The Lost Art of Conversation

Monday, December 6th, 2010 – Already sick of snow, full of coffee and devious intent
It’s Christmas party season and after an admittedly rather pleasant party on Saturday night, filled with quite lovely geek people and good food, I’ve decided there are certain things that I used to excel at that I no longer have any talent for.

Things like small talk, for example. There used to be a day where I would talk to a table leg if the opportunity came up, just because I could and would talk to anyone/anything. And let’s be honest here, usually it helped that I was so full of pints of cider/lager hybrid goodness, I made David Hasselhoff’s cheeseburger incident seem like a nun at a tea party.

The point is, I always had something to say, even if it was nonsense.
And my ability to shoot the shit with just about anyone, wasn’t ONLY because I had a penchant for attracting the people no one else wanted to talk to. Although, truthfully, back in the day, I was notorious among my friends for being the one in the group who would inevitably end up debating life’s great mysteries with some passing, unwashed hobo because I was too trashed or too polite to shoo them away. Come 11pm you could usually find me in a dive bar discussing life with some resident, random, aged, long haired hippy who smelled like patchouli and cigar smoke and who still thought it was 1972. Sadly he usually also considered it entirely possible that some 20 year old chick would like to give him their phone number and even sadder than that, sometimes I was drunk enough to actually give it to them which usually meant spending the next two weeks refusing to answer the phone.

Nowadays though, not so much. I’ve lost any desire to make small talk with random undesirables or even regular people. Truth is, for the most part I don’t care what you do for a living or about your kids’ school activities or where you went on vacation last year, because I’m too busy plotting how I can sneak a second portion of hors d’oeuvres and a pint of sangria from the snack bar without anyone thinking I’m a pig.

However, if you want to talk about hilarious ways to embarrass yourself in the snow, or inappropriate underwear, or zombie apocalypse scenarios, or liquor, or that one epic fart you did that one time after a burrito, that scared the neighbours and triggered the fire alarm, I’m probably fine with it.

I’m complicated, what can I tell you?

Another Year More Awesome

Monday, November 29th, 2010 – coffee, buzzed, feeling sassy
Hmm. Still snowing like a bitch outside. Although that’s a pretty stupid saying since bitches, to the best of my knowledge, have nothing to do with snow. But still. Snow makes me grouchy. It’s cold and wet and makes the car slip around unattractively and makes me say things like “Holy fucking fuck!” and pray not to die even though I don’t believe in God.

Today’s actually my birthday. I know, right, who has a birthday in the frozen asshole of winter? Well now you know the answer. I do. And even though it’s not a big landmark birthday or anything fancy like that, I had decided to have a nice, relaxing “me” day where I didn’t do anything at all but stay home and wallow in my greatness and be all luxurious and pampering.

What have I actually been doing? Sleeping a little later than normal then doing laundry and cleaning and all the other things I’ve neglected lately. Every time I’m about to sit down and read some blogs and drink my coffee and eat a Mars Bar and gloat a lot, I see something else I need to do but haven’t had time lately.
Seriously, how does a bathroom get so damn messy in ten days? HOW? Maybe I go in there in my sleep and throw stuff around and rub soil on the floor and overflow the garbage can? It’s the only explanation, I feel.

I am however clinging to my desperate attempts to have a nice day by imagining there will be lots of cake and alcohol in my immediate future, if I can get anywhere to do either of those things without dying or freezing to death. Even if I can make it to the liquor store I will be happy. I’m not fussy. Right now I’m hating all you people with July birthdays who never have to deal with this crap.

Since I’m home all day and obviously capable of using my time unwisely, I might play some songs on my ukulele and drink my favourite coffee until I turn into someone with the brains, coordination and speed of a bluebottle, as I run around the corridors of my building yelling “IMMAWANNAPLAYBITCHES!”
But first I’m…you know…going to put a load in the dishwasher.

Then I’m going to get busy rampaging and rebelling my way through the rest of the day.

Hey, if nothing else I have clean pants.

Today’s Bitchslap

Monday, November 22nd, 2010 – cold feet, warm heart, loathing
It’s been a while since I’ve had a good whine about insignificant things that really bug me. What can I say? Hola! Here are three of them.

