Rip Van Wrinkle was a Poser

I have always considered myself to be pretty self aware when it comes to my skills and talents.  I have never needed to try making soap sculptures with a chainsaw in order to prove that I suck at it.  I am fully aware that when I dress myself in the morning and put on hot pink, stripe socks with dress pants, that I am most likely doing it wrong.  I know that I need to fake clap at concerts because I can not carry the rhythm required to clap along with everyone else.  These things would make me feel bad about myself,  if I wasn't confident in all the things that I am an expert at.  This list involves, but is not limited to, eating, giving high fives, being awesome, doing the chicken dance, and (now that I have discovered spray foam) building living room forts.

Above everything on the list, I know that I am an expert sleeper.  I have been sleeping for 33 years and have always considered it to be one of my best talents.  Yesterday, I went to buy new sheets for all the awesome sleeping I do.  I walked into the store and  there was a huge, soul crushing sign that read:

"Performance Sheets: Sleep like a Pro!"

 I am not sure what type of performances these sheets do every night and it seems that it would be a little distracting to have your sheets putting on puppet shows or ballet routines while you were trying to sleep but what do I know, apparently I have been sleeping like an amateur all this time and I had no clue. 

My Elf Casts Magic Missles on the Wench's Book Club

On my list of "Things that are so Stupid, I must be missing something", Book Clubs rank right under Dungeons and Dragons. No matter how many times these things are explained to me, I still can not grasp why normal people need to engage in such things in order to socialize with other people. People that engage in such things, always have the enthusiasm of 15 Umpa Lumpa's when explaining it to you.

D&D:
Them: It is SO much fun and there are endless possibilities so the game never gets boring. It is like collaborative story telling with dice.
Me: Why do you need dice to tell stories?
Them: So you know if your character succeeds or fails at whatever it is the Dungeon Master has told you to do.
Me: But if you are so bad at telling stories that you need a Master to direct you, maybe you should work on the craft a little more so you can work up to the point of telling a story without dice.
Them: You just don't understand!

Book Clubs
Them: We all read the same book and get together once a week to discuss what we have read.
Me: Why don't you just read whatever you want to on your own time and get together with friends once a week to, i don't know.... just hang out without having to complete an assignment first?
Them: It is a lot like hanging out. We generally drink wine and eat snacks...but the book gives us something to discuss. We are able to get each others perspectives on what happened in the part of the book we are reading.
Me: I hang out with my friends and drink wine all the time and we manage to have good conversations without having a specialized topic for the night.
Them: You just don't understand!

I think I do understand, though. Book Club people create an environment where everyone has the same experience in order to give them something to relate to others about. Right? What I don't understand is, why are their lives SO boring that they have nothing else to talk about.

It seems like it would be handy for a book club to only read Choose Your Own Adventure books. This way, they could all practice talking about different topics while still talking about one book. It is all about the baby steps.

Judge Judy is Bad For the Economy

It has been a  few years now that I have been hearing people complain about the unemployment rate and the fact that it is "literally impossible" to find a job.   I never understood this and here is why....

I have spent the last 5 years working with schizophrenics in a role where my main outcome of success was getting them to the point that they could understand and manage their symptoms enough to gain and maintain competitive employment.   A typical client would come to me with last weeks' Chinese food stuck in his unkempt beard, wearing 3 winter coats over his purple uni-tard in the summer time (none of which had been washed in the 10 years since they got them from Salvation Army).   It was normal for clients to randomly stand up in the middle of working on interviewing skills in order to belt out the most interesting rendition of "You're a Grand Old Flag" you have ever heard.

As far as it being "literally impossible" to find a job... MANY of these severely mentally ill people, with all kinds of abnormal characteristics, were able to find a job.  Not only a job, but one that lead to a sense of purpose and one that they enjoyed going to everyday.  I always judged fully functioning and capable humans that complained they couldn't work when I would see Mr. Crazy Pants getting and keeping a job..... Until now!

I have been unemployed since I moved from NYC to Atlanta. Almost a full 2 months.  I now fully understand what they mean when they say the economy is rough.  There are SO many obstacles to finding and securing a  job.  The following is a small (not by any means complete) list of obstacles I am encountering.

~ Court TV is on for 6 hours a day. Judge Joe Brown, Judge Alex, Judge Judy, People's Court, etc.  The cable company is clearly run by the 1%.  I can not think of a better way to hold the American people down then to put on a constant running stream of quality tv programming.  Everyone knows that very bad things happen when you don't listen to Judge Judy!

~ My back yard looks like a rainforest and that means that I need to spend probably another 4 hours a day designing an Ewok village for my back yard. Right now the design has 4 tree houses and 5 walking bridges between them all.  It would be completely irresponsible of me to not have a decent space for the Ewok invasion on 12/21/12. 

