(Edit -- this review is kinda messy and all over the place -- whenever I feel strongly about something I get kind of gushy and sloppy over it. I kinda want to take the part where I'm comparing it to Day of the Triffids and The Road and turn it into a separate essay)
War of the Worlds is one of those books that I never got around to reading because I always forgot that I hadn't done so already. HG Wells is one of those guys, like Lovecraft or Tolkien, that became a victim of his own popularity, and was mimicked so many times that it's sometimes easy to forget that they were actually the progenitors of what they were doing, and weren't relying on a bunch of pre-established tropes and cliches.
Skimming through some more recent reviews of War of the Worlds, I feel like it's fallen out of fashion a little bit in the last few years. It gets shit flung at it from all angles -- the sci-fi people hate it because it doesn't really explain anything scientific, the adventure story people hate it because it lacks a strong clear villain and is too classic-y, classics people hate it because it's too adventure-y, and the alien people hate it because they think it paints aliens as one-dimensional aggressors (lots of new agey people actually revile the book because they blame it as the sole reason why so many are inclined to assume that beings from another planet would be malevolent).
The plot of the book, also recently maligned, is well known at this point -- Martians land in England, and being to systematically destroy everything. People also seem to think it fails as a disaster story because not enough stuff actually burns down.
As always, I think people need to calm the fuck down, because they're missing the point. War of the Worlds was written in England and published in 1858 while the Empire was still going strong, and a large part of why the novel was so effectively terrifying and well received was because it showed how fragile and fallible all that shit could be. Novels and movies about a societal collapse are pretty common today, and I think it's important to remember how scary and powerful a well written book about that would have been if it hadn't been experienced before.
While the book may fail today in terms of shock and surprise, it succeeds wildly in two areas: how much STUFF it has to say, and how well it says it. Unlike a lot of other alien/adventure stories, which get by on an exciting plot that keeps you rushing through and turning pages, War of the Worlds takes its time with language and has some truly (surprisingly) beautiful moments of writing. At one point in the story, after all the shit hits the fan, the narrator ends up having to kill somebody. Later on, when reflecting on it, he says --
The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to recall’ I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow, the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We had been incapable of cooperation -- grim chance had taken no heed of that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. But I did not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I have set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses -- all these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the reader must form his judgment as he will....
Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place -- a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity -- pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.
I'm sorry, but to me that's powerful shit that doesn't deserve to be shoved into the abysmal "genre fiction" dungeon.
Understandably, people often compare War of the Worlds with Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars series, but I think they have almost nothing in common except for having Martians as central figures. War of the Worlds actually has a lot more in common with John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, which would come half a century later, and would also become much disparaged and relegated to pulp-status, mainly because of the terrible movie with the same title. Not only did War of the Worlds almost (arguably) create the sci-fi genre, but it -- more successfully -- created the post-disaster genre. It would take 50 years for The Day of the Triffids to match it, and I don't think another novel has come close until 2006, when The Road by Cormac McCarthy was published. All three of these novels have been criticized for not having a strong, clear antagonist, because all three of these novels have -- I think possibly more so than Dostoevsky, though that might get me lynched -- shown that the specific nature of disaster is secondary in interest to how humanity as a group and people as individuals deal with it. Chances are that anyone with enough leisure time to sit down and read a book haven't been pushed to the extreme limits of where tragedy can push them, and hasn't had their strength tested or seen what they are or aren't capable of. The fact that something that seems almost arbitrary can cause the light we're reading by to go out and for our entire set of societal assumptions to collapse and leave us to fend for ourselves is, I think, even more of an effective means of terrifying a reader today than it was a century ago, since we're (generally) even more clueless and helpless about how to meet our basic needs than we were back then.
Wells makes repeated references to ants throughout the novel, and how often the narrator was reminded of the way they look to us compared to how we looked to the Martians. The other great message of War of the Worlds is to constantly remind us of the danger of our arrogance, a point driven home when the Martians themselves meet their own anticlimactic demise.
I'm hoping that at some point the general consensus on this book swings back in the other direction, because I think every single inch of its status as a classic is well deserved and I think it's probably one of the most important books ever written. Stupid movies and copycat books aside, War of the Worlds is one of those very, very, very few things that makes me proud to be human, even if it does so by reminding me of how pitiful and small and irrelevant we all are.
Rating: B+
Recommended For: Sci-fi and Alien fans, fans of disaster fiction, fans of human misery.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Book Review: Dog Days -- Diary of a Wimpy Kid
I wasn't familiar with the Wimpy Kid series when I first picked up this book. I was stuck in a rather unpleasant social situation (not at all the fault of the people I was with, mind you, I just wasn't feeling it and didn't have anything to say to anyone) and neglected to bring a book with me. I tried to look casual as I poked around the living room and kitchen desperately in search of ANYTHING to read, and ended up grabbing this as it was the only thing I could find besides crossword/suduku books (taking someone's book without asking and going off to isolate yourself in the middle of conversation is bad enough, and writing in one seemed to cross a line). I wasn't sure if it was going to be any good, but then I opened up to the first page and read --
"For me, summer vacation is basically a three-month guilt trip.
Just because the weather's nice, everyone expects you to be outside all day "frolicking" or whatever. And if you don't spend every second outdoors, people think there's something wrong with you. But the truth is, I've always been more of an indoor person.
The way I like to spend my summer vacation is in front of the TV, playing video games with the curtains closed and the lights off."
That sounded like a direct quotation from the diaries that me and all of my loser friends would have kept if we weren't too busy spending the summer trying to beat Banjo Kazooie to pick up a pen (it's true -- I actually got honestly upset that my evil mom and sister were making me go on a Caribbean cruise before I had finished this game in the summer of 98. I specifically recall staying on the ship several times when they went out to the beaches, rereading Nintendo Power and fantasizing about how I'd play it as soon as I got back to civilized society). If I had been able to actually put down the magazine and pick up something like this to read at that age, I would have rejoiced at finding a new role model and literary voice to speak for me (STFU, Holden Caulfield). I'm self obsessed and vain enough still so that, even as an adult, I will automatically enjoy anything that sounds like it was written by me, even when it is gentle (in this case) or severe (Notes From Underground?) self-parody.
Dog Days reads as the summer-long diary of Greg Heffley, a middle school kid who just wants to stay the fuck inside and be left alone to do his own thing. The quick read takes the reader through Greg's summer at a brisk pace but takes enough time to set up characterization, jokes, and awkward situations without making the whole thing seemed rushed or irrelevant. The book manages to highlight some of every awkward kid's worst summer nightmares -- public swimming pools, long car rides, time spent with a douchey friend's family -- while for the most part avoiding cliches that would make this seem like an obvious rehashing of similar stories done by better authors. The writing is solid -- Jeff Kinney is mostly convincing as the voice of a middle school student, only occasionally slipping into bitter adult-writing-in-retrospect-as-a-kid tone. The highlight, though, is probably the hilarious illustrations on every page. The writing may not have been enough to stand alone, but works really well with the illustrations as a sort of comic/short novel hybrid. I found myself genuinely excited to turn each page to see what the next would look like. The drawings are simple, but very effective for this kind of story.
