you think to yourself, "Just let the subway lady think you're retarded. It's way better than the truth."

Update

2007-07-31T17:07:00.000-04:00

So is Best Week Ever.

2007-07-31T16:06:00.000-04:00

Richmond you're awesome.

Unnecessary Celebrity Gossip

2007-07-30T10:40:00.000-04:00

Jimmy Fallon is set to take over Conan O'Brien.

Faith Hill breaks it down for fans: "You don’t go grabbin’ somebody else’s, somebody’s husband’s balls, you understand me? That’s very disrespectful.”

I'm just waiting for Meryl Streep to start doing porn and for Lindsay Lohan to stop looking like Stiffler's Mom (seriously, look at this shot:

and tell me that La Lohan doesn't look like the recently botoxed PTA member at your son's elementary school who just can't quit talking about the wonders Vitamin E has done for her skin). Forget famine and pestilence. Those are the real horsemen of the apocalypse.

Overheard in Chicago

2007-07-29T03:51:00.000-04:00

[Setting: Subway, 2:30PM-ish]

Man in Suit on Cell Phone: Yeah...uh huh...right....no I agree...I thought Lawrence was on that one...yeah...right....I completely agree and I think the thing to keep in mind is that teamwork makes the dream work...

Chances that man is not a d-bag: 0%
Chances that I will use that phrase at every available opportunity: 100%

The Little Things

2007-07-28T02:15:00.001-04:00

I just bought a tiny bottle of gin from a slightly mulleted man who ended the transaction by giving me finger guns and advising me to "stay beautiful." Sometimes when ridiculously delightful things like that happen, I can't help but think that the world is an awesome place.

Questions I've Been Asked on Dates In the Past Seven Months:

2007-07-25T16:10:00.000-04:00

* Have you ever kissed a girl? Would you consider it?

* You've really never hooked up with your guy friends? Never?

* So when do you turn 21?

* I've been with guys before, is that a problem for you?

* Is your sister hot?

* Would you like to come to my birthday party next week? It's a 48-hour party on my parents farm where all of my friends that are in bands will be playing for two days straight. Also I'm dressing like Jesus and all of my guests are coming as my followers, so, you know, wear a robe or something. You do own a robe right?*

* Would you rather be really hot but have explosive diarrhea once a day or be kinda hot and have no intestinal difficulties at all?

* Do you bruise easily?

Dating is like an explosion of uncomfortable questions.

----------------------------
* I was kind of charmed by this one.

Random Question

2007-07-24T14:28:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to sell a laptop on Craigslist and I keep getting these weirdly personal responses that outline traumatic reasons why I should ship the thing to Nigeria or Turkey or Kansas instead of selling it locally. In the past week the thing has been listed, I've gotten reasons ranging from war to research to fulfilling a dead man's dying wish for his son on why I not only should, but NEED to ship this thing somewhere around the world. I've gotten maybe 10 e-mails and all of the stories sound creepily similar with each buyer offering to pay me in money order form. Do people pay for things in money orders anymore? I'm really uncomfortable giving out my address. When I think about it, I have weird daydreams of a trench-coated detective dragging my bloated corpse out of the Chicago River, all the while shaking his head and mumbling "laptop...Craigslist...Jesus, another one...the world is cruel." Has anyone else had a problem or success selling stuff on Craigslist?

Reason #87 Why I Love My Neighborhood

2007-07-23T03:44:00.000-04:00

Every day I pass by this:

And it makes me giggle and think of this:

I am a woman of simple, media-driven tastes.

Open Letter

2007-07-18T02:57:00.000-04:00

Dear Maternity Store I Passed Tonight:

Your window display scares the shit out of me.

I'm not sure if this child is trying to suckle the armless mannequin or if the mannequin just can't defend itself, you know, given the armless situation and all. I am sure that the idea of a child that big trying to aggressively suckle me or anyone else in a retail display window is definitely the creepiest thing on earth...and this is coming from someone who was once hit on by a pedophile. Next time, I suggest letting taxidermy animals do your selling for you. Just a thought.

