I have been very blessed (and relieved out the whazoo) to get some very positive feedback since starting this blog (I can only assume that you guys can smell my nervous sweats through the computer and have been so kind as to reassure me that this blog isn't absolute garbage). Every time I hear directly from you or through the grapevine that you have at least chuckled at my charmless anecdotes, my heart truly skips a beat; I must say, I'm completely flattered.
Which is why I am really ashamed at not having posted in some time. There's been a very weird "whooshing" sound in my ears lately, and I figured out that's because it's NOVEMBER already and that whooshing sound is the months and my school semester flying past me. As I am trying to keep my head above forensic water, I haven't been able to post as faithfully as I initially planned. Plus, you know, I watch too many shows on Hulu, so it's not like I'm knocking my school assignments out ahead of their due dates or anything. But I digress. (P.S.-If there are any fans of the old British show "Spaced," I would love to talk about it, since it was pretty awesome and short-lived and I live in America where people watch "Jersey Shore" and "Dog Whisperer.")
The point is, I wanted to drop a quick line and let you know that I do plan to return soon (hopefully by the end of the week) and that your encouragement has been incredibly special to me and since I am narcissistic, please keep your lovely comments and readership coming!
And here's a little nugget to end on: I naively bought a cat repellent spray called "Stay Away" for surfaces you don't want your cats jumping on. I have sprayed copious amounts on my bed, because my cat sheds more hair than my boyfriend's love child with a Yeti (read: a super frig-ton; all due respect, Keithy.) At first I thought it worked, but today when I woke up, there's Zsa Zsa curled up on the bed not giving two s**ts; the same when I got home from school this evening. Rest assured that I will be notifying Whisker City of their sham product and asking them how they sleep at night, because you know how I'm sleeping? Rolling around choking on the wispy left-behinds of my cat's latest tongue bath, you liars.
See you soon!
Monday, November 14, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
That Time I Should Have Died: Part 1
Hello again! I would like to apologize to my single-digit followers for my absence, but as it turns out, grad school is pretty life-consuming. Case and point: I live about 10 miles away from my sister and am lucky if I get to visit with her once a week.
Thankfully, though, my fellow classmates in the Forensic Science program are enjoyable to be around; this is especially good news since I am with them about 12 hours a day. The dynamic is so good, in fact, that we often derail from studying to tell jokes or stories. Somehow, during one of these derailments, I recounted a couple of stories from my youth in which my ignorance, naivete, or just plain stupidity should have led to my ultimate demise. I say should have, because somehow I miraculously remain alive. Given the obscurity of these scenarios and the fact that I still live, I have a picture in my head of Death chasing after me and being thwarted like a sinister Wile E. Coyote as I jauntily saunter away, completely oblivious to the battered buffoon behind me (hey, alliteration!) So, I present you with Part 1 in a running series of instances that should have caused my death.
I begin the series in junior high. I was in a class called Differential Curriculum, essentially a Gifted & Talented History/Social Studies class. Every morning in D.C., two students would take the school's American flag and run it up the flag pole in front of the school. One fateful morning, it was my turn to take the flag out with my friend/classmate, Clarissa. We brought the flag outside and began.
If I remember the mechanism of this flag pole correctly, it operates under a basic pulley system. Through a compartment in the pole, Clarissa and I removed all of the extra rope and untied the knot that keeps the flag at the appropriate height. Or whatever.
After Clarissa untied the rope knot, she began to feed the rope into the pole that drops the weight at the top so that we could attach the flag. I watched her as I leaned against the flag pole. Being kids, we always tried to find a more fun way to do any task. Clarissa realized that she could let go of the rope and watch it zip through her fingers at racing speeds. She and I chuckled as we watched the rope get sucked into the flap pole like the end of a tape measure.
Suddenly, I was blinded. Unbeknownst to me, as I watched the rope zip through Clarissa's open hands, the heavy weight at the top of the flag pole was also racing towards the top of my head, directly in its flight path. The weight (which had to be about 3-4 pounds) crashed into the top of my skull at an alarming speed. Perhaps more surprising than the weight not shattering my skull and pulpifying my brain matter is the fact that I didn't even lose consciousness. Instead, my knees buckled under me as I reached up to grab my blazing head. Before collapsing to the ground, though, my legs noodled around to regain stability. My legs engaged the rest of my body in a strange dance in which they desperately tried to counterbalance the inertia of my body trying to hit the ground. I swayed back and forth like an inflatable tube-arm man at a car dealership, and every possible color flashed in my eyes.