Dog Days never gets particularly heavy or tries to pass itself off as a biting social commentary about the plight of the misunderstood child, and I was impressed that it never got preachy or took itself too seriously. It's nothing earth shattering or life changing, but it was a very pleasant way to spend a day that I would have otherwise had to have spent talking to other people and being sociable.
Rating: B
Recommended For: Comic fans, cranky underachievers, gaming nerds, light reading.
"For me, summer vacation is basically a three-month guilt trip.
Just because the weather's nice, everyone expects you to be outside all day "frolicking" or whatever. And if you don't spend every second outdoors, people think there's something wrong with you. But the truth is, I've always been more of an indoor person.
The way I like to spend my summer vacation is in front of the TV, playing video games with the curtains closed and the lights off."
That sounded like a direct quotation from the diaries that me and all of my loser friends would have kept if we weren't too busy spending the summer trying to beat Banjo Kazooie to pick up a pen (it's true -- I actually got honestly upset that my evil mom and sister were making me go on a Caribbean cruise before I had finished this game in the summer of 98. I specifically recall staying on the ship several times when they went out to the beaches, rereading Nintendo Power and fantasizing about how I'd play it as soon as I got back to civilized society). If I had been able to actually put down the magazine and pick up something like this to read at that age, I would have rejoiced at finding a new role model and literary voice to speak for me (STFU, Holden Caulfield). I'm self obsessed and vain enough still so that, even as an adult, I will automatically enjoy anything that sounds like it was written by me, even when it is gentle (in this case) or severe (Notes From Underground?) self-parody.
Dog Days reads as the summer-long diary of Greg Heffley, a middle school kid who just wants to stay the fuck inside and be left alone to do his own thing. The quick read takes the reader through Greg's summer at a brisk pace but takes enough time to set up characterization, jokes, and awkward situations without making the whole thing seemed rushed or irrelevant. The book manages to highlight some of every awkward kid's worst summer nightmares -- public swimming pools, long car rides, time spent with a douchey friend's family -- while for the most part avoiding cliches that would make this seem like an obvious rehashing of similar stories done by better authors. The writing is solid -- Jeff Kinney is mostly convincing as the voice of a middle school student, only occasionally slipping into bitter adult-writing-in-retrospect-as-a-kid tone. The highlight, though, is probably the hilarious illustrations on every page. The writing may not have been enough to stand alone, but works really well with the illustrations as a sort of comic/short novel hybrid. I found myself genuinely excited to turn each page to see what the next would look like. The drawings are simple, but very effective for this kind of story.
Dog Days never gets particularly heavy or tries to pass itself off as a biting social commentary about the plight of the misunderstood child, and I was impressed that it never got preachy or took itself too seriously. It's nothing earth shattering or life changing, but it was a very pleasant way to spend a day that I would have otherwise had to have spent talking to other people and being sociable.
Rating: B
Recommended For: Comic fans, cranky underachievers, gaming nerds, light reading.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Book Review: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
When Chris gave me my Christmas presents this year, I was surprised to see something that looked like it may possibly be a book. I’ve been asking him for years to buy me books, and he always complained that I had too many of them and would buy me things that he claimed that I either needed or would never buy for myself (clothing, shoes, a toothbrush…)
I was impressed by his boldness before even opening the gift -- buying a book for me is not an easy task unless I specifically mention which one I want. And Chris is not exactly a book person -- in my mind, I picture him walking into Barnes and Noble looking to pick something out for me to be like the way I am when I walk into American Eagle to try to buy him a shirt: dazed, confused, clueless, and helpless. I imagine him walking up to the cashier and asking “if this book doesn’t fit him, can I return it?”
I didn’t really know anything about this book except that I thought it was some kind of Oprah shit designed to give you a… what the fuck does she call it… an “uh-huh!” moment? An “ah-ha!“ moment? A “light bulb” moment? A sphincter-clenching moment? I expected it to be preachy, obvious, contrived, and cringe-worthy, and I felt guilty that I’d have to lie to him about whether or not I liked it.
For the most part my assumptions were accurate, except that I found myself enjoying it despite the emphatic protests of all the weeping angels of my better judgement. To be fair, I was definitely grading the book on a curve considering where it came from, but even my most generous mindset couldn’t forgive the opening paragraph --
“This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
Right from the start this made me angry and immediately put me on the defensive as a reader. From the second line it manages establish a pontificating, sententious tone and seems to set itself up for a couple of hundred pages of trite moralizing and giving us “revelations” about the struggles of every day life.
Again, for the most part this was the case -- a few chapters in, we get this earth-shattering truth revealed to us:
“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The blue man put his warms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know”.
(I think Marge Simpson said it better and more concisely at the end of the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire [directed by Llewellyn Sinclair] when she sang “A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t yet…”)
So why am I giving this three stars? Well, despite its obvious flaws that anyone that has ever read anything that wasn’t an Oprah book club selection can point out, it made me cry a couple of times. And because I’m a sappy, sentimental fool. And because I’m a sucker for books about old people. And because it was a Christmas gift (this alone is worth a half star -- I would’ve given it 2 ½ otherwise) (this is probably why I could never review anything professionally).
I found myself becoming gradually attached to Eddie as the book plodded along -- he’s essentially just a placeholder, but being taken through his entire life from birth to death was an effective way of making you care about him in the absence of any actual plot or character development. The parts that deal with him and his wife were surprisingly emotional and well written and seemed out of place in the rest of the book -- they could maybe have been lifted from here and transplanted into some random Nicholas Sparks novel without missing a beat. My eyes were dripping like pre-cum down the side of a penile foreskin for the last couple of chapters, although if anyone had asked I would have lied and said I was crying tears of joy because it was almost over.
Most “serious” readers don’t need to waste their time with it, although it moves along quickly (I finished it in about three hours -- I have to admit, it was tough to put down) . For anyone looking for something a little bit light, or something kind of sweet, or someone who tends to like these kinds of books, though, it’s worth a read.
I was impressed by his boldness before even opening the gift -- buying a book for me is not an easy task unless I specifically mention which one I want. And Chris is not exactly a book person -- in my mind, I picture him walking into Barnes and Noble looking to pick something out for me to be like the way I am when I walk into American Eagle to try to buy him a shirt: dazed, confused, clueless, and helpless. I imagine him walking up to the cashier and asking “if this book doesn’t fit him, can I return it?”
I didn’t really know anything about this book except that I thought it was some kind of Oprah shit designed to give you a… what the fuck does she call it… an “uh-huh!” moment? An “ah-ha!“ moment? A “light bulb” moment? A sphincter-clenching moment? I expected it to be preachy, obvious, contrived, and cringe-worthy, and I felt guilty that I’d have to lie to him about whether or not I liked it.