---Chris---

Overheard in Chicago

2007-07-16T02:36:00.000-04:00

[Setting: Chicago subway, 3AM]

Dude #1: Oh dude, you are sooooo wasted. You're wasted like, I don't know, wasted.

Dude #2: Hey, I got a question. Why do people live in the city? Fuck the city man. Seriously, fuck that place. I'm never movin out of the suburbs.

Dude #1: Yeah, fuck the city.

Dude #2: Fuck the whole fuckin city.

Dude #1: Wait, did you drive to the el? Did we drive to the el?

Dude #2: Shit man, that's what you do in the suburbs.

Dude #1: Oh you're too drunk to drive home dude. You are f'ed. You are f'ed right in the doodle man. I mean right IN the doodle.

Dude #2: Yeah, the suburbs rule.

Telling people that they're f'ed in the doodle is now one of my favorite past times.

The Great American Mustache Experiment

2007-07-13T00:42:00.000-04:00

There are few things we here at Post-GradNothing Headquarters find more majestic than a full-fledged mustache. All 240 of us (220 if you count the midgets as half-people) who work round the clock to bring you untimely, oftentimes completely incoherent updates agree that the stache is the limosine of the face. Nothing says I AM A VOLCANIC ERUPTION OF MANLINESS more than covering your upper lip with a thick canopy of hair. I mean, just look at the difference:

Burly Walrus of a Man:

Took His Sister to Prom, Pees Sitting Down:

In fact, right this second, I can't think of ANYTHING more majestic than a mustache except for maybe a bald eagle with a mustache. Since they're so elusive in nature, I went ahead and photoshopped one just to show you what that level of majesty would look like*. I also threw Cobra Commander in there too to show you that a mustachioed eagle is even more powerful than G.I. Joe's most cunning nemesis:

WARNING: MUSTACHIOED EAGLE'S GLORY RAYS MAY BURN RETINAS WITH HIGHFALUTIN AWESOMENESS!

To celebrate the mustache and all that it's done for this fine, fine country, I'd like to invite you to participate in a social experiment. I'm looking for at least one volunteer to grow the finest stache they can muster [beards excluded], wear it around for a few days, then allow me to ask some fairly ridiculous questions about how it has impacted their lives and post the results along with photos. Participants who...um, participate will be laureled with online praise as well as a fun pak (tm) of thank you prizes which may or may not include a tiny plastic hot dog** from this store.*** Plus, I mean, you'll have a full-grown mustache which, as we all know, is its own reward (Am I right ladies?). If anyone is interested, drop a comment or e-mail me at postgradnothing@gmail.com. Grow it for glory.

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* Did funny images exist before Photoshop? I don't think so.

** I'm really dying to send someone a ridiculously tiny plastic hot dog in the mail. Don't let me down internet.

*** I chose Uncle Fun's because it's like the greatest yard sale you've never been to AND the logo features a pretty great touchy uncle stashe.

Conversations With the Ex

2007-07-11T14:44:00.000-04:00

Other Chris: Hey, I'm calling to tell you I'm a genius!

Me: Oh yeah?

O.C.: Oh yeah! Remember how I used to keep my money in a coffee can? Well I learned that the problem with that is that it's just as easy to take money out of the coffee can as it is to put it in. Today I drilled a hole in a San Pellegrino bottle to put my money in. If I want to buy anything big, I'm going to have to be really committed and break the bottle by shooting it with a beebee gun.

Me: Why don't you just put your money in a savings account?

O.C.: [Long pause, overly dramatic sigh]. Jesus Chris, because last time I checked, it is illegal to shoot your money out of a savings account at a bank.

Me: Sometimes I miss you very much.

Conversations From Last Week

2007-07-10T01:53:00.000-04:00

Setting: Walking down the street past a giant cemetary

Overly Friendly Slightly Mentally Unstable Homeless Man: Hey there young lady.