Clarissa, after watching me for a brief second in utter confusion, soon made the connection once the flag weight clunked to the ground. She helped me sit down and kept me there until I stopped moaning unintelligibly. Eventually, the searing pain in my head subsided into a dull ache, and the top of my skull remained intact yet extremely tender to the touch. Instead of wondering about the possibility of a concussion or other trauma to my head, Clarissa and I both feared getting in trouble and vowed not to tell our teacher what had happened.
We hastily finished running the flag up the flag pole, and we hurried to class, where our lesson continued on the Alamo or the Battle of Bighorn or something. We thought we were in the clear, but at recess that day, two kids ran up to me and asked me if I was okay. When I tried to play it off and asked them what they were talking about, they told me they had been gazing out of their classroom's window and seen me do my inflatable tube man dance, clutching at my brains. Witnesses to my shame.
I'd like to say that there was no lasting damage to this event, but to be honest, I'm not sure about that. I am not even positive that those two kids came up to me at recess; they could be figments of my imagination from that blow to the head, and I had been talking to myself that day. I do sometimes recall memories that nobody else remembers happening that way, so perhaps that is something to think about.
But for now, I'm going to use this miracle head to eat some leftover pizza and steak and try to prepare for the week ahead in school. Unless my life up until now has all been a random dream in the mind of my post-flag pole comatose state. But I doubt that....
Thankfully, though, my fellow classmates in the Forensic Science program are enjoyable to be around; this is especially good news since I am with them about 12 hours a day. The dynamic is so good, in fact, that we often derail from studying to tell jokes or stories. Somehow, during one of these derailments, I recounted a couple of stories from my youth in which my ignorance, naivete, or just plain stupidity should have led to my ultimate demise. I say should have, because somehow I miraculously remain alive. Given the obscurity of these scenarios and the fact that I still live, I have a picture in my head of Death chasing after me and being thwarted like a sinister Wile E. Coyote as I jauntily saunter away, completely oblivious to the battered buffoon behind me (hey, alliteration!) So, I present you with Part 1 in a running series of instances that should have caused my death.
I begin the series in junior high. I was in a class called Differential Curriculum, essentially a Gifted & Talented History/Social Studies class. Every morning in D.C., two students would take the school's American flag and run it up the flag pole in front of the school. One fateful morning, it was my turn to take the flag out with my friend/classmate, Clarissa. We brought the flag outside and began.
If I remember the mechanism of this flag pole correctly, it operates under a basic pulley system. Through a compartment in the pole, Clarissa and I removed all of the extra rope and untied the knot that keeps the flag at the appropriate height. Or whatever.
After Clarissa untied the rope knot, she began to feed the rope into the pole that drops the weight at the top so that we could attach the flag. I watched her as I leaned against the flag pole. Being kids, we always tried to find a more fun way to do any task. Clarissa realized that she could let go of the rope and watch it zip through her fingers at racing speeds. She and I chuckled as we watched the rope get sucked into the flap pole like the end of a tape measure.
Suddenly, I was blinded. Unbeknownst to me, as I watched the rope zip through Clarissa's open hands, the heavy weight at the top of the flag pole was also racing towards the top of my head, directly in its flight path. The weight (which had to be about 3-4 pounds) crashed into the top of my skull at an alarming speed. Perhaps more surprising than the weight not shattering my skull and pulpifying my brain matter is the fact that I didn't even lose consciousness. Instead, my knees buckled under me as I reached up to grab my blazing head. Before collapsing to the ground, though, my legs noodled around to regain stability. My legs engaged the rest of my body in a strange dance in which they desperately tried to counterbalance the inertia of my body trying to hit the ground. I swayed back and forth like an inflatable tube-arm man at a car dealership, and every possible color flashed in my eyes.
Clarissa, after watching me for a brief second in utter confusion, soon made the connection once the flag weight clunked to the ground. She helped me sit down and kept me there until I stopped moaning unintelligibly. Eventually, the searing pain in my head subsided into a dull ache, and the top of my skull remained intact yet extremely tender to the touch. Instead of wondering about the possibility of a concussion or other trauma to my head, Clarissa and I both feared getting in trouble and vowed not to tell our teacher what had happened.
We hastily finished running the flag up the flag pole, and we hurried to class, where our lesson continued on the Alamo or the Battle of Bighorn or something. We thought we were in the clear, but at recess that day, two kids ran up to me and asked me if I was okay. When I tried to play it off and asked them what they were talking about, they told me they had been gazing out of their classroom's window and seen me do my inflatable tube man dance, clutching at my brains. Witnesses to my shame.