1) Walmart on a Sunday. There is only one thing on God’s green Earth that could be more excruciating than visiting a Walmart on a Sunday, and that’s visiting a Walmart on a Sunday near Christmas. Holy Christ on a swizzle stick, if you’re even contemplating this, don’t do it. For the love of all that is holy, if you want to preserve the few grains of sanity you have left, stay home. Imagine a zombie uprising. Now imagine a zombie uprising of surprisingly sprightly overweight people in velour, surrounded by a mist of small, screaming crotch nuggets and they all. Want. You.

I made the mistake of forgetting all this yesterday as I bustled around the store in order to get in and out as quickly as possible with the minimum casualties. I stumbled down the aisles, avoiding old people with carts and no “driving” etiquette, my arms filled with random useful items I’d picked up as I gymnastically dodged escaped, squawking, frazzled toddlers, running amok like rabid baby chickens. While I fervently attempted to resist the urge to Febreeze the living shit out of them with my new “Brazilian Carnival” air freshener/pepper spray, I had a moment of extreme clarity. THIS is why guns are legal in many states.

2) People who keep telling me “The Big Bang Theory” is wicked good.
 Now I had seen a couple of episodes of this show in passing and decided that it was about as funny as dried cak scraped off the underbelly of an alley cat, but I was prepared to be proven wrong. So in the interest of fairness I put on my comfy pajamas and foot-orgasm-old-lady-slippers and sat down to watch a few episodes in order to be shown the error of my ways.

Now how can I put this to cushion my reaction adequately? Just imagine for a moment you’re walking in the woods on a cool, frosty evening. You feel a sharp blast of seething pain in the soul of your foot and realize you’ve stood on a rusty nail and it’s impaled you right through your shoe. In agony you hobble to the only house in sight, but no one is home to help you, however their garden shed is open so you limp inside, breathing heavily from the pain and find a tool box. In the tool box is a fine array of useful items. You pull out some heavy duty pliers and yank that sucker out of your foot. It tears your flesh with its rusty barbs and you scream. You grab some grain alcohol and pour it over your wound. It burns like your crotch after a night with Paris Hilton.

 Finally, you accidentally knock over a lantern (so it’s 1807, shut up) and set fire to your own foot, still dripping in alcohol. After an eternity of shrieking and burning and managing to put out the flames, you’re in a whole new, previously un-imagined world of agony, bleeding, dripping flesh, hopping on one leg, suffering from hypothermia, and suffering fevered chills. You finally make it home, half blue from the cold and no longer functioning properly. Your temperature is 105. You’ve lost your keys. It starts to snow. A wolf shows up as you’re sobbing on the frosty doorstep, agonized and burning with fever. The wolf doesn’t care. It bites off your arm. You die.

This whole scenario? Preferable to sitting through three episodes of “The Big Bang Theory”. Comprendez?

3) Another blog I was reading today mentioned today how boring hearing about people’s workouts is and by God, she was right. People who go on about how fantastic working out is and what outstandingly, healthy, awesome people they are because they drag their carcass onto a torture device every day to sweat all over everything, need a swift kick in the fanny.

Sure I envy your steely resolve and will power. Maybe I even hate you a little for it. And maybe you HAVE earned the right to boast about your magnificence, but come on. Workouts aren’t fabulous at all. Let’s get brutal here, people. If you’re doing it right exercise is painful, sweaty and you spend half your work out desperately trying to not look at yourself in the mirror, making those godawful, frightening, torture faces. The only things consuming your mind during a workout are things like, “How come I’ve been running for four days and yet I’ve only burned 30 calories!?!” and “Why can’t I have the metabolism of a 12 year old boy, why does God hate me?”

While you’re pounding several shades of shit out of the mat on your treadmill and cursing through gritted teeth, if you’re at all like me what you’re really thinking is, “I can’t wait to get off of this fucking thing and eat some cheese.”

There you have it. Shocking upcoming whine attractions, “Snow is cold” and “I’m not rich.”

Why Airports Are Like Hades

I have a theory that if there is a hell, it is not a place filled with scorching heat and unbearable pain, but rather a bland landscape filled with nothing but never-ending shades of grey and everlasting monotony.

I’m writing this in the Minneapolis International Airport during a tedious six hour wait for my next flight, while bitterly regretting leaving my laptop at home and cursing tiny touch screens.