For the most part my assumptions were accurate, except that I found myself enjoying it despite the emphatic protests of all the weeping angels of my better judgement. To be fair, I was definitely grading the book on a curve considering where it came from, but even my most generous mindset couldn’t forgive the opening paragraph --
“This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
Right from the start this made me angry and immediately put me on the defensive as a reader. From the second line it manages establish a pontificating, sententious tone and seems to set itself up for a couple of hundred pages of trite moralizing and giving us “revelations” about the struggles of every day life.
Again, for the most part this was the case -- a few chapters in, we get this earth-shattering truth revealed to us:
“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The blue man put his warms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know”.
(I think Marge Simpson said it better and more concisely at the end of the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire [directed by Llewellyn Sinclair] when she sang “A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t yet…”)
So why am I giving this three stars? Well, despite its obvious flaws that anyone that has ever read anything that wasn’t an Oprah book club selection can point out, it made me cry a couple of times. And because I’m a sappy, sentimental fool. And because I’m a sucker for books about old people. And because it was a Christmas gift (this alone is worth a half star -- I would’ve given it 2 ½ otherwise) (this is probably why I could never review anything professionally).
I found myself becoming gradually attached to Eddie as the book plodded along -- he’s essentially just a placeholder, but being taken through his entire life from birth to death was an effective way of making you care about him in the absence of any actual plot or character development. The parts that deal with him and his wife were surprisingly emotional and well written and seemed out of place in the rest of the book -- they could maybe have been lifted from here and transplanted into some random Nicholas Sparks novel without missing a beat. My eyes were dripping like pre-cum down the side of a penile foreskin for the last couple of chapters, although if anyone had asked I would have lied and said I was crying tears of joy because it was almost over.
Most “serious” readers don’t need to waste their time with it, although it moves along quickly (I finished it in about three hours -- I have to admit, it was tough to put down) . For anyone looking for something a little bit light, or something kind of sweet, or someone who tends to like these kinds of books, though, it’s worth a read.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Up Too Late
5:41am. Just got home from the bar. I feel like I'm too old for this shit.
Nothing bad happened. I didn't even really drink. I had a couple of (LIGHT) beers just because I felt guilty sitting around and not buying anything (same reason why I sometimes buy books I don't even want if I'm in a tiny used bookstore). I had a good time sitting and talking with a couple of my friends for the majority of the night, and meeting some new people after they left. I got to talk about Star Trek/Wars and Tolkien a little.
I just feel fucking gross and used up for some reason. I spent the majority of the night having to deflect unwanted advances without being a dick about it -- and I think the gays and straight chicks reading this know how ridiculously impossible it is to subtly deflect a drunk guy's advances without being mean and hurting their feelings.
This isn't a "wah wah wah I'm so attractive it's hard to be so hot!!" kind of thing. I honestly and in all seriousness don't consider myself physically attractive and think that I'm probably average at best -- slightly above on a good day, slightly below on a bad day. I'm also one of the most awkward motherfuckers on the planet. But unfortunately, one of my ways of dealing with my extreme social discomfort is to force/fake a friendliness and ease with people that I don't actually feel. I'm learning that this works really well at work (waiting tables), but not so much at a bar, since most gay men are too fucking drunk and emotionally damaged to differentiate between friendliness and sexual interest.
I want to bitch about this subject more deeply and eloquently at some point, but it's now 5:48am and my goal was to be in bed before 6 (aiming for the stars, right?) so I should probably turn the damn computer off.
Tomorrow's goals: wake up at 11:30, start p90x by 12:15 (I've learned that I'm absolutely incapable of starting sooner than that -- especially in the winter. Waking up is a very slooooow and gradual process for me, and in the winter I'm like a lizard that needs to absorb a certain amount of heat before it can move), finish by 2, shower and leave for work by 2:45. Force a smile all night at work and attempt to be pleasant to the people around me. Get a little fucked up at a friend's place after work.
Thursday: Wake up no later than 10:30 and head to work for the lunch shift around 11 (the benefits of spending the night with a friend who lives in Manhattan -- ordinarily I have to wake up at 8:45). Get a haircut and do some late Christmas shopping during my break. Back to work 6-10, head to Brooklyn, squeeze in p90x, go to bed at a decent hour (ughhh), wake up early (ughhhhhhhhhhhh) and with any kind of luck, manage to smoothly get onto a Chinatown bus to Maryland on Friday morning.
5:53. Seven minutes to STOP RELOADING FARMVILLE, take out my contacts, and go to bed.
Nothing bad happened. I didn't even really drink. I had a couple of (LIGHT) beers just because I felt guilty sitting around and not buying anything (same reason why I sometimes buy books I don't even want if I'm in a tiny used bookstore). I had a good time sitting and talking with a couple of my friends for the majority of the night, and meeting some new people after they left. I got to talk about Star Trek/Wars and Tolkien a little.
I just feel fucking gross and used up for some reason. I spent the majority of the night having to deflect unwanted advances without being a dick about it -- and I think the gays and straight chicks reading this know how ridiculously impossible it is to subtly deflect a drunk guy's advances without being mean and hurting their feelings.
This isn't a "wah wah wah I'm so attractive it's hard to be so hot!!" kind of thing. I honestly and in all seriousness don't consider myself physically attractive and think that I'm probably average at best -- slightly above on a good day, slightly below on a bad day. I'm also one of the most awkward motherfuckers on the planet. But unfortunately, one of my ways of dealing with my extreme social discomfort is to force/fake a friendliness and ease with people that I don't actually feel. I'm learning that this works really well at work (waiting tables), but not so much at a bar, since most gay men are too fucking drunk and emotionally damaged to differentiate between friendliness and sexual interest.
I want to bitch about this subject more deeply and eloquently at some point, but it's now 5:48am and my goal was to be in bed before 6 (aiming for the stars, right?) so I should probably turn the damn computer off.
Tomorrow's goals: wake up at 11:30, start p90x by 12:15 (I've learned that I'm absolutely incapable of starting sooner than that -- especially in the winter. Waking up is a very slooooow and gradual process for me, and in the winter I'm like a lizard that needs to absorb a certain amount of heat before it can move), finish by 2, shower and leave for work by 2:45. Force a smile all night at work and attempt to be pleasant to the people around me. Get a little fucked up at a friend's place after work.
Thursday: Wake up no later than 10:30 and head to work for the lunch shift around 11 (the benefits of spending the night with a friend who lives in Manhattan -- ordinarily I have to wake up at 8:45). Get a haircut and do some late Christmas shopping during my break. Back to work 6-10, head to Brooklyn, squeeze in p90x, go to bed at a decent hour (ughhh), wake up early (ughhhhhhhhhhhh) and with any kind of luck, manage to smoothly get onto a Chinatown bus to Maryland on Friday morning.