I'd like to say that there was no lasting damage to this event, but to be honest, I'm not sure about that. I am not even positive that those two kids came up to me at recess; they could be figments of my imagination from that blow to the head, and I had been talking to myself that day. I do sometimes recall memories that nobody else remembers happening that way, so perhaps that is something to think about.
But for now, I'm going to use this miracle head to eat some leftover pizza and steak and try to prepare for the week ahead in school. Unless my life up until now has all been a random dream in the mind of my post-flag pole comatose state. But I doubt that....
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Shut Your Porthole!
My sister, Jessica (Friend Extraordinaire and author of Blog and JAM ) is the quintessential young professional. In fact, she's a card-carrying member of our area's Young Professionals Association; every week she invites me to some fun and snazzy networking event with free wine and beer. We toast and stroll about and I look enviously at the big fishbowl of business cards because I don't have business cards and can't enter to win the $100 gift card they're giving away. So I sip my wine and tell myself that I should really start getting up earlier to dry my hair after my shower.
I say all that to set up the preface of my story: about a month ago, I went with Jessica to a small "Wine & Chocolate Pairing" Happy Hour at Messina Hof Winery with three of her friends. The wine was savory, the chocolate was decadent, and the girls got tipsy enough to laugh at my jokes. On our way out, one of the girls saw an announcement for a Pirate-themed Murder Mystery dinner coming up in a couple of weeks: holy crap, that sounded like fun. Our little gang decided to sign up, and I decided to have one last fun Friday before starting grad school. I signed up for the dinner (5 courses with individual wine pairings, I might add) and received my character: Merchant. Wait, just Merchant? No silly name or enticing back-story to accompany my scurvy alter ego? Jessica was deemed Mad Rose, a Serving Wench with her eye on every peg leg that stumped into her tavern; clearly she was an integral part to the forthcoming plot of the evening. Oh well, I got my costume together, and that Friday, our group of five met at Messina Hof to drink wine and solve a good old-fashioned whodunnit.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my character did have some history, so I really dove into it with every pirate-contrived slang that I could think of, and except for the two (accidental!) wildly inappropriate jokes that I made, I was very proud of myself. My first foot-in-mouth incident arose as I tried to achieve some goals laid out on my Character Page: I was supposed to approach the Governor's wife and imply to her that her husband needed to mind the company he keeps. On the spot, I was reminded of the "Lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas" adage, and I tried to put a nautical spin on things. Unfortunately, what came out of my mouth was, "Arrr, you need to tell that husband of yours to watch out; his ship is covered in barnacles."
Having just made an apparent STD/penis comment to a total stranger, I politely excused myself and hid under my sister's petticoats until I had finished my glass of wine. Soon after, my friend Blair and I were conspiring together about how to steal (fake pirate) money from unsuspecting players when a non-costumed, slightly heavyset "pirate" came up to us and tried to "rob" us without any weapon or heart. I pointed my musket-shaped water gun at him and told him to scram. As he walked away, I couldn't help but think of a good pirate insult to shame him with, and my vivid imagination conjured up a scenario of me stuffing him into a ship's porthole. Of course, he wouldn't fit, resulting in a Winnie-the-Pooh-stuck-in-the-tree-stump situation, which would be humiliating for him and hilarious for myself. Unfortunately, I didn't articulate that as well when I yelled out, "Get out of here before I shove you through my porthole!"
At this point, I realized the graphic and unladylike implications of my comment, and I again finished my wine as my table of friends took turns laughing and uttering their disgust at my expense.
Thankfully, my devotion to staying in character paid handsomely, because although I didn't correctly guess the Murderer, I was voted "Drama Queen" and won a free bottle of Chardonnay. Nice, right?
Now, as I write this blog post before tucking into the next few chapters of Practical Crime Scene Processing and Investigation (my Master's program is in Forensic Science, by the way. Don't worry, I'll share all the morbid details), I am very grateful for the memory of that night. Not only was the food absolutely delicious and the company wonderfully entertaining, but I'll always remember the time that I, among other things, accidentally told a stranger that her husband probably has genital warts.