Let me just tell you now, that six hours in an airport is harder to kill than you might imagine, once you’ve exhausted the cornucopia of brightly coloured store-fronts full of expensive local wares, chunky sweaters featuring knitted moose heads and state paraphernalia. Those harshly lit fast food places in the food court, especially designed to separate the weary traveller from the last of their change, are depressing and soulless, filled with blank-eyed travel zombies and overcooked fried foods.

 Even watching shiny, majestic planes land and take off through the glass fronted wall of the food court, only occupies your mind for a few minutes before the tingling in your toes and the spreading numbness in your buttocks from the hard, wooden stools, makes you want to get the hell out of there to freedom.

A couple of laps of the concourse and a sniff around the designer goods in the alluring, yet ultimately disappointing, duty free store, under the hovering, oppressive eye of the duty-free-store-clerk-Nazi and you’ve pretty much exhausted your entertainment options for the rest of the day.

Airports are infuriating places if you’re travelling alone. Left to your own devices and desperately trying, out of sheer boredom, not to blow all your remaining finances on things that the next morning make you question your own sanity, a person can go mad just trying to stay sane.

With five hours left to kill and only a giant black coffee and some resolve left to fuel you, you wander aimlessly towards the empty bank of seats scattered around your leaving gate and sit down to read a book you’ve already read twice.

Which brings me to this.

 Airports make you appreciate the sheer brilliance of whichever, probably quite insane, Chinese leader, instigated the “one family/one child” law. If you are child free and blissfully indifferent to people who are far too young to vote, a day in an airport will most likely drag you, hollering obscenities, right over the line of placid indifference and dump you firmly into the camp of “ban all children from public spaces until they are 14”. Because the only thing more infuriating than spending six hours in an airport is spending six hours in an airport surrounded by other people’s bored kids.

Whichever quiet sanctuary you carve out for yourself, to pass those last few hours before take off, be it a deserted gate, a carpeted corner or an empty corridor, know that annoying human entities of all ages will find you and infiltrate your serenity with their shrill protests, their fighting, their shrieking, their incessant cell phone conversations and ringtones of hip-hop songs that sound like they’ve been strained through a tin can. You will spend those remaining several hours praying fervently, despite your non-belief in any divine being, that none of those entities will be seated anywhere near you on the plane, yet sense, with a begrudging, tired knowledge, that they will probably turn out to be your row mates and that you will spend the entirety of the flight conjuring up imaginative ways to murder them.

Defeated, you will throw on your headphones, turn up the music and eye up the “Tequileria” place a few short feet from the gate, weighing up what your chances would be of still being permitted to board your flight after several super-sized margaritas and a fart-bonanza-inducing bean burrito.

In surmise, airports will suck out your very soul and fill the space with unending torture.

Whine over.

Let’s Get Stabby

Hey you sexy thangs!

I’m feeling perturbed today. I think it’s that time of the month we ladies enjoy so much. The one where someone sucks out all our normal cells and replaces them with those of a psychotic, attention deficient, parrot. A parrot who loves chocolate and zits on their chin. I don’t know what else it could be, man. I have good coffee. I have new boots. I have Kashi bars with chocolate in them. I have my reading glasses on (tres sexy). I have clean hair. Normally these things combined would make me little miss sunshine. Not today though. I’m pouting.

It’s the little things that piss you off the most, no? Examples for today? Bien sur!

1) People who use the word “heroes” incorrectly for one. Cases in point;

“The Chilean miners are heroes!”

“The people who died on 9/11 are heroes.”

WRONG. All of those people are victims of bad circumstances or of bad people. 

They’re tragic consequences of fate. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time and something bad happened to them. Heroes? No. The heroes are the people who devised ways to pull those poor men out of that mine. Who showed up every day for months at the World Trade Center site to sift through ash and asbestos and shards of plastic and rubble to find tiny pieces of human remains, despite the danger to themselves.

 You are not a hero because something bad happens to you. Stop incurring my wrath, people. I will spoon out your eyes and feed them to a crocodile.

2) I am also feeling a touch disgruntled at airlines who seem unwilling to sell a person a one way ticket unless they’re willing to pay as much as, or more than, the round trip price. WHY? What the fuckety? Let me get this right. I want to travel half the distance, taking up only one seat and half the fuel but you want to charge me more than if I did that all twice? Fuck right off. A turd on your pillow, airlines, you money sucking, tight wadded fucknuggets.