5:53. Seven minutes to STOP RELOADING FARMVILLE, take out my contacts, and go to bed.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Book Review: When You Are Engulfed in Flames
My favorite thing about reading David Sedaris is that it always feels like I’m spending time hanging out with my faggy, cigarette-smoking best friend, staying up late and making fun of people. Nobody is spared while I’m crankily waving smoke away from my face and begging him to move closer to the window -- crippled people, dead people, old people, Jews, and least of all, ourselves. It may not always be the most stimulating or thought provoking conversation, but it’s something that I desperately need and crave for my own sanity, and likewise I always find myself looking forward to each of Sedaris’s new releases as if this friend was going to be back in New York visiting me after a couple of years away, and in the interim all I had to speak to were a bunch of college professors.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames continues where our last late night bitch-fest left off in 2004 with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, with both of us seeming a little more tired and old, but still filled with a few good stories and more than a few good bitchy remarks. It’s a little more subtle and less punch line focused than the previous book, and a lot more self-conscious than earlier books like Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- it works really well in stories like That’s Amore, about an elderly woman who lived in his apartment building, and Old Faithful, a surprisingly sweet story about him and his boyfriend’s aging monogamous relationship (it must be nice to have someone be willing to lance your pus-filled boils for you and still want to sleep with you afterwards -- I haven’t quite reached that point in any of my relationships).
One complaint that I’ve noticed a few reviewers bitching about, though, is that he’s fallen victim to the same thing that fucks up most successful essayists after a certain point. Early books have a whole lifetime of material to draw from, while later books seem to have progressively less and less and become a lot more self conscious and talk too much about being famous, money, etc. It makes the stories a lot less approachable, and for whatever reason, a lot less funny. Sedaris does this a little bit here, but I think he’s a good enough writer to make it not matter so much as it did when, say, Michael Moore became a recognizable person and his post-Bowling for Columbine documentaries reeked of celebrity bullshit.
One of the things that has always made David Sedaris so approachable and welcoming is that he’s always almost gleefully shared with us the worst parts of himself -- his selfishness, his vanity, his insecurity, his self-centeredness, and all the other things that most of us normally pretend we don’t think and feel. These strengths lend themselves much better to the transition into self conscious fame-writing than if he had always been writing about what a normal, down to Earth person he was, and how he loved a normal, quiet life. No, this isn’t his best work, but I also don’t think it’s egregiously inferior or horrible like I hear a lot of other people whining about. Think Samantha in the Sex and the City movie getting together with the girls as soon as she gets in from LA -- it’s a little weird at first, but all differences and changes are quickly forgiven when everyone realizes what a good time they’re having.
And if any straight men are reading this, I’m really, really sorry for that reference. I can blow you if it’ll make you feel better.
Unrealistic Hopes for 2010
Like most people, every year around this time I go on and on about ways to facilitate creating A New and Better Me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -- most of these are forgotten by the end of January, and the last few usually die out around the time that I'm having some kind of awful couple fight on Valentine's Day. This is probably another one of those lists.
Another thing I do every year is talk about how the previous year has been the worst one of my life. I'm also doing this again. I can say without hyperbole that 2009 was the worst year that I've had so far (though I also said the same thing about 2008).
It was just...a huge fucking waste. I can't even really say that it had a lot of blown potential -- I started out 2009 in a really shitty way, and I figured that nothing major was going to change. I kind of want to try to blame the shittiness solely on my attitude, but there was more to it than that.
At any rate, I'm (at the moment) really committed toward making 2010 count for something. If I'm trying to force any kind of positive spin on 2009, I can say that I definitely learned how NOT to conduct myself in a way that is conducive to health, vitality, and happiness. Keeping that in my mind, I'm going to compile a short list of things to work on in 2010 and beyond.
-- Less internet. More constructive use of the time I DO spend on the internet.
If 2008 had a lot of wasted time pumped into Pokemon, 2009 trumped that with my discovery of Farmville. It's crazy and completely pointless. I've put off SEX for Farmville. I let my reading, writing, and exercise all fall off to the side so I could fuck around on Farmville and reload Facebook over and over again. It's a fucking compulsive sickness for me at this point -- I can't pass a computer without clicking refresh. The rest of the time is wasted looking at Tori Amos and figure skating stuff (gaygaygaygaygaygaygaygaygay).
I'm not going to give up on Farmville completely -- I'm too competitive for that -- but I want to make it so that I give myself an allotted time slot for it so that it doesn't eat into the time I should be spending doing other things. If I'm really not in the mood to do anything else and really do just want to sit at the computer, instead of sitting here mindlessly reloading all these fucking things, I can be replying to emails/messages, researching stuff, and writing.
-- Try to pretend that my alarm clock doesn't have a snooze button.
Seriously. I can divide people into two groups -- those that are snooze people, and those that aren't. I am a chronic, helpless, hopeless snoozer. I despise it. I'll never do it to the point where I'm late -- I'm actually NEVER late for work -- but I'll do it until the exact last minute that I have to get out of bed, shower, and leave the house to get there. Which means I don't eat breakfast, don't work out, don't write, don't RELAX, just so I can fucking keep my lazy ass in bed and do nothing. It's not like I'm SLEEPING for that extra time -- it's so fucking counterproductive and ridiculous. I end up being much more tired than I would have been otherwise because I end up having to rush instead of being able to get ready at a leisurely pace. This morning I had my alarm set for 11:30 and didn't get up until 1:30. Two hours of getting up every ten minutes to hit that fucking button. I wish there was a way I could program my alarm clock to give me an electric shock every time I try to touch it. Maybe I can get Chris to work on that for me.
-- Be less sexually driven. Value people for other things.
I can usually only force myself to leave my house for two reasons: work and sex. If not the actual physical act of sex, then at least to be put in situations where it's either a possibility, or at the very least, planting seeds for future encounters. It leads to very boring thoughts and very boring writing and I'm tired of going back and reading pages and pages and pages of innocuous nymphomaniac bullshit in my journals. Also, a VAST majority of my stress in 2009 was boy-related and sex-related. Find other things to do with people. Talk to more lesbians.
-- Drink less alcohol.
This isn't a huge deal -- my drinking has never been dangerous or out of control. I'm way too neurotic and self monitoring for that. I'd really just like to save myself a little bit of money and calories. I rarely go out and get fucked-the-fuck up, and when I do it's usually a nice/fun change of pace, but I'd like to keep it to just one or two drinks, one night a week. I generally go out to Pieces on Tuesdays still, and that's fine. Every now and then I'll add in a second bar night if I'm meeting up with someone or have a specific reason to go, but that's it -- I spent way too much money in bars in 2009.
-- Do more drugs.
This probably seems contradictory to the less alcohol thing, but it's not really. I'm not going to turn into a heroin/coke person. But I have good experiences with the lighter hippie shit, and plan to continue doing so as long as I use them in a constructive way and not as an escape.
-- Communicate more.
I want to be a better and more emotionally available friend. I'm usually a really lazy communicator and over-use things like texts and facebook comments in place of more personal/direct communication. I'm going to try to write more emails and letters and use AIM a little more when I'm having computer time, see more people outside of a bar context, and... gulp... talk on the phone. Not often, mind you, but I'd like to start slow and have maybe one or two phone conversations a week, and see where it goes from there.
God, I hate the phone.
-- Eat more moderately.