~  My Xbox gave me the "Red Ring of Death", which sounds like a blessing in disguise since I need to be looking for a job and not playing Xbox, but now I have about 50 games that need to be re-saved to the new hard drive.  This takes up the rest of the day.

~ Vodka- 'nuff said.

I am starting to learn that it might, in fact, be LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to find a job. 

Curiosity Blows Up and Covers The Cat With Toxic Glue While it Sleeps

I have successfully moved into my new home and am now starting to notice all the unique characteristics of my house. Mostly normal stuff, like how every bathroom has an air vent right next to the toilet so that you end up freezing while trying to piss or the super industrial springs in our 1950 windows that will occasionally propel the window open with no notice, leaving me scared for my life until I realize the noise was not me getting shot in a drive by, but just the window opening itself. Today I noticed a pile of saw dust that I had already cleaned up. It is a magical little hill that just keeps coming back under the window sill. I started to inspect the wall and there is no sign of where it is coming from except for a tiny little hole underneath the window. I am very familiar with Carpenter Bees, those are the ones that are the size of a dog and will chase you down the street threatening to sting you while flying kamikaze style into your head, attempting to give you a concussion, but we have not seen any of those bees around. I decided that I needed to ask the Google for advice. BIG MISTAKE!

I was able to quickly rule out killer whales, bats, Sasquatch, and midgets. I continued on with a false sense of security that with all those ruled out, the problem could not be too bad. I have not been this wrong since the time I diagnosed myself on WebMD with Foreign Accent Syndrome. The following discovery is proof that ignorance is bliss and you should by no means use the internet to educate yourself.

Turns out I have Carpenter Ants. At first, I got pretty excited because we have been paying a contractor to do a bunch of work on the house, and I had visions of saving money by training the ants to frame out the basement for us. I started doing research on how to train them and I discovered that not only are they untrainable, but they don't actually build anything either. In fact they eat holes through your walls in order to appease the queen by making her a bigger nest. Why is there ALWAYS a woman behind EVERYTHING evil?!!? Normally, I only read the top line of Wikipedia. I find that is normally enough info to claim that I am an expert on any given subject, but the bottom of the article caught my attention.

Also called, Exploding Ants: 'The Ants' feature greatly enlarged mandibular glands that run the entire length of the ant's body. They can release their contents suicidally, rupturing the ant's body and spraying toxic substance from the head, which gives these species the common name "exploding ants." The ant has an enormously enlarged mandibular gland, many times the size of a normal ant, which produces the glue. The glue bursts out and entangles and immobilizes all nearby victims -Wikipedia.

Like most people, I have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours thinking about what my defense mechanism would be if I had not been lucky enough to be born near the top of the food chain. When it comes to survival tactics, I have always wanted to function like a Sea Cucumber. They can make change forms from liquid to solid and even turn their bodies inside out in order to elude alien evasions, flesh eating bacteria, or being captured by terrorists. They are much like the Wonder Twins without the need of the pesky unitard. I have NEVER once thought about spontaneously blowing my body up in order to attack intruders. This might be the worst defense mechanism in the animal kingdom!

Screw Al Qaeda, I am living with the real terroists!

I didn't know it was possible to be this uncomfortable in these post Two Girl, One Cup times

A few weeks ago I was invited to see my friends daughter, Bri, do Stand-Up Comedy. I have always had a secret fantasy of doing stand-up but have been terrified that the audience would NOT actually have a sense of humor and would think I was stupid because they were too dumb to understand why kids hurting themselves was funny. I have visions of me telling my favorite abortion joke and someone standing up, glitter bombing me and yelling “I’m going home to look at cats on the internet!!!!! At least THAT is funny”. Since glitter is the herpes of the arts and crafts world, my glitter herpes would serve as my scarlet letter and be a constant reminder that everybody else in the world has no concept of funny and that I am truly alone in the world. I was curious to see someone go up on stage and seemingly not care about being glitter bombed. So.....

I agreed to go and after sitting in the audience of 8 people for 30 minutes hearing people ruin my night 4 minutes at a time, I realized my fear of doing stand-up was insane since I could go on stage and die, and it would be more funny that most of these people. The other “comics” were so bad that, I started getting nervous for Bri. Her father told me she was funny, but was that like the time my mom told me I was the best dancer in the recital even though I tripped 3 times and fell off the stage? Parents lie. Bri got up on stage and to my relief, she was actually funny. She is a cute white girl with an acoustic guitar and she sings about testicular caner, paraplegics, and Tim Tebow's imaginary friend. My fears about being the only one to understand life slipped away as she spoke about punching blind people in the face.