I say all that to set up the preface of my story: about a month ago, I went with Jessica to a small "Wine & Chocolate Pairing" Happy Hour at Messina Hof Winery with three of her friends. The wine was savory, the chocolate was decadent, and the girls got tipsy enough to laugh at my jokes. On our way out, one of the girls saw an announcement for a Pirate-themed Murder Mystery dinner coming up in a couple of weeks: holy crap, that sounded like fun. Our little gang decided to sign up, and I decided to have one last fun Friday before starting grad school. I signed up for the dinner (5 courses with individual wine pairings, I might add) and received my character: Merchant. Wait, just Merchant? No silly name or enticing back-story to accompany my scurvy alter ego? Jessica was deemed Mad Rose, a Serving Wench with her eye on every peg leg that stumped into her tavern; clearly she was an integral part to the forthcoming plot of the evening. Oh well, I got my costume together, and that Friday, our group of five met at Messina Hof to drink wine and solve a good old-fashioned whodunnit.
 |
| Some smarmy sea dogs |
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my character did have some history, so I really dove into it with every pirate-contrived slang that I could think of, and except for the two (accidental!) wildly inappropriate jokes that I made, I was very proud of myself. My first foot-in-mouth incident arose as I tried to achieve some goals laid out on my Character Page: I was supposed to approach the Governor's wife and imply to her that her husband needed to mind the company he keeps. On the spot, I was reminded of the "Lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas" adage, and I tried to put a nautical spin on things. Unfortunately, what came out of my mouth was, "Arrr, you need to tell that husband of yours to watch out; his ship is covered in barnacles."
Having just made an apparent STD/penis comment to a total stranger, I politely excused myself and hid under my sister's petticoats until I had finished my glass of wine. Soon after, my friend Blair and I were conspiring together about how to steal (fake pirate) money from unsuspecting players when a non-costumed, slightly heavyset "pirate" came up to us and tried to "rob" us without any weapon or heart. I pointed my musket-shaped water gun at him and told him to scram. As he walked away, I couldn't help but think of a good pirate insult to shame him with, and my vivid imagination conjured up a scenario of me stuffing him into a ship's porthole. Of course, he wouldn't fit, resulting in a Winnie-the-Pooh-stuck-in-the-tree-stump situation, which would be humiliating for him and hilarious for myself. Unfortunately, I didn't articulate that as well when I yelled out, "Get out of here before I shove you through my porthole!"
At this point, I realized the graphic and unladylike implications of my comment, and I again finished my wine as my table of friends took turns laughing and uttering their disgust at my expense.
Thankfully, my devotion to staying in character paid handsomely, because although I didn't correctly guess the Murderer, I was voted "Drama Queen" and won a free bottle of Chardonnay. Nice, right?
Now, as I write this blog post before tucking into the next few chapters of Practical Crime Scene Processing and Investigation (my Master's program is in Forensic Science, by the way. Don't worry, I'll share all the morbid details), I am very grateful for the memory of that night. Not only was the food absolutely delicious and the company wonderfully entertaining, but I'll always remember the time that I, among other things, accidentally told a stranger that her husband probably has genital warts.
 |
| The best friend(s) a landlubber could ask for |
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Holy crap, holy crap! I'm blogging!
For far too long I have considered starting a blog. As an avid reader of humor blogs/sites and someone who tries too hard to entertain others, I have many times thought, "This observation should be on the Internet" as I adventured through my day.
Well, the age of inaction and half-assery are over; welcome to my cyber brain dump! Given my varied interests, pastimes, and bouts of tyrannical road rage, I imagine this blog to be a catch-all scrapbook of stories (my adolescence has blessed me with deliciously awkward tales; did you know I once paid my sister to teach me how to be cool and she pitifully refunded my money after 20 minutes?), sardonic gripes, moments of thankfulness, and the occasional pee pee joke or two.
Please stick around, I trust there will be something here for everyone. Also, I have been trying to think of a nice ending joke for about 10 minutes and am too nervous to come up with anything. Instead I'm going to wish you well, ask you to return soon, and comfort-eat baked potato salad and fried chicken wings.
Thanks, friends!
Well, the age of inaction and half-assery are over; welcome to my cyber brain dump! Given my varied interests, pastimes, and bouts of tyrannical road rage, I imagine this blog to be a catch-all scrapbook of stories (my adolescence has blessed me with deliciously awkward tales; did you know I once paid my sister to teach me how to be cool and she pitifully refunded my money after 20 minutes?), sardonic gripes, moments of thankfulness, and the occasional pee pee joke or two.
Please stick around, I trust there will be something here for everyone. Also, I have been trying to think of a nice ending joke for about 10 minutes and am too nervous to come up with anything. Instead I'm going to wish you well, ask you to return soon, and comfort-eat baked potato salad and fried chicken wings.
Thanks, friends!
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