Notice that I didn't say "eat better" or "eat healthier" or "NO MORE DESSERT!" or anything ridiculous that we ALL know I won't actually follow through with. I feel like this is the best way of phrasing it if I want to stick with it.
My sister bought me a wonderful huge box of brownies for Christmas and I love it. I find myself opening the box several times a day just to smell them and look at them. Ordinarily, these would have been gone in a day or two. But they're individually wrapped, and I've been trying to savor them. One (okay, sometimes two) a night has been working really well for me. I don't feel deprived or insane/angry. I'm going to try to bring this mindset with me into the rest of the year. Likewise, smaller portions, more fresh fruit/vegetable crap, a LITTLE less carbs/sugar, blahblahblah whogivesashit.
-- Learn Italian, at least a little bit.
I have The Rosetta Stone Italian program now and I've been fucking around with it a little. I want to get more disciplined with it. I'm around a lot of Italian speaking people now because of work, and so I have no excuses. If possible I'd like to find a way to get to Italy at some point either this year or next and maybe take a class. I can't really explain why this is so important to me -- practically, socially, and, um, sexually, it makes a lot more sense for me to learn to speak Spanish or Japanese, but this is the one I really want to do.
Besides, there's something kind of hot about not understanding a word that the person I'm fucking is saying, and pretending I don't know what "no!!!" means. Most boys decrease in value considerably if you have to listen to them talk.
-- Write more.
I'm going back and forth about whether or not I want to add "read less" next to that. I don't think I'm going to -- I think that I should read the same amount and just find more time to write from the time I spend on Facebook or jerking off. I want to have at least the skeleton of a short novel done this year and a few stories finished, as well as a fairly prolific blog and an updated journal. No matter what I have to write SOMETHING every day, even if I'm just talking about sex.
I have such a huge amount of fear tied up with my writing, and I constantly surprise myself with how deeply it goes. I'm really fickle with most things, but there have been two things in my life that I've always wanted to do and never felt wishy-washy about: I wanted to go into outer space, and from my earliest memories of my grandmother reading me bedtime stories and my grandfather showing me his encyclopedias, I wanted to write books. I don't really remember a single thing from my last year of highschool, but I still remember how excited and proud of myself I felt the first time I read The Cat in the Hat by myself, how "cool" (heh) I felt reading my first Babysitter Club book in 1st or 2nd grade, and the way that I could see whole entire worlds open up for me the first time I read Matilda, my first Roald Dahl book, and every other literary milestone in my life. It's all I ever REALLY wanted to do with myself, and I feel like I really should be working on that more seriously -- or at least, more than I work on getting laid.
If I would write half as much as I fucked, or spend a quarter of the time I spend THINKING about fucking thinking about writing instead, I'd probably have at least six books written already.
-- Be more adventurous with baking. Be less afraid of cooking.
I love baking, but most of the shit I want to make is expensive and time consuming and then I get too lazy to do it on day off. And I NEVER cook -- I'm not gonna lie - as much as I like Food Network and I'm obsessed with food, I really, really, REALLY do prefer it being made FOR me, preferably by someone I can fuck in return for it. I'm never gonna be this OMG AMAZING COOK!!!!!!!!!, but I want to at least get better at cooking for myself and not be so neurotic/tense about it.
-- Exercise. Shut up, stop whining, just do it.
(Self explanatory. Never gonna like it or enjoy it, but it's a necessity, unfortunately.)
Okay, this dragged on way longer than I meant it to, and it's already almost 5am. Motherfucker. I might add to this list later on. As for now, I want to try to get in some book time and then pass out.
Rob
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Books of 2009
(I'm going to be trying to start this blog up again. My resolution this year was to try to write at least a little bit every day in SOME kind of form, and a blog is a nice lazy way to kind of cheat and get that out of the way)
Anyway, I had a goal to get to 50 books in 2009 -- I didn't quite make it in 2008 because... uh... I discovered Pokemon in 2008 and so that ate into most of my subway time where I'd normally be reading. I did make it this year, but cheated a little by counting comics (if they're collected in one volume I think it counts).
My favorites are bolded. If I'm not too lazy this weekend I might try to do a top ten list kind of thing.
My favorites are bolded. If I'm not too lazy this weekend I might try to do a top ten list kind of thing.
1) The Children of Hurin -- J.R.R. Tolkien
2) In The Miso Soup -- Ryu Murakami
3) Persuasion -- Jane Austen
4) Fight Club -- Chuck Palahniuk
5) Lucifer Vol. 1
6) Lucifer Vol. 2
7) Lucifer Vol. 3
8) Lucifer Vol. 4
9) Lucifer Vol. 5
10) Lucifer Vol. 6
11) Lucifer Vol. 7
12) Lucifer Vol. 8
13) Lucifer Vol. 9
14) Lucifer Vol. 10
15) Lucifer Vol. 11
16)War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy
17) B is for Beer -- Tom Robbins
18) Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
19) The Robber Bride -- Margaret Atwood
20) The Stolen Child -- Keith Donohue
21) Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22) Twilight -- Stephanie Meyer
23) Gilgamesh -- Derek Hines
24) The Trial -- Franz Kafka
25) Three Guineas -- Virginia Woolf
26) Live and Let Die -- Ian Fleming
27) Dancing Girls -- Margaret Atwood
28) Watchmen -- Alan Moore
29) The Eye in the Pyramid -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
30) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
31) Oryx and Crake -- Margaret Atwood
32) The Sirens of Titan -- Kurt Vonnegut
33) The Golden Apple -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
34) Official Book Club Selection -- Kathy Griffin
35) Maps and Legends -- Michael Chabon
36) The Year Of The Flood -- Margaret Atwood
37) Lost Girls -- Alan Moore
38) Leviathan -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
39) Kitchen -- Banana Yoshimoto
40) New Moon -- Stephanie Meyer
41) Look at the Birdie -- Kurt Vonnegut
42) Almost Transparent Blue -- Ryu Murakami
43) The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- Michael Chabon
43) The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- Michael Chabon
44) Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters -- Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters
45) Baseball in April -- Gary Soto
46) Child of God -- Cormac McCarthy
47) A Princess of Mars -- Edgar Rice Burroughs
48) The Integral Trees -- Larry Niven
49) The Time Machine -- H.G. Wells
50) Amrita -- Banana Yoshimoto
51) Alien Xmas -- Stephen Chiodo & Jim Strain
Friday, March 13, 2009
Welcome Back, and P90X Day 3
My entire 2009 belongs on the front page of failblog.org so far. Saying nothing about the fact that there's probably already an rss feed of the past 24 years of my life streaming somewhere onto the site.
I'm characteristically downplaying a really big change I'm attempting to initiate right now. I'm on day three of the p90x program right now and I'm fucking sore all over but I love it and think I'm gonna stick with it. I'm gonna try to blog about it fairly consistently (keyword being "try") to try to chart my progress with it because it's something I feel really strongly about right now.
