sure, help yourself. jackass.

you know what would just thrill me to pieces? if all the thieving sons o' bitches were rounded up and thrown into a pit lined with tetanus laden rusty spikes where i could come by and beat the piss out of them whenever the mood struck.

you wanna know what else would thrill me to pieces? if i had been able to sleep until 8:45 this morning in my warm cozy bed with the 10 pound comforter.

"well, why didn't you?", one might be tempted to ask.

to which, my reply might be something along the lines of, "well i would have had some cunt-licking fuckwad not wandered down the street and decided to help himself to the contents of my vehicle."

yep, that's right folks. had you ventured down 3rd* street this morning around, oh, i don't know, 6:30 or so, you would have stumbled upon a snarling creature with long messy hair and dark rimmed eyes, intermittently spouting off sinister sounding (but otherwise unintelligible) phrases and just standing there, a shivering, seething ball of hatred.

you might have listened to your inner voices when they screamed, "run away! before it eats you!" or you might have been dumb enough to venture closer for a better look. those dumb among you might have then thought to yourself, "hey! that looks oddly like miss liz!" and you would have been correct. it bore every semblance of me. but it wasn't. it was what happens to miss liz upon finding out that her beloved annabelle has been brutally beaten and raped.

not only was my shit flung all over the sidewalk, my printer laying in the street, a huge gaping hole in the dash, but those wonderful bastards had been kind enough to bust out the one remaining window that worked.

to add insult to injury, it took the police over a half an hour to go the one block, literally, from their station to my building.

and there's absolutely nothing i can do. the perpetrators won't be caught. they'll continue on with their dastardly ways.

and i? i get the joy of filing a claim and paying the deductible, all because i had the audacity to park outside my building.

* come on now. did you really think i'd give my real street?

i'm a hermit

i was thinking today (as it's tuesday, which, as everyone knows, is the only real day to get good thinking done. you can't on wednesday cuz you're torn between trying to be optimistic, "only one day until friday and after that it's the weekend!" and trying not to kill everyone, "god-fucking-damnit why is it only wednesday?!". thursday's no good cuz you've realized that tomorrow is friday and there's a shit-load of work you haven't done. friday, well it's friday. that's the day you wander around to other people's offices and bitch about how long the week was and how you're so glad it's almost over. saturday's spent nursing the horrible hangover you incur friday night, celebrating that the week was over. sunday, you take care of all the things you should've taken care of on saturday but couldn't, while also cursing that you've wasted your weekend doing jack-shit and have to go back to work tomorrow. and everyone knows about mondays. so, you see, all you really have is tuesday. that unassuming, oft-forgot day of the week where the next weekend is too far away to really be bothered with and the previous weekend has already been purged from your memory.)

so anyway. i was thinking today and i've come to the realization that i'm a fucking hermit. seriously. i think if it were left up to me, i'd never leave my apartment. i'd just sit there all day, reading books, smoking, and talking to my cat. this is probably not a good thing. 

it's not that i hate everyone or even most, it's just that i usually have nothing to say to someone. i think this might stem from my lack of common ground with most people my age. i couldn't give a fuck less about tila tequila, i'm not a huge reality t.v. freak, i'm really just not a huge fan of t.v. in general (which seems to be the bulk of what people talk about.) and it seems like every show i do like and might actually talk to someone about, gets cancelled. dead like me? i fucking loved that! i watched every show. 

social situations just don't work for me. guys mostly come over to see if they can fuck me and girls tend to just glare at me. and i don't like it when people who don't take the time to talk to me, dismiss me because i'm not unattractive. it tends to piss me off.  what usually happens is that i'll have a few drinks and talk to the handful of people i do know until that one fucker who just doesn't understand that i'm not interested gets really annoying and i'll leave. i end up passing the night drinking coffee and reading. so now i just bypass all that bullshit and go straight to the anchor.

also, my monday through friday 9-5 schedule is at odds with most of my friends. they're either in school or working, usually at restaurants or retail stores.

i was gonna finish this but i'm tired of bitching. i'll be extra-specially nice tomorrow to make up for today. i promise.

Mr.Thompson

i was reading a post on fatmammycat today about shit teachers and she mentioned having gone to a boarding school which made me think of Mr. Thompson at New Horizons Academy.