Me: Hey there yourself.

OFSMUHM: It's awfully hot today.

Me: Yeah it'd be nice if it cooled down 10 degrees or so.

OFSMUHM: I'm Ernie. What's your name?

Me: Hi Ernie, I'm Chris.

OFSMUHM: I had a girlfriend named Chris once. I loved her so much, but she's gone now.

Me: I'm so sorry to hear that.

OFSMUHM: She was beautiful. Got hit by a car while crossing the street. I thought I would never get through that. [looks at giant cemetary we are still walking past]

Me: My god, that's terrible. I'm so sorry.

OFSMUHM: I always wanted to get me another girlfriend named Chris.

Me: ...............................

OFSMUHM: Do you....

Me: Have to run. Take care Ernie. Drink lots of fluids.

My Humps

2007-07-07T12:43:00.000-04:00

Someone just sent me a link to a group of boys in Alabama who perform air hump routines to Pretty Ricky songs then broadcast them on the internet. They say that your life begins the day you meet the love of your dreams. I say it begins the first time you lay eyes on a bunch of 19 year olds taking turns humping the same ottoman. My favorite part of that video is that they take time in the beginning to introduce each individual member. I feel like that's a nice ice breaker so when I think to myself, "Man, who is the tall one? I really admire his classic yet contemporary technique," I'll know that the answer is Pipelayer. Things like this make me curse the fact that they haven't invented time travel yet because there's nothing I want to do more than fast forward five years to see Satisfaktion try to explain to a date why he talking about high school makes him weep and hide in a closet.

Although all six Peer Pressure videos are glorious in their own way, I'm kind of partial to this one simply because you have no idea what's going on in the beginning and then BAM! humping teenagers slithering in from the sides! Chaos! Mayhem! Also why are they wearing surgical masks in that video? Is the couch too contaminated to dry hump? Why stick to Pretty Ricky? Are other R&B artists not hump worthy enough? These questions, I fear, may never be answered but one thing's for sure, Peer Pressure does private parties and I'm turning 26 in October.

Roadtrip Wrap-Up (Truncated! Just Like Extra Long Decimals!)

2007-07-06T04:54:00.001-04:00

There are few things better than the Great American Roadtrip. Barring skiing down a slope of ice cream or tongue-wrestling with the MIT math league, I honestly can't think of anything better than piling in the car with a bunch of friends and driving somewhere new. My trip this weekend was phenomenally phenomenal. We ate a boatload of beef jerky, I got to make as many awful puns as I wanted, and it felt pretty good to be around people say things like "babies are nature's kickballs." I would tell you more about our trip - which spanned several states and involved adventures like riding a duck-shaped van that transformed into a boat through a Mississippi River canal - but it would be a crime to tell those stories without photographic illustrations. I mean how can you explain just how gross the world's oldest corndog is without pictures? Riddle me that. As soon as I get my grubby paws on some photos (the ones I took are snuff film-level grainy), I'll upload them along with tales of triumph and tribulation.

In the mean time, Chicago and I are officially one-month into our red-hot love affair as of tomorrow. I'm way into this place, almost (but not quite) as much as I was into wearing pants like this all the way up until 1995 or so. As obnoxious as it is to put in print, I can officially say that I'm head over heels in love with here, more so than I've ever been with a place in my life, and when my weekend visitor gets here tomorrow, I plan to celebrate in style with some frushi followed by an evening at a fairly swanky jazz bar. There will be gin. There will be jazz. I am hoping that dancing will be involved. I feel like it might be impossible not to fall in love with a place when there's gin and jazz and dancing. That's like holding the Triforce of Badassery*. Photos and stories to come when my camera-savvy friends upload them. In the meantime, crack open some Bombay Sapphire, turn on some Coltrane, and think of me.

* In this scenario, replace courage, wisdom, and power with awesomeitude, face-melting sweetness, and rockstardom. Also replace whatever you thought of me before reading that last sentence with "total fucking dork."