There are so many things in my life that I desperately need to fix that are probably more important than body-stuff, but this is the one that I feel like I can exert the most immediate degree of control and influence over. And it's something I whine about a lot. I feel like if I can actually follow through with this commitment for 90 days and change this part of myself and get stronger/better it'll help carry that momentum into other areas of my life. I'm gonna chart my progress with pictures every 30-ish days I guess and see if I can objectively notice any difference instead of just whining about nothing happening.
So anyway, that's what I'll be doing for the next three months. I'm trying not to expect a miracle because I ALSO have to change my eating habits which is.. hard. But the way I see it, I probably won't get any WORSE. And I HAVE to get at at least a little better.
I tried making a tech joke but it might not even be accurate. I never really understood how rss feeds work. God damn it EVERYTHING FAILS.
My first dream that I remember having in 2009 was possibly the most disturbing of my life -- I went up to the North Pole and brutally raped and murdered Mrs. Claus. Seriously graphic shit, even for me. I vividly remember fisting (I actually just typed "visiting" -- well, that too, I guess) her really violently and then slicing off her nipples and biting all her skin off while wildly beating her, and then fucking her to death. I very distinctly remember the exact feeling of doing all of this and I still cringe when I think about it. What the fuck, dude.. I LOVE Mrs. Claus -- I always thought she was a fucking dirty ass crazy fuck and did some amazing vag-strengthening exercise shit. I didn't necessarily think she fucked all the elves but I'm sure she did SOMETHING to keep them in line, not to mention having glacier-shattering sex with pepaw husband and keeping him relatively jolly. Not to mention being the star of one of the greatest movies of all time --
Uh... what was I talking about? Oh, right. The dream. It sucked.
That was on January 2, and things haven't really improved much since then. It's been a long, hard (throbbing) winter, and I've been a fucking wreck throughout most of it. I never really got over the sickness crap I posted about back in November and all that strep throat shit (pretty much everyone in my life unanimously agreed that I need to stop rimming so much). I've been sick on and off for four months now and it's frustrating as a motherfucker -- before this year I was never sick unless I WANTED to be. I generally had a couple of days of incapacitating allergies in the spring and fall and that was it.
I know it's mostly related to stress and taking really bad care of myself. My relationship pretty much fell apart, as did several friendships, and as usual I'm not getting enough sleep or washing my hands after using the bathroom and spending too much time on the subway and eating crappy pasta from work every single day instead of something more nutritious. Point noted, I'm taking care of it. I started taking stupid lame ass vitamins even though I still don't think they do anything except make my nasty asparagus-scented pee even nastier. We'll see.
That was on January 2, and things haven't really improved much since then. It's been a long, hard (throbbing) winter, and I've been a fucking wreck throughout most of it. I never really got over the sickness crap I posted about back in November and all that strep throat shit (pretty much everyone in my life unanimously agreed that I need to stop rimming so much). I've been sick on and off for four months now and it's frustrating as a motherfucker -- before this year I was never sick unless I WANTED to be. I generally had a couple of days of incapacitating allergies in the spring and fall and that was it.
I know it's mostly related to stress and taking really bad care of myself. My relationship pretty much fell apart, as did several friendships, and as usual I'm not getting enough sleep or washing my hands after using the bathroom and spending too much time on the subway and eating crappy pasta from work every single day instead of something more nutritious. Point noted, I'm taking care of it. I started taking stupid lame ass vitamins even though I still don't think they do anything except make my nasty asparagus-scented pee even nastier. We'll see.
I'm characteristically downplaying a really big change I'm attempting to initiate right now. I'm on day three of the p90x program right now and I'm fucking sore all over but I love it and think I'm gonna stick with it. I'm gonna try to blog about it fairly consistently (keyword being "try") to try to chart my progress with it because it's something I feel really strongly about right now.
There are so many things in my life that I desperately need to fix that are probably more important than body-stuff, but this is the one that I feel like I can exert the most immediate degree of control and influence over. And it's something I whine about a lot. I feel like if I can actually follow through with this commitment for 90 days and change this part of myself and get stronger/better it'll help carry that momentum into other areas of my life. I'm gonna chart my progress with pictures every 30-ish days I guess and see if I can objectively notice any difference instead of just whining about nothing happening.
All the workouts are crazy hard but the second day, plyometrics, was the only one I couldn't actually finish. I'm still sore from doing chest and back three days ago, and I'm sure I'll be feeling it in my arms and shoulders tomorrow after this morning's workout, but strength training has always been easier for me than long cardio/jumping sessions. Because I don't really sweat I tend to get overheated and dizzy and wobbly and pathetic. As with all activities I do (....), I can go really hard and intense for brief spurts but never really have the stamina to keep up that pace for prolonged periods of time. Relative to the first two, arms and shoulders this morning was kind of easy -- as soon as I can afford it I think I need to move up to 20lb weights.
Here are my before pictures -- and yes, they're right, these DO work as an excellent motivational tool. Ughghghghh...
I know it could be a lot worse, but... it can also be a lot better.
So anyway, that's what I'll be doing for the next three months. I'm trying not to expect a miracle because I ALSO have to change my eating habits which is.. hard. But the way I see it, I probably won't get any WORSE. And I HAVE to get at at least a little better.
It's quiet outside right now. There was a cat that must've been in heat or something just fucking SCREAMING for almost two weeks. She stopped briefly during the snowstorm (by the way, fucking weathermen measure snowfall the same way that guys measure their penises -- I don't know where they get all that extra measurement from but six inches is never anywhere NEAR nine inches. I swear to god that most people use centimeters. anyway --) but then started up again right after. Either she died of horniness or just got fucked really good and stopped complaining. Either way, I completely relate.
With how upset and shitty I've been lately it's been a shame that I haven't really been able to get lost in a story/book the way I usually do as a coping mechanism, but I've been stuck on War and Peace for a while now and I'm making very, very, very slow progress through it. I don't... I mean... It's not a bad book, obviously, but I'm 400 pages in and I still don't care about any of the characters or what's going on. Someone -- I used to think it was Virginia Woolf but I think it was Isaac Babel -- said that if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy. I kind of agree. But the problem is that I HATE the world, and all the people in it. So...
I love Anna Karenina. I don't know why I can't get myself into this right now.
By contrast, I started reading the Lucifer graphic novel series and I'm completely hooked on THAT. It's probably not fair to War and Peace to have it be competing with a comic for my attention span, though.
I love Anna Karenina. I don't know why I can't get myself into this right now.
By contrast, I started reading the Lucifer graphic novel series and I'm completely hooked on THAT. It's probably not fair to War and Peace to have it be competing with a comic for my attention span, though.
Alright, ugh, I should get dressed and head out. Hopefully I'll be writing more regularly.
Peace and Fece(s)
Rob
Monday, December 1, 2008
Whatever, Martha!
This holiday season, I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation for all the wonderful things in my life.
Specifically, I'm thankful for these two sexy bitches:
Alexis Stewart and Jennifer Koppelman Hutt. I was sick as a motherfucker this past week and one day, after being sent home from work for dripping mucous all over the restaurant, I was stuck on the couch, sunk balls deep into my assgroove, and my mother introduced me to these two fine ladies (on the Fine Living Network, no less!)