NHA was one of the three schools under the umbrella of New Horizons Youth Ministries. There was a summer camp in Missanabe Ontario called, creatively, Missanabe Woods Academy. There was New Horizons Academy, a year-round "boarding school" in Marion, Indiana. And Esquila Carribe, hell on earth, in the Dominican Republic. That is a list, in a progressively intensive order, of their programs designed to help "high potential, under achieveing youth" rid themselves of their fuckery. Unfortunately, for most people who attended, it ended up doing more harm than good. But nobody died (except for a boy who was swpet away by a flash flood in a gorge in the d.r., but that was a freak accident) so parents weren't really too concerned.

It helped (them) that all your mail was read going in and out and you "received consequences" if your letters were deemed to be "emotionally manipulative". Also, for the first three months, the only contact with family was through letters. In the fourth month, your progress was assesed and if you were deemed well enough to receive phone calls, you could have a 20 minute conversation with your parents once a month. These were recorded and reviewed by your counsellor.



anyway. we had school in NHA with homeroom teachers who, at the end of the day, would fill out a point sheet that would be added to your daily point sheet, updated by your house parents. Mr. Jackson (my house father at the time) had recently instituted a new rule that anyone who scored a two or below (points were awarded on a scale of 0-5, 5 being the highest and rarely given out) at school in any area would have to run a certain number of times depending on the score and how many areas in which you were deficient. Once for a two, twice for a one, and three times for a zero. Multiplied by how many areas, which was up to four or five, i can't remember.



Running was no fun. It was a 3/4 of a mile loop with a near impossible time limit, generally 90 seconds, which, if you ran over (and you almost always did), you'd have to do it again with 10 more seconds added to the limit. This extra 10 seconds meant absolutely jack shit, cause you were so exhausted from the first run that you generally ran over the limit on the second one as well. What more often than not ended up happening is that you would run for the entire work time (about and hour and a half) or until your house father took pity on you and let you stop. i particularly hated running because i have stress induced asthma and no inhaler. so about halfway through the first run, my throat would start constricting, my lungs would burn, and my ribs would ache. and then on the second run, my bottom teeth would start with this buzzing/itching feeling and the blood would pound in my temples, giving me a god-awful headache. Needless to say, i tried my damn hardest to avoid running.

But Mr. Thompson hated me. For reasons unknown, he had decided that i was shit and it was his god-appointed duty to make my life hell. He would never give me anything above a two, no matter how hard i tried. At first i thought it was me, maybe i was unknowingly fucking up somewhwere, so i had some of the higher ranking girls in the house pay attention to what i was doing to help me figure out where i was going wrong. But no, he was just a douche bag. So one night, during our free time, i studied the handbook and memorized every way in which i could "go above and beyond" in my performance. The next day, that's all i thought about. i volunteered every time there was opportunity, responded first to every thing he said (responding: after every time a staff member says something your response needs to be prompt with either "yes" or "okay"), cleaned off the table after lunch, just fucking everything i could think of to get a good score and not have to run. At the end of the day, i was so sure that i'd gotten at least a four if not a five that i was damn near giddy at the prospect of Mr.Jackson seeing it and giving approval of my performance.

solid twos. all the way down. i had never been more livid in my life. even now, thinking about it, my heart starts pounding in my throat and i can feel myself getting flush. But here's the shittiest part of all of it. you're not allowed to be angry. staff members are the ones who "set your reality" and if you get mad, it means that you're not accepting their authority or "facing your reality", which was another area on your pointsheet.

the walk back to the house that afternoon was torture. the rage over knowing i would have to run when i didn't deserve it. the helplessness that there was nothing i could do to avoid it. and the larger feeling of hopelessness that i would never get out of that place. without better scores in school, there was no chance of moving up a level, and the judge had told me i couldn't leave until i had reached fourth.

i was so consumed with my thoughts that i hadn't realized what i was doing until we reached the house and i went to take off my coat. my fingers were sticky and when i looked down, bloody. i had, in my attempt to not explode, torn a strip of skin off my forearm.
i don't really remember the run that day. i don't know if i was able to make the time or not. i do remember, though, that a couple of the high rankers that night told mr. jackson what had really happened at school, and the next day nikki jackson went in with me to confront mr. thompson. his face was blank and he gave some non-commital answers about my performance.
after that i got threes in everything. i knew i should have been scored higher but not having to run was the best i could hope for with him. in a month or two, we got a new girl in our house, sarah, and god apparently gave mr.thompson a new assignment.
he fucked with her head until one of the girls in another house accused mr.thompson of sexual harassment and he became a boys' homeroom teacher for the rest of the time i was there.

i hadn't thought about all that in a long time. just thought i'd share.

what's his face and i at the anchor last night

his phone rings for the fifth time since we've sat down. he flips it open with a smile, cutting me off mid sentence.