A few weeks later, I was told that Bri was booked for an 8 minute set and agreed she was funny enough to go watch again. I showed up to the bar early to maximize my consumption of alcohol work on my relationship with Vodka and when her and her family got there, she was told that the bar had double booked the stage with an Underground Hip Hop Open Mic night. I started looking around at the crowd and realized that 8 Mile had come to the Lower East Side. The 300lb woman in the skin tight, red, mostly sheer mini dress that was MC’ing all the “rappers”, agreed that Bri could still have the stage for her 8 minutes. Looking at the crowd, I figured no one in their right mind would put them selves through this.... UNTIL, Bri says “I’m gonna do it! This is going to be great experience of bombing on stage”.

It was at this point that I realized Bri had more testicle than anyone I had ever met in my life. It was equivalent to Steven Slater going to work and having the balls to quit his job by pulling the emergency slide on the plane, only looking back to grab the beer.

It was almost time for her to go on stage, so we all headed down to the basement. The room was packed and performers were on stage “rapping” about “Bitches sucking my dick”, over and over and over and over again. It was only slightly awkward being the only white people walking into the room, it was a little more awkward when someone in our party showed their whiteness by loudly saying “I have always seen these dresses in stores and wondered who the hell bought them, now I know”, but it was a level of awkwardness I had never experienced knowing that Bri was about to go on stage with an acoustic guitar to sing about Jesus not existing to a crowd of hyped up hip hop fans. I was nervous to watch the serious cultural differences that were about to play out.

The loud, monotonous beats stopped and Bri took the stage. Silence overtook room and Bri performed 2 songs while the audience yelled “Is she serious?”, “What is this white girl doing?”, “This is the craziest shit I have ever seen”. Even though there was a moment where she had some soul sisters singing the word “Paraplegic” with her, the whole experience was completely uncomfortable. She proceed to sing for the longest 8 minutes of all our lives while looking completely calm and cool. It was at that moment that I realized Bri would have balls the size of Chuck Norris', if Chuck Norris had elephantitis of the balls.

Bri is my hero and should be yours too.... Now go watch her video:



*This is not a video from that night, the people laughing in the background actually understand how funny she is.

...But I will NEVER feed the pigeons!!

After a rather long horrible day, I got on the bus to venture home. I go to the back of the bus and sit down in the back corner seat where I am expecting to be left alone. A man gets on at the next stop with 3 bags (1 with old Chinese food, a garbage bag that was full of, judging by the smell, 22 years of homeless love making and 1 with a 40oz of some gut-rot beer). He threw 2 of his bags down (I'll let you guess which 2) half on me and half on the seat next to me. He then leaned over 4 others and attempted to open the window. As he toke the stuff off the seat to sit down, he looked at all of us in the area and says "Sorry but you all need this window open. I am sorry in advance if I cough on you, but I have pneumonia". At this point, I stood up and went to the front of the bus. This is not an easy task on a NYC bus at 5:00pm.

I thought my day had reached finally reached rock bottom. And then......

At the next stop a woman with 2 kids get on the bus, followed by an old lady. One of the kids sits down in the only empty seat, at which point his mother screams at him to stand up.

Kid: WHY!?!?!
Mother: because there is a woman that needs the seat. These seats are for her, not you!
Kid: the sign says "Seats reserved for disabled, elderly, and children. I am 8 years old, so this seat is for me".

Now, I have never been one to think kids were capable of making intellectual arguments, but I felt his argument was well thought out and very timely delivered. I found myself giving the kid an affirming look. The kid saw me looking at him as his mother yanked him out of the seat and replied to my gesture by looking at me and saying,

"Apparently, I have to stand up because old ladies LIKE YOU get to steal the seats"

This kid is SO lucky that I am actually NOT an old lady!

I plan on being "Crazy Old Lady". I will wear tacky hats (preferably with HUGE sunflowers that I will puffy paint purple). I will wear sweaters with flamingos dressed in Santa suits with plaid pants. I will drink expensive wine from the bottle while driving to Wal*Mart. I will no longer use a filter for my thoughts when in public. I will jump in line at check outs. I will walk in the street if I feel compelled. I will scream at kids. I will run people over in my motorized chair. I plan on setting my ID free. People will be on the edge of their seats wondering what I am going to do next never go into public with me again.

Nobody will ever do anything about it. They will just look at my bad behavior and shrug their shoulders while saying "what can you do...she is just crazy-old-lady".

If I had, in fact been crazy-old-lady on that bus today, I would have broken that kids legs with my cane and offered his disabled ass my seat.