Alexis is tall and pretty and dresses well and looks more frigid than Nicole Kidman's arctic igloo fortress (vag) and I want her to stick one of her heels up my ass. Jennifer looks like she has a really overactive cock-greedy cunt that will explode all over my face if I just look at it. I love them both.
Has anyone else seen this show? It combines two of my favorite things -- reverent awe for Martha Stewart with loving relentless mocking of Martha Stewart and I'm tempted to stay home from work tomorrow just to watch it. Because, officially, when guys ask me and I'm trying to impress them I still say "I DON'T WATCH TV" so I would never let my mother get Tivo or anything.
I probably shouldn't stay home from work ever again, though, after all the money I missed out on by staying home this past week. God, it fucking sucked -- I felt like I had been giving head to a cactus all week and the fucker kept ramming the back of my throat even though I kept begging him to ease up. And I was coughing up blood for the last two days. When people at work/elsewhere asked me what was wrong I just kept telling them I had consumption, and then got pissed off when only a few of them knew what I meant.
Thanksgiving was nice though. I made Barefoot Contessa style rice pudding (oh Ina... please adopt me and let your old rich Hamptons fags pay for me to go back to school) and had a bunch of people over and a small group of us went through six bottles of wine... early on I felt like I was trying too hard to have contrived-holiday fun but by the third glass of wine I was fine.
We got a really brother-sister duo picture out of it:
several failed attempts at a nice couple-shot
and one sort-of awkward successful one
I'm a little annoyed at how preppy and clean cut I look -- if I'm going to look like I go to fucking Harvard I want to actually BE at fucking Harvard. And not delaying school a whole extra year because I can't afford fucking Bronx Community College.
Anyway, the usual Sunday night agony about waking up early for work is happening, so I should try to get my ass into bed. I'm playing Dragon Quest IV on the DS right now and it's better than anyone reading this is.
(Oh, and besides Jennifer and Martha & Alexis Stewart, I'm thankful for family/friends/books/videogames/my cock)
Happy Thanksgiving. If anyone wants to bake me a pie please do it. Chris brought over two and I ate both of them (not by myself, though).
Specifically, I'm thankful for these two sexy bitches:
Alexis Stewart and Jennifer Koppelman Hutt. I was sick as a motherfucker this past week and one day, after being sent home from work for dripping mucous all over the restaurant, I was stuck on the couch, sunk balls deep into my assgroove, and my mother introduced me to these two fine ladies (on the Fine Living Network, no less!)
Alexis is tall and pretty and dresses well and looks more frigid than Nicole Kidman's arctic igloo fortress (vag) and I want her to stick one of her heels up my ass. Jennifer looks like she has a really overactive cock-greedy cunt that will explode all over my face if I just look at it. I love them both.
Has anyone else seen this show? It combines two of my favorite things -- reverent awe for Martha Stewart with loving relentless mocking of Martha Stewart and I'm tempted to stay home from work tomorrow just to watch it. Because, officially, when guys ask me and I'm trying to impress them I still say "I DON'T WATCH TV" so I would never let my mother get Tivo or anything.
I probably shouldn't stay home from work ever again, though, after all the money I missed out on by staying home this past week. God, it fucking sucked -- I felt like I had been giving head to a cactus all week and the fucker kept ramming the back of my throat even though I kept begging him to ease up. And I was coughing up blood for the last two days. When people at work/elsewhere asked me what was wrong I just kept telling them I had consumption, and then got pissed off when only a few of them knew what I meant.
Thanksgiving was nice though. I made Barefoot Contessa style rice pudding (oh Ina... please adopt me and let your old rich Hamptons fags pay for me to go back to school) and had a bunch of people over and a small group of us went through six bottles of wine... early on I felt like I was trying too hard to have contrived-holiday fun but by the third glass of wine I was fine.
We got a really brother-sister duo picture out of it:
several failed attempts at a nice couple-shot
and one sort-of awkward successful one
I'm a little annoyed at how preppy and clean cut I look -- if I'm going to look like I go to fucking Harvard I want to actually BE at fucking Harvard. And not delaying school a whole extra year because I can't afford fucking Bronx Community College.
Anyway, the usual Sunday night agony about waking up early for work is happening, so I should try to get my ass into bed. I'm playing Dragon Quest IV on the DS right now and it's better than anyone reading this is.
(Oh, and besides Jennifer and Martha & Alexis Stewart, I'm thankful for family/friends/books/videogames/my cock)
Happy Thanksgiving. If anyone wants to bake me a pie please do it. Chris brought over two and I ate both of them (not by myself, though).
Monday, November 24, 2008
Suze Orman For President!
Obama has the right idea so far -- putting Hillary up there as Secretary of State is a good way of placating rageful feminazis like me who were still bitter from the primary shit. Okay, good job, thank you. I know you did it just for me.
But so far he's already made one very big mistake, and it's a troubling one. Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury? Who? You're putting together this superstar team of people and you appoint some random dude for what may be the most important position in the country over the next four years? I don't care if Wikipedia says he was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
I want to somehow get in there and pull a Monica (except I wouldn't stain my shirt -- I'd swallow every last drop of that shit. Though she had the right idea, I would stash that shit away also. I wouldn't grab my mother's stain removal stick for that, except maybe to shove it up my ass while I take out the soiled shirt from under my bed every night and jerk off while looking at the jizz stain and remembering how for five minutes I was the most powerful person in the world) and after I was done and he told me he was desperately in love with me and would do anything I asked him to, I would tell him... WHY NOT APPOINT SUZE ORMAN AS SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY????
I'm serious! Sure, she might not have any "POLITICAL EXPERIENCE" but what the hell -- she's like EVERYBODY'S consultant and knows EVERYTHING about money and I guarantee she'd do a better job than literally anyone else alive on the planet right now, WITHOUT HYPERBOLE!!!!!! She taught both Oprah AND Anderson Cooper better ways to manage their money (less egotistical vanity projects for the former, 10-inch long 6-inch thick brown dildos for the latter. Okay no she didn't say that, but I could tell she was thinking it. Because she and I are of one mind on most topics and I can't see us randomly diverging wildly on this one)
And, more importantly... KATHY GRIFFIN!
She's tough...
But fair!!
Not only is she incredibly thoughtful...
...but she's also ELEGANT
Look at that. Tell me that woman isn't perfect. As Michael K (who one day will read my blog and decide that he wants me to go spelunking in his chili hole) would say, a sexy GAYELLE. I would fucking grind my fishmound against hers if she gave me even the slightest signal that it would be okay -- just one raised eyebrow would be enough. I want her to spank me with her filthy money-touching hands and maybe imprint me with just a slight aura of success. TELL ME RIGHT NOW that you don't think she would solve every single one of this country's problems? Timothy WHO???
If I saw him wearing either this outfit (think Peg Bundy accepting a job at a consulting firm) or the one above, then maybe I'd consider warming up to him. Maybe.
In other news, all I did today -- my last day off before Thanksgiving, mind you -- was watch TV and eat and jerk off. Oh and I played Mario Kart with my sister. And took kind of a messy shit.