Come On and Feel the Illinoise

2007-07-01T01:37:00.000-04:00

Chicago is awesome, mainly because I am all of a sudden around friends who say things like "hey, I quit my job. Let's drive somewhere weirdly awesome this weekend." And so it is. From today until Tuesday, I'm with my homeboyz Steve and Dan searching for the most bizarrely bizarre things this nation has to offer...or at least the things we can drive to in a weekend. Today we drove to Rockome Gardens in Amazing Arcola! Illinois, the nation's largest Amish community (I think). We stopped there because we read an article about Chick-Tac-Toe, a game in which willing opponents battle a live chicken in a game of tic-tac-toe. Rockome is basically an amusement park for Amish people who apparently get their kicks playing normal games with livestock. Unfortunately, there were no chickens available today for Chick-Tac-Toe, but we did see a lot of wooden guns and wigwams. Also, they re-enact WWII battles every 15 minutes or so Rockome Gardens. I mean, they have a tank and a haunted cavern and an Elvis impersonation band and people dressed like Abe Lincoln. It was like walking through a piece of my own brain. We also saw an Amish volleyball game and took shots of sour candy out of test tubes while standing in a boiling-hot antique museum, looking at something that may very well have been a turn of the century baby coffin. Needless to say, it was delightfully surreal. Right now I'm in Memphis trying to convince the boys to call me "Pretty Pretty Princess" for the rest of the weekend and watching a sweet-ass special on snake fetuses. Photos and stories to come when I get back. See you kids on Tuesday.

Open Letter

2007-06-27T00:34:00.000-04:00

Dear Guy Who I Spoke to at H&M a Few Days Ago:

First off, I owe you an enormous apology. In my world of sweaty-palmed awkwardness, decent-looking strangers NEVER come up to me out of nowhere, tap me on the shoulder, and say with confidence, "I just want to tell you that you're incredibly cute." It just doesn't happen, especially without wanting anything in return. Women have a higher likelihood of spotting Jesus riding a yeti than receiving a genuine no strings attached compliment from a non-creepy stranger in broad daylight. In fact, the phenomenon is so rare that when it did happen, my first reaction was to give you a crazy quizzical look as if you had stuck an entire infant in your mouth and I simply couldn't believe my eyes. When I saw your face go from elated to deflated in 0.2 seconds, I realized that I had just been the undeserving victim of kindness, but by then you had turned and walked away. Being next in line, I paid for my things and spent the next 40 minutes looking around the store to tell you that I'm sorry for giving you an accidental face-melting stare and that I think what you said was maybe the nicest thing I've heard in weeks. I didn't find you, but I did walk out on Michigan Avenue just in time to see a man dressed as a tiger put himself into a tiny glass box. See:

I guess you could say that's two acts of kindness. Next time I'll just blush and say thank you. Thanks for being really nice.

---Chris---

What's In a Name?

2007-06-22T16:45:00.000-04:00

I just finished an interview with a woman who insisted on calling me Bikina during our entire 45 minute conversation. I tried to correct her numerous times, but she kept saying "What's your name? Bikina? That's what I've been saying! Right! Bikina!" The interview went so well and the woman was so ridiculously nice that when it was over and she asked me where such an unorthodox name came from, I didn't have the heart (or patience) to try to sound out Kris-Tee-Na again, so I just said the first thing that came to my mind. "It's Balkan."

Update

2007-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

I keep going back that weirdo giraffe/penny picture - which is now my background by the way - and I cannot for the life of me come up with any plausible reason of why this thing exists...what the hell is it other than the greatest thing to come along since fantasy horse art? I feel like if I stare at it long enough I'll either go crazy or be transported to another time.

Adventures in Awkward

2007-06-20T02:16:00.000-04:00

I got an e-mail that just said, "we, the people, only want to hear about over the top happy stuff for so long." Any time you receive an e-mail with a reference to the Constitution, you're kind of obligated to give them, the people, what they want.