3) People who look at me wrong. You’ve been warned. Also people who point out how grammatically bad “people who look at me wrong”, is. See? I’m not myself at all. Or maybe I am. You decide.

What’s pissing you guys off today? Tell your auntie Veg.

The Seven: 3. Procrastination

Saturday, September 25th, 2010 - night time with a chill in the air

Why yes, I am still alive, thanks for asking. I've been busy though. Really busy. Only time to check my email once a day, busy. And I'm goddamn tired. But I thought it was probably about time I continued the seven things meme, before I totally forget about it and start babbling about something else instead. You see, I've been procrastinating my meme duties.

So yes, procrastination. I procrastinate quite a bit. I read somewhere that it was a sign of a psychological defect, but I hardly think that's true. I mean hello! Look at me. My mind is a healthy, devious, smart bastard. So I'm declaring shenanigans on that theory. I'd go find the article in question and link to it but honestly, I can't be assed right now so I'll do it later.

See what I did there?

Actually I don't procrastinate everything, of course I don't. I only procrastinate unpleasant things. I mean show me anyone who's keen to do unpleasant things. Only a halfwit with OCD or a Jim Carrey fan is in a hurry to do nasty things. Or a reality show contestant. Or whoever dares touch Lindsay Lohan without bio-hazard gloves.

I never procrastinate nice things. I mean you put a giant bar of chocolate the thickness of a rugby player's leg in my fridge and see how long it takes me to devour it. Go on, try it. I haven't timed this, but I'm willing to bet that before you can spell 'procrastinate' that bar will be cozy and safe in my belly. So obviously I don't have a problem per se, just a tendency to be selective about which tasks I perform in a timely fashion.

I was actually going to write out a list of things I procrastinate and things I don't but then I thought, 'Ah screw it, I'll do it later.'

Because that joke never gets old.

The Seven: Why Ukuleles Are Cool

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010, bedtime with a song in my heart
Well, I am certainly not doing well with this supposed "Seven Things" meme. So far I've written about one thing and then I totally ran out of things! Things eluded me, people. Until today.

Today I'm writing about Thing Number Two, "Astrophysics and the Process of Nucleosynthesis".

Ha, right. Look out your window. Do you see a flying pig? Well then. In that case I'm writing about "Why Ukuleles Are Cool".

 So without further ado:

WHY UKULELES ARE COOL

Ukuleles are cool because they are hideously uncool. You don't see dudes dressed head to toe in leather, hair in eyes, smoldering at you over a cigarette, carrying a little, wee, fey mini-guitar now do you? No. That's because those dudes don't know a damn thing about cool. Sure, your old school cool might involve leather and lung cancer and looking like Ethan Hawke if he hadn't bathed in a month, but the new cool? Ukuleles my friends. Ukuleles are cool.

I'll tell you why. A uke is like a tiny guitar. It makes tiny guitar noises. Like taking a guitar, shrinking it (kind of like you used to do with chip packets and an oven), then forcing it to make cute noises. Plunk plunk plunkety plunk. That kind of thing.

Also, they come in all sorts of fun shapes and colours and sizes. Some are shaped like pineapples! How cool is that? If you said "really fucking cool, Veg" you'd be correct.

Others are shaped like mini Les Paul guitars or tiny Fender Strats. But those are for posers with tiny penises. Don't get your ass caught with one of those. I'm kidding, mine's actually the Les Paul shaped one. I'm so ashamed. No, I'm not.

Ask Jude and Elly how cool ukes are. They'll open their arms wide as a goddamn football field. Because they know. You don’t have to wear cable sweaters, mountain-man bushy beards and eat lentils to enjoy the ukulele.

I mean you can if you want…

As if all this wasn't enough evidence of the mondo-coolness of the ukulele, remember they're from Hawaii and anything that reeks of Hawaii is cool by default.

Well, okay, maybe not Dog the Bounty Hunter. I imagine he reeks of ball sweat, old leather and cabbage. I can’t see that tosser with a uke, can you? A NUKE maybe…

But on the other side of the coin there are pineapples, hibiscus flowers, mai tais, surfing, glorious beaches, "Lost" and ukuleles.

Happy Thursday, bra! (That’s like…Hawaiian talk you know. I wasn’t talking to my brassiere. Not this time.)