And at no point did I ever wash my hands.
PEOPLE FIRST, THEN MONEY, THEN THINGS
But so far he's already made one very big mistake, and it's a troubling one. Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury? Who? You're putting together this superstar team of people and you appoint some random dude for what may be the most important position in the country over the next four years? I don't care if Wikipedia says he was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
I want to somehow get in there and pull a Monica (except I wouldn't stain my shirt -- I'd swallow every last drop of that shit. Though she had the right idea, I would stash that shit away also. I wouldn't grab my mother's stain removal stick for that, except maybe to shove it up my ass while I take out the soiled shirt from under my bed every night and jerk off while looking at the jizz stain and remembering how for five minutes I was the most powerful person in the world) and after I was done and he told me he was desperately in love with me and would do anything I asked him to, I would tell him... WHY NOT APPOINT SUZE ORMAN AS SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY????
I'm serious! Sure, she might not have any "POLITICAL EXPERIENCE" but what the hell -- she's like EVERYBODY'S consultant and knows EVERYTHING about money and I guarantee she'd do a better job than literally anyone else alive on the planet right now, WITHOUT HYPERBOLE!!!!!! She taught both Oprah AND Anderson Cooper better ways to manage their money (less egotistical vanity projects for the former, 10-inch long 6-inch thick brown dildos for the latter. Okay no she didn't say that, but I could tell she was thinking it. Because she and I are of one mind on most topics and I can't see us randomly diverging wildly on this one)
And, more importantly... KATHY GRIFFIN!
She's tough...
But fair!!
Not only is she incredibly thoughtful...
...but she's also ELEGANT
Look at that. Tell me that woman isn't perfect. As Michael K (who one day will read my blog and decide that he wants me to go spelunking in his chili hole) would say, a sexy GAYELLE. I would fucking grind my fishmound against hers if she gave me even the slightest signal that it would be okay -- just one raised eyebrow would be enough. I want her to spank me with her filthy money-touching hands and maybe imprint me with just a slight aura of success. TELL ME RIGHT NOW that you don't think she would solve every single one of this country's problems? Timothy WHO???
If I saw him wearing either this outfit (think Peg Bundy accepting a job at a consulting firm) or the one above, then maybe I'd consider warming up to him. Maybe.
In other news, all I did today -- my last day off before Thanksgiving, mind you -- was watch TV and eat and jerk off. Oh and I played Mario Kart with my sister. And took kind of a messy shit.
And at no point did I ever wash my hands.
PEOPLE FIRST, THEN MONEY, THEN THINGS
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Welcome the Prince of Puke!
I've been (tentatively) wanting to penetrate my way back into the blogging world for a while now. So let me vomit on my cybercock and slide it back in, slowly.
I have a weird relationship with blogging. I've had countless fights and squabbles over it, and I've violently fluctuated between posting every single thought and event that happened to me and thinking the whole thing was disgusting and overly indulgent. I have the chronic problem that most shy people with low self esteem have -- desperate for external acknowledgment, and being unable to either find what we need inside of ourselves or find it through natural human interaction, we're left desperately clawing at the internet ether for some source of validation. Unfortunately, going along with the whole shy/low self-esteem thing is a sometimes neurotic and obsessive need for privacy, which seems very counter productive to keeping a consistent public record of our life and thoughts.
Plus, on a personal level, I'm terrified that the Reptilians are tracking my every move and I should give them as little ammo as possible. But since they've most likely already probed my ass and read my mind (which is pretty much the same as reading 120 Days of Sodom so really I wish they would just leave me alone, although they probably did get a lot of new rectal torture ideas from me) anything I say here probably won't make a difference.
When I start writing in a format and using a platform that encourages every sentence beginning with the letter "I" I have a tendency to become extremely morose and faux-soul-searchingly lugubrious and angsty. And it goes on. And on. And on. So I'm going to try something a little different and keep slightly more structure to this. I'm gonna try to keep it relatively light and humorous, and try to save the more whiny shit for my personal journal. I need to get back in the habit of writing consistently again -- in that sense, my personal journal doesn't count, because I'm so lazy with grammar and structure and content that it doesn't use any of the writing muscles at all. Writing for an audience is a lot different and makes me think a lot harder, and I want to do it as much as possible.
As a secondary function I'd like it to help keep all my friends semi-updated with what's going on in my life, since I'm shitty and lazy and any time I sit at the computer to write an email I usually just end up jerking off and then reloading dlisted.com over and over again and then eat and go to bed.
So, hi -- add me, subscribe, whatever, and I promise to try my hardest to keep you entertained and make you laugh, or at least disgust you slightly. Or, if nothing else, at least leave you feeling good about yourself, in a "god, it could be so much worse, at least I'm not HIM..." kind of way. Maybe I'll even make you orgasm from such a sudden influx of self esteem.
I'm nothing if not altruistic.
I have a weird relationship with blogging. I've had countless fights and squabbles over it, and I've violently fluctuated between posting every single thought and event that happened to me and thinking the whole thing was disgusting and overly indulgent. I have the chronic problem that most shy people with low self esteem have -- desperate for external acknowledgment, and being unable to either find what we need inside of ourselves or find it through natural human interaction, we're left desperately clawing at the internet ether for some source of validation. Unfortunately, going along with the whole shy/low self-esteem thing is a sometimes neurotic and obsessive need for privacy, which seems very counter productive to keeping a consistent public record of our life and thoughts.
Plus, on a personal level, I'm terrified that the Reptilians are tracking my every move and I should give them as little ammo as possible. But since they've most likely already probed my ass and read my mind (which is pretty much the same as reading 120 Days of Sodom so really I wish they would just leave me alone, although they probably did get a lot of new rectal torture ideas from me) anything I say here probably won't make a difference.
When I start writing in a format and using a platform that encourages every sentence beginning with the letter "I" I have a tendency to become extremely morose and faux-soul-searchingly lugubrious and angsty. And it goes on. And on. And on. So I'm going to try something a little different and keep slightly more structure to this. I'm gonna try to keep it relatively light and humorous, and try to save the more whiny shit for my personal journal. I need to get back in the habit of writing consistently again -- in that sense, my personal journal doesn't count, because I'm so lazy with grammar and structure and content that it doesn't use any of the writing muscles at all. Writing for an audience is a lot different and makes me think a lot harder, and I want to do it as much as possible.
As a secondary function I'd like it to help keep all my friends semi-updated with what's going on in my life, since I'm shitty and lazy and any time I sit at the computer to write an email I usually just end up jerking off and then reloading dlisted.com over and over again and then eat and go to bed.
So, hi -- add me, subscribe, whatever, and I promise to try my hardest to keep you entertained and make you laugh, or at least disgust you slightly. Or, if nothing else, at least leave you feeling good about yourself, in a "god, it could be so much worse, at least I'm not HIM..." kind of way. Maybe I'll even make you orgasm from such a sudden influx of self esteem.
I'm nothing if not altruistic.
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