As great as Chicago is, it doesn't change the fact that I'm still really awkward. That's fine when you're with someone because then it doesn't really matter how much sushi you can put away or how corny your jokes are. There's a mutual understanding that you both kick ass...hard. Dating, on the other hand, is an awkward process to begin with and for someone that's awkward by nature,* it's is like being thrown in a tiger cage with a plastic spork and a slinky to protect yourself.

Here's the rub - Every time I'm out with some dude, I get really nervous and think the most bizarre things - things you can't say out loud to a stranger because if your date rejects them, that makes for an uncomfortable evening and if your date accepts them, you're probably out with a mentally unstable person. My train of thought goes something like this on a date:

Why am I sweating like a farm animal? Why is it that I have an easier time conversing with my gyno during an actual examination than with this seemingly decent person over a nice meal? Maybe my gyno is just really personable. She did tell me I had a nice watch last time I was there. What if she were a snowman, would that be a more difficult situation than this one? I mean, she would have sticks for hands, so that can't be pleasant. I wish I had a detachable hand that I could change out for something like a divining rod or a Swiss army knife or a suction cup whenever I wanted. I'd be Suction Cup Couch. God that would be sweet.

And so on. The only time in my entire life this happens is when I'm out with someone. The better looking they are, the worse it gets. My brain doesn't stop the entire time and by hour 3, I'm thinking about really bizarre stuff like of all the failed presidential candidates throughout time, who would make the cutest older gay couple - that was a real thought I had my last date. I decided it was Grover Cleveland and Al Gore since they both won the popular vote but lost the office**. I figured that they were both probably bitter and would want to discuss that over lattes and low-fat scones.

By the time the date is coming to a close, things that would have gotten filtered out in the beginning of the date now seem relatively tame in comparison and actually work their way into conversation in the form of awful nervous joke attempts and misplaced sarcasm. On a date I had months ago the following conversation took place:

Dude: Those are nice pants.

Me: Thanks. I'm tiny and they're from the children's section. Play your cards right and you can say you got into a 14 year old's pants...I mean, not that, ha, you know, you would want to say that. I don't think you're into 14 year olds...Or their pants...Or any teen fashion really...Hey, sorry, my jokes suck and I've made this terribly uncomfortable. Have you ever said something and then immediately after you said it, kind of wished you were dead?

Dude: I don't think so.

Me: Right. Nevermind.

Afterwards it's like every WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT alarm goes off in my head at once and I go home wishing the earth would swallow me up. Dating is harder than multi-variable calculus. I would get a 1 on the AP Dating Exam.

Last Wednesday, I went to the beach with my dog. While there, I started talking to this girl who also has a dog and who, like me, happens to have an affinity for girl punk bands. We talked for about half an hour about who the poster girl for punk rock should be*** and when I was ready to leave, I said goodbye and started heading across the beach towards home. I was a good 5 minutes into the walk when I felt a tap on my shoulder and the girl shoved her phone number into my hand and said, "Um. I don't want to be creepy or anything, but you know, we should hang out...hang out together. [awkward pause]. I'm sorry if I sweat all over that phone number. I have, like, a lot of glands in my hands. [awkward pause]. I have no idea why I just told you about my glands." I smiled all the way home.

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* I have no idea what this is, but it came up when I Googled "Awkward By Nature." I was hoping to find some reference to Naughty by Nature, but a giant penny facing a drunk giraffe might be better.

** Yeah, I know John Quincy Adams also falls in the Won the Popular Vote, But Lost the Election category, but do you think that the man who invented the internet is going to settle for someone as angry looking as this? I don't think so.

*** Brody Dalle - duh.

I'll Take "Names I Was Probably Called in 1993 As the Only Girl in Middle School Who Didn't Start Shaving Her Legs Until the Eighth Grade" for $200

2007-06-19T19:00:00.000-04:00