"hey. whats goin on miss?.." he asks the mystery girl.

"can't you tell them not to call so damn much?" I ask, purposely loud, hoping whoever it is can hear me.

he looks up, annoyed."...yeah...but hey, can i call you back in a little bit?...yeah. alright. talk to you later." he tosses the phone back on the table. "i hate when you do that. i hated it when we were dating, too."

"yeah, i know... so who was it?"

"tara." *

i swirl the spoon around in my coffee, "you know, she calls a lot more than just a friend would."

he starts to deny it, then looks down, a little embarrassed. "i'd be an ass if i said she doesn't have a crush on me."

"yeah?"

"she told me one night."

"hmm... and you?"

"she's a sweetheart. and she's cute."

"bullshit. she's sweet as pie and gorgeous. or have runway models become hideous chuds?"

he smiles. "yeah, she is fucking gorgeous."

"where as i am only sweet, right?"

"sweet as spun sugar. except for when you're being a bitch."

i settle back in my seat and light a cigarette. through the exhale of smoke i ask, "so are you trying to date her?"

"i don't know. she might just have a crush and not be interested, or maybe she is... i guess i need to talk to her." he lights his cigarette.

"well... if you do decide to date, actually date, her... you and i won't exist."

"so, would i be taking the other room?"

i play with the stack of empty creamers, picking my way through the thoughts in my head. "For the purpose of me moving on, i think it would be best if you found somewhere else to live."

"hm. that does weight heavily in my decision."

"it wasn't meant to be an ultimatum."

"i know."

"ok. good. so why don't you?"

"why don't i what?"

"date her."

"because i don't want to leave that apartment. it's gonna look amazing when it's done. and we work well together."

i scoff. "you stay because of an apartment and how well we work together?"

"that's not what i..." he flicks the filter of his cigarette angrily. "sometimes i think i'm a little too honest with you. can we talk about something else?"

"yeah."

the rest of the conversation is swallowed by our intent evesdropping on another table. two men and a woman, apparently trading roommate horror stories.

"he was digusting! he would eat the weirdest shit. more out of laziness than anything else. he used to make these peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, except, instead of putting one on one slice and another on another slice, he'd mix the two together and slap it on a single piece."

guy two asks, "What like the Goober stuff?"

guy one: "yeah, but he'd make his own. he'd dump out half the peanut butter, fill the jar the rest of the way with the jelly and mix it up! it would turn into this grey greasy mess, then he'd put the jar in the fridge and leave it there for weeks until it became crystalized on top and begin to separate."

"oh that's gross. i knew this guy in college who had bunk beds, right? and he'd spread peanut butter on pieces of bread and stick them to the bottom of the top bunk so in the middle of the night he could just reach up, peel one off, and eat it."

the girl pipes in, "do you remember the cat he had?"

"oh god! this cat, ok?, was not neutered..."

after fifteen minutes of listening to stories of neglected cats, piss in beer bottles, and crusty bathrobes, what's his face asks if i'm ready to go.

"sure. you got the tip?"

"yeah."

and we head home.



*is not her real name. or maybe it is. or maybe i want you to think it's her name when it's not so you'll question whether it is her name and drive yourself mad trying to figure it out.

or maybe i just couldn't think of something non-derogatory to call her.

hi

thanks for stopping by.

i'm a little nervous (this being my first time and all) so please be gentle. i know i'm not very good but hopefully with a little practice, i'll get better.

i realize the first post is traditionally where people write witty things about themselves and why they're starting a blog to encourage people to come back but that's not me. sorry.

i'm starting a blog because i work in the billing department of an immigration law firm and periodically have long stretches of time with nothing to do. so, i'll write about the unimportant nuances of my day. and if you like it, and find reading this to be just a wonderful addition to your day, then please, come back, comment, and let me know that you find me as hilarious as i do. and if not